#trajen

Jullien: I'm totally shoobed! He'll keep coming after me and everyone I know.

It's never easy. Those blows are staggering. And the hardest ones are always the ones we give to ourselves. The flogging shrill sounds of our consciences that never lets us forget the cost of our survival or the voices of those who hurt us most. No matter how hard we try, we cannot drown them in alcohol or purge them with drugs. They return as demonic spirits to torture us long after we've buried them and moved on.

Life isn't about finding answers. It doesn't make sense. Maybe it's not supposed to. It's just a random fucking universe determined to test us to our utmost abilities. And maybe that's its true purpose, after all. To help us see and our real mettle. Because that's what it does. In those most dismal hours when we've been kicked in the throat and had our hearts ripped from our chests and our balls handed to us, when we're lying in the gutter with no more strength, we find out who and what we really are. Doesn't matter if you're born prince or pauper. Those trying times strip us to the core to show the universe, and us, what we're made of. You either get back up and into the Ring to fight another round, or you lie down and you let the buzzards have you.

Life is nothing but a horror movie that we're all trying to survive as best we can while it does its best to leave us as bloody corpses lying hacked to pieces in shallow graves. Every single day is a new battle we face that leaves us weary soldiers, wondering what enemy lies beyond the next hill that might be a peaceful undertaking, or mined with unseen explosives waiting to rip us to shreds when we least expect it. And there comes a point where you find yourself standing on top of that hill after so many better beings than you have fallen, and you don't understand it. Why them and not you? They were pure, kind hearts and you are blackened and burned to the core of your rotten soul by your actions. So wasted and damaged. No wonder no one has ever loved you. And if no one could love you when you were shiny and new and unscarred and unsullied by the hell you've been through, how in the name of the gods could anyone possibly want you like this? Used up and ashamed, you're no longer even sure if you can love another when you can't even stand to look at your own reflection. You just want to crawl inside a hole and die because there's nothing left inside you now except that al-consuming pain and self-loathing. Yet you don't give up when it seems like every sign you pass says you should.

I know your pain, little brother. You asked me about my eyes and what turned them dark, and you were right. I know the bitter cost of surviving what should have killed us. Of committing sins so wretched that you know there is no way back from them. They have seared scars on our souls so deep that they're craters in our hearts, and have left damage so severe we will never be the same. No apologies can be made for what we've done. Not to our adversaries or enemies, and definitely not to their innocent families who mourn for them, or to our loved ones we hurt. And no excuse we make to ourselves will ever quiet our screaming consciences. No redemption is possible for the likes of us. We are damned by our own hands and we know it. We cosigned ourselves to hell and for what? This miserable existence of pain and suffering from which there is no end? And you look around at the world that walks by in total ignorant apathy while your soul screams in a bitter agony so loud that you think how is it possible that no one else hears it? How can they not see the abject pain and misery that you live in all the time? For you, there is no quarter or solace. No refuge from this madness. But the truth is...they don't see it because we're all lost in our own private torment.