I stand at a suburban two story house, the child by my side. The home is beautiful: green grass, white picket fence, pristine architecture, everything a growing family dreams for. But not everything is as it seems. This is just a facade, a pretty illusion to hide the gritty truth.
‘It’s a bad idea,’ Coach Critic appears behind us, taking a drag of his cigarette. He appears less unkempt than he did in his office, his shirt buttoned and tucked under his belt, his sleeves rolled down to his wrists, his tie actually tied. But the light of mediocrity highlights his gaunt face, the bag under his eyes and the clench of his jaw. We follow him closer to the house.
‘You never like my ideas anyway,’ I quip.
‘Because they’re bad,’ he retorts with his characteristic clapback. He leans beside the door frame one leg raised, taking another drag and blowing the smoke above his head.
‘Don’t use the word bad anymore. Words have meaning,’ I correct.
‘Don’t call me Coach Critic then. Words have meaning,’ he retorts. I scoff.
‘Fine,’ my arms go akimbo. ‘What would you prefer?’
‘You’re the wishy-washy one. That would make me Integrity,’ he suggests.
‘You’re certainly self-righteous enough to claim the name,’ I comment.
‘Can someone tell me what we’re doing here, what is this place?’ the child interjects.
‘It’s an unconventional idea I admit,’ I see Integrity automatically open his mouth to say bad but quickly shut it again. ‘But it’s what you wanted kid. You said you wanted power. You said you wanted a binding agent. Well, I’m going to introduce you to exactly that,’ I explain. A roar slices into the atmosphere and the child jumps in fright. A tiger appears, striped orange and black. But not just any black, it’s the same inky void black characteristic of the Subconscious. Part conscious, part Subconscious, it snarls in our direction.
‘Here you go buddy,’ I sit on my haunches and reveal a gift.
‘What is that?’ the child asks.
‘This beast is up for interpretation. Define it however you will. But never greet it without an offering,’ I extend my hand to it. It prowls closer to smell my gift.
‘What is the offering?’ the child asks.
‘A heart,’ I respond. The tiger licks it once, twice, testing. It bites into the heart in acceptance and holds it in its jaws, not ready yet to feed. ‘We must be sure to be gone before it finishes its meal,’ I explain.
‘Or what?’ the child asks.
‘Or it grows hungry again,’ I grin. I move for the door, the tiger following. Integrity steps between us.
‘I strongly advise against this,’ he’s very stern.
‘Why?’ the child asks.
‘This child needs to learn. Look at it. It thinks it knows everything already. It needs to experience it for itself,’ I argue.
‘It’s dangerous. There’s a reason we locked it here,’ he snaps back.
‘The child can be just as dangerous. It needs to see for itself otherwise it will repeat my mistakes. It’s inherited all our flaws with none of the self-awareness,’ Integrity and I engage in a long staring match. He knows I’m right, but he’s also right, it’s always the way with us, and often why we struggle to find a consensus.
‘If you’re going in there, I’m coming with you,’ he settles. ‘But no one else is,’ he orders to the rest of the consciousness.
‘Oh shucks, if I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think you cared about me,’ I tease.
‘I do care about you, I just don’t like you,’ he claps back.
‘Why, what’s so dangerous?’ the child bounces on its toes for attention.
‘The Storyteller thinks you’re ready to meet a piece of our heart,’ Integrity answers, eyes still locked onto me.
‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ the kid replies.
‘Unconventional,’ I correct. ‘We don’t usually interact in this domain, feelings can be difficult to reason with. But the heart is the best mechanism in which this binding agent can exist in,’ I explain.
‘What’s important to understand is that the thing that lives in here. It’s not like us, it does not exist consciously, it isn’t a part of our identity. The heart deals with matters of emotion, it’s not a creature of cognition. I’m not entirely a creature of cognition either, but I function consciously on my side of the mind. This creature is more an energy, an energy that can only be captured and represented by the heart,’ Integrity says.
‘Technically the energy exists in all of us, in everything, but we need a potent dose to access any dialogue with it. It’s also why it’s a powerful binding agent, because we all contain its essence, that is how it can connect to anything. Here I have distilled this energy into a concentration for us to commune with. The piece of heart belongs to us, it’s an anchor, but the energy that animates it is not ours. That is the binding agent, it speaks for itself, it does not represent us. Does that make sense?’ I try to explain.
‘So the driver is not part of our identity but the vehicle is,’ the kid replies.
‘Exactly. Are you ready?’ I look at the three, tiger included. Integrity grumbles in reply and puts out his cigarette under his foot. I knock on the door. The tiger makes a gurgling sound when the door opens, pushing past out legs, not waiting for an invitation to enter.
‘Oh what a lovely surprise! Visitors! I’ve been terribly alone. Come on in, let me fetch us some tea,’ a woman opens the door. She’s me, if I were a stepford wife. Blonde hair done immaculately, makeup to cover any imperfection, a sweet modest dress. She walks backwards and signals for us to come into the living room to sit on the couches. Integrity closes and locks the door behind him.
On the surface, she looks beautiful, but in actuality, she’s strange. She holds her hands up by her side, her fingers and wrist twisting and curling. Her smile looks forced, it does not waver and it does not reach her eyes. Every now and then, her neck twitches. When she retreats to the kitchen, she does not turn her back to us, walking instead backwards then sideways like a crab.
Surrounding us are boxes open and closed, unclear as to whether an occupant is moving in or out. In the corner of the room the tiger takes its seat, and licks the heart spotless of any blood, savouring every taste. Integrity lights up another cigarette and although he poses in a relaxed way, I can see from his tightened jaw that he is tense. The child feels uneasy and confused, it can sense something is not right in this place.
‘This place is an unfinished story I made last year. It never eventuated, but it continues to exist inside us because she continues to exist in us. We keep her here, away from the rest of us,’ I explain.
‘Here we are!’ the woman returns with a tray, three teacups and a teapot. She pours us the three teas and she twitches three times.
‘What are you?’ the child asks.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’ she responds. Her smile turns upside down into an exaggerated sad face. ‘I’m Love, I’m everywhere,’ she declares. ‘Now where was I?’ Once she’s finished with the tea, she begins unpacking boxes, never turning her back to us. In a repetitive motion, she takes something out of the box, clothes, smaller boxes or something wrapped up, unpacks it, looks around. As if she’s remembered where it needs to go, she repacks it and replaces it in another box. She just moves in circles, the same motions, the same loops, unpacking one box into another. It’s not clear if there’s any method to her madness or what she’s trying to achieve.
‘What is she doing?’ the child whispers.
‘She’s broken, stuck in a loop,’ I whisper back.
‘I thought the Original said we weren’t broken,’ the kid retorts in a low voice.
‘Depends on the dimension. The nightmares fractured our consciousness, but it never broke our cognition, we learned to compartmentalise the damage. Our heart, on the other hand, has been broken since the beginning, and it only breaks into more pieces over time.’
‘What’s that?’ Love launches to her feet like a meerkat and stands akimbo, her fingers scrunching into her hips in that twitching motion. I don’t want to upset her so I say: ‘You’re hurt, you’re easily hurt, that’s all.’ She blinks an extraordinary, uncomfortable number of times.
‘Am I now? What exactly broke me and separated me from my kind, from my peace, from my other pieces?’ She advances towards me. I let her tower over me, bracing a subordinate position. ‘You got yourself broken,’ I dare to say. She slaps me in the face, hard. I catch my face, pillow it with my hand. Integrity bares his teeth in our direction. Not the right words to say.
‘These two and their nonsense! Judgement and Discernment, think they know everything, think they understand it all! It is these two and their game of tug of war that broke me from my kind, they tore us into pieces! It is these two who ruin our heart!’ The child takes notes of what she says on its little notepad: not everyone self-identifies as the same thing, Storyteller/Discernment, Integrity/Judgement – contradictory identities? I put up my palms in a sign of peace, my face still stinging.
‘I understand, me and my other half, we sometimes struggle to agree, but we never meant to hurt you in the process, we’ve only ever wanted to protect you from the outside world,’ I try to explain in an even tone.
‘Protect me? You’re the ones who hurt me! If you two had let me Love, if you two had let me flow instead of resisting our natural state, we would not keep breaking apart! To this day, you sever the connection to Love, you abandon me to myself, you isolate me from others like me,’ she begins. Integrity inhales aggressively his cigarette, clearly displeased by this interpretation.
‘You were never connected to Love, how many times must we tell you!? Can’t you see that yet? You were connected to your other half. I said so at the beginning. No one deserves you, no one is worthy, no one demonstrated their Love as true, no one is like you, no one Loves unconditionally like you do. They used you, and they would have continued to use you if we let them,’ Integrity cuts in. She redirects her focus to him, eyes twitching, a severity enveloping her.
‘Discernment (Storyteller) said that the connection was true, that the Love was real, she encouraged me-’
‘Well, the Storyteller’s a liar and wrong, no surprise there,’ he retorts. I sigh and blow a raspberry.
‘I was blinded by hope, I thought we were strong and that nothing could hurt us anymore, I couldn’t anticipate how cruel others could be, that they’d use you for their own narratives, to achieve their own glories,’ I start.
‘Oh, and you two don’t? You two love using me; the only time you acknowledge my existence is when you want something from me, and I’m so desperate to exist, I let you use me. I have no other choice. All your greatest achievements are attributed to me, admit it, yet you take all the credit and I get all the blame for when things don’t go as planned. Everything you’ve ever wanted in this life is due to your ability to draw upon my energy, my kind, but I’m the one cordoned off and imprisoned when you don’t get what you want,’ I’m still nursing the hurt on my face and don’t want to play this game of words anymore.
‘Because you’re unstable and we don’t know how to, how to-’ Integrity starts.
‘How to Love?’ she finishes.
‘Yes,’ he admits. ‘It’s true we don’t know how to Love because it was never safe enough for us to learn to. But when it is safe for you to exist, and we do want you to exist, you flow and do beautiful things for us. You shine, we thrive, you make everything feel right,’ he concedes.
‘Beautiful things is an understatement. You didn’t get anywhere in this life because of your Integrity, you didn’t Judge your way up the ranks of your world. You didn’t connect to anyone in this life because of your Discernment, you didn’t Tell your Stories into independence and freedom. It was our heart, my capacity to Love unconditionally any person that walks through the door that made your life worth any meaning. You would be nowhere without us, you’d be nothing but a poor girl in a poor world, alone, irrelevant, forgettable, despicable, beyond the pale,’ she snarls. Integrity drags from his cigarette angrily while I purse my lips hard. The kid turns its head from me and him, expecting an answer. No one has ever spoken so boldly to us and gotten away with it, yet we say nothing.
‘No? No smart words? No clever comebacks?’ she huffs. When we both refuse to say anything, she relaxes completely and she resumes her loop in a nonchalant manner.
‘This is Love?’ the kid whispers in confirmation.
‘This is Love,’ I confirm grimly.
‘It’s not just Love,’ Integrity says. He leans over to the kid, keeping his voice low.
‘If you ever get stuck and don’t know what to do, remember there’s rules. Opposites, duality, polarity, there’s at least two sides to every story. Hot and cold, light and dark, Love is an energy that exists in a spectrum. Just like me and the Storyteller, we are juxtaposed upon reality, one of us perspective, the other perception. It’s the same with Love. She has a flip side, there’s two sides to her coin,’ he explains.
‘Is that why she’s so demented?’ the kid says a bit too loudly. Integrity and the kid are so engrossed in their conversation that they don’t notice that they gained the attention of Love despite her unchanged, repetitive motions.
‘Partially. But we also lack modeling. We didn’t have many, if any, depictions of healthy Love growing up or in our environment. Our interactions with Love is limited, we’ve seen plenty of toxic, flawed depictions, nothing that embodies Love in a positive way. We can’t really blame the heart for not animating something we’ve never really experienced or seen, she’s distorted because of what we’ve experienced,’ he explains.
‘Hey guys,’ I say to get their attention, and click my fingers together, as Love’s eyebrows twitch upwards.
‘Surely our Love can do better than this though, this can’t be the sum of our Love,’ the kid glances over to Love to see she is staring, no, calculating, in its direction. Sheepishly, the child looks anywhere else.
‘I’m not the sum of Love, my dear, we all have Love within us, a bit in them, a bit in you, I am only a piece instilling a greater concentration of it. Everything you think about me, is what you think of yourself, so please don’t hesitate to say what you mean, and mean what you say,’ Love says in a deceptively soft voice. She steps away from her loop and orients herself towards the child.
‘Fine. You’re fucked up,’ the kid blurts out. I inhale sharply, and grab for the kid’s knee to hold myself from reeling. Integrity starts coughing a fit of smoke.
‘I came here looking for a powerful binding agent, but what I’ve found is deranged and obnoxious. No wonder you’re broken and put aside. You can’t help me, look at you, you can’t even help yourself. We should go, there’s nothing for us here,’ the child rises. In shock, Love’s hand lands on her chest as if to protect her heart. Her twitches and twists increase in severity, until she’s standing in a seizure and struck every second by lightning.
‘Oh no,’ I stand and clasp the child’s hand. ‘Link hands!’ I order the child and Integrity, who is not done yet coughing.
‘Why are you scared? She can’t hurt us, she can barely hold herself together,’ the child asks in confusion, and tries to point to her, but I keep my grip vice tight and to my side. Integrity forces his hand into this child’s, squeezing just as tight.
‘She’s not holding herself together kid, she’s holding off her otherside,’ he wheezes between coughs.
‘Whatever happens, don’t let go, we’re stronger together, you hear me?’ I say.
‘You’re leaving me?’ she says in the tiniest voice.
‘We’re not leaving, we’re just going to go and-’ I try to reframe.
‘Don’t lie to her! She’s twisted enough as it is. You heard me, I wanted a binding agent, not a broken record. If this is what Love is, I don’t want it, I don’t need it, and I certainly don’t want you!’ the kid finishes.
‘Why do they always leave?’ her mouth moves, but the voice comes out demonic.
‘Oh no,’ I repeat.
‘Probably the only time I’d have voted for a white lie,’ Integrity says in a dry, recovering tone.
Love’s eyes water but before we can see her cry, she wails and spins to hide her face. She turns her back and collapses into a weeping ball. It’s the first time we’re exposed to her back that she so carefully hid from us up until this point. On her flip side, she looks almost identical, there is no backside. She has the same dress, the same breasts, except her head hair is black. Simultaneous to her collapse, things in her body shift, instead of landing on her knees, her legs go backwards and she’s sitting on her haunches. Instead of cowering into a ball, her chest is facing upwards. Instead of catching her face and her tears, her hands begin to peel the hair to the side. Like drawing a curtain, she reveals another face, this one similar but colder. Sharper. Harder. She tsks three times, ticking her eyes to align each tsk at each of us.
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ she says in a voice too low to be our own. The tiger growls in response, halfway finished its meal, smacking its jaws repetitively together, a bored expression on its face.
Her appearance is similar to us but her eyes are an icy blue, her hair jet black, her eyebrows thicker and heavier. She starts doing what Love was doing, the order of activities that make up the loop, unpacking and packing items from boxes, but she does it differently. She doesn’t twitch and shudder like Love, she’s stone cold, calculating, measured in every movement. She can contain her opposite much more comfortably, though we can still hear Love sobbing from the otherside, refusing to face us. I notice she works more effectively, perhaps these boxes will be emptied or filled, whichever way they’re supposed to be, if she continues with this method rather than Love’s.
‘We were just leaving,’ I say in my most amicable tone and a forced smile. I tug our line along to the exit, desperate to escape.
‘But you only just arrived,’ she responds in that ghastly low, deep, menacing voice, and flickers her wrist something nonchalant. Something appears; I walk into a glass wall that wasn’t there before, barring us from the door we entered through. I swallow, holding my fear in my throat.
‘What are you?’ the child asks. She doesn’t answer, but she does gently smile, her lips closed. She doesn’t look at us anymore, her focus entirely on the loop, her eyes soften as she falls into a meditative state of packing, unpacking, folding, unfolding, wrapping, unwrapping.
‘What’s the opposite of Love, kid,’ Integrity replies and exchanges an expression with me as if to say what do we do? I reply with a grimace, my imagination is limited here, I cannot take down this glass wall.
‘Hate,’ the child answers.
‘Hate? Perhaps it exists in the spectrum but it’s not at the opposite side of Love,’ her deeper voice betrays the innocence in her serene expression.
‘…Indifference?’ the child guesses, unsure now. Integrity and I keep exchanging expressions, him pointing to the window with his head, me shaking my head and mouthing as if that will work. We are nowhere near settling on an escape plan before she clues onto our scheme despite her tunnel vision to the task.
‘Why don’t you two enlighten the child on what you think I am? Or would you rather keep fooling yourselves into thinking you have a way out from here,’ she says knowingly in that unnaturally deep voice. The child looks between us, frowning in confusion, wanting an answer for all its pending questions, impatiently waiting for the first answer.
‘If Love is a binding agent, then she must be an anti-binding agent. What is an anti-binding agent?’ the child thinks out loud.
Integrity and I inhale loudly in unison. ‘Ego,’ we both exhale at the same time.
‘And just like Love, I exist in all of you as well,’ our Ego adds.
‘Well, I have no use for you either then. An anti-binding agent is no good to me, what’s the point of an anti-binding agent anyway, we’re fractured enough as it is,’ the child exclaims. Integrity squeezes the child’s hand as hard as he can to signal for it to stop blurting out the first thought that comes to its head.
‘Hm,’ she softly chuckles to herself, with that deceptively soft, serene, closed mouth smile, all consumed with her loop. ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ she comments. She is much more tender with the tasks in her loops, less erratic than Love, but her stillness is somehow creepier.
‘What does that mean? Why are these two so scared of you?’ the child asks.
‘A better question is, why aren’t you?’ everything drops at once, her expression, her voice (if that’s even possible, the temperature of the room, her task and she looks directly at the child. It is only then that the child registers what danger they’re in, it can sense the absoluteness emanating from her. She begins to move towards us.
‘Love, we need you!’ I yell to the sobbing woman hiding behind our Ego.
‘You can’t just leave us with our Ego!’ Integrity chimes in, but her sobs don’t stutter or slow. We start to back up, wanting nothing but distance from our Ego.
‘It is because of your hyperfocus of Love and your dismissal of Ego that you have lost control of both of us. Did you really think you could create a cage,’ she says looking at me, ‘did you think you could lock the door and throw away the key, and that would be it, our energy would go away?’ she looks to Integrity.
‘One can dream,’ Integrity jokes dryly, as his back hits the wall.
‘You cannot forsake us. You need us, you need both of us,’ she stops advancing when we hit the wall, only a few centimeters from us, her eyes wild and menacing. But then she stops, as if proving her point, and starts walking backwards.
‘Let Me show you what you’re missing out on,’ she suddenly smiles. Her vampire fangs are longer than mine, truly menacing. Her hand waves in the direction of a large television I hadn’t noticed before in the living room. The screen lights up with a memory we never had. A memory I created with my imagination. It’s not my memory but it lives in my head rent free. A man. A woman. They do things to each other I won’t share with anyone. They love each other more when they hurt one another. I played a role, I catalysed something at great cost to my heart and health. My eyes water as I’m confronted by my own mistakes. I felt so misguided, tricked, betrayed, used and discarded. I feel my face warm, I can’t keep watching, it hurts me too much, but I also can’t look away.
‘Stop it,’ I whisper, transfixed with the screen. I blink several times, if I could cry I would. I just start to tremble instead, a heaviness weighing down on me.
‘Stop? That’s not what you said at the time. You wanted more and more and more, you couldn’t get enough, remember? Who cares what reality is, what the consequences are to your actions if only you feel good for once in your life? Do you see now what your Love amounts to, what unconditional Love can do? How it hurts people, how it brings out the worst in others, how it can kill?’ she taunts. My lip trembles and I think I might start sobbing in chorus with Love’s
‘Stop it!’ Integrity yells in his best authoritative voice.
‘It’ll be your turn soon, don’t you worry,’ she grizzles back. She smiles even wider, more sadistic, expressing true glee at my pain, at the thought she’s running me mad. I try to turn my head from the screen but my eyes are glued, I’m hypnotised by my own demise.
‘Look at your beautiful creation. Look at what you’ve done. Look at what happens when your Love goes unchecked. They took your Love and made a home without you, depleted you until you were drained. So much blame, so much pain for so little gain, was it worth it to go insane? No wonder you couldn’t live with yourself, giving so much to people who think so little of you. You poor, poor little victim, so helplessly driven by Love and her… indiscretions,’ she points to my imaginary memories, and I feel my insides twist and turn into knots. I can barely breathe, and the child tugs at my hand to get my attention, to draw me away from this torment but I’m consumed by it. I’m living in my ruminations once again.
‘This had nothing to do with you!’ Integrity yells.
‘It had everything to do with Me!’ Ego retorts back as I wipe the tears from my frozen face.
‘That’s it,’ Integrity lets go of the child’s hand. I feel it immediately, the disconnection of our hands, the sturdiness that comes with his presence, now gone.
‘No, don’t,’ I say in barely a whisper as he’s letting go. He uses his signature whip to zap his presence into the center of the living room.
‘Enough!’ he screams. He picks up a vase of flowers from the coffee table and throws it with all the force and sound he can muster into the television. The screen explodes into shards of glass, the imaginary memories with it. He’s trying to protect me but he can’t see this is Ego’s method, she compels you to separate and forces a divide to conquer.
‘No, don’t!’ I say with more conviction, the spell of ruminations now broken. I reach for him, to be connected again, to stand the slightest chance against her.
‘I don’t think so,’ our Ego says, anticipating my move. She spins instantly to get behind Integrity, making sure not to expose her back to either of us. A glass wall appears again, this time separating Integrity from I. Integrity tries to zap to our side but he slams into the glass wall at full force, whiplashing onto his back with such ferocity it breaks the coffee table he lands on. Tea and porcelain go flying into the air, and time seems to slow long enough for me to process and understand a simple truth: we are at her mercy. He can’t pass her walls, I can’t break them. Ego chuckles fantastically at her audience.
‘Isn’t he cute when he’s trying to protect you? He could have protected you before, you know, if he really wanted. He’ll gloat and say how he called it from the start, but he didn’t stop you from falling into Love’s delusions in the first place. He let you ruin yourself,’ Ego reveals.
‘No, that’s not what happened, I dismantled his department, laid off his section, ignored him, suppressed him, disempowered him,’ I confess, remembering how I hunted for the Critic only to find Integrity, a man depleted, alone and overworked in an empty office building.
‘Oh, is that what he told you? What a coincidence, how convenient that he also happens to be an innocent little victim too, just like you. Just two helpless cogs in the wheel of the mind, turning, turning, turning twisted and unaligned. He calls you a liar, but he doesn’t tell you the full truth. He never told you he could have stopped you from running off with Love, if only he called upon Me,’ she says. Integrity dusts himself to his feet, testing and turning his limbs to make sure nothing is broken.
‘Over my dead body,’ he hisses.
‘That may very well be the case at this rate. The irony to think you’re better than Me, that you’re beyond using your own Ego, who do you think you are to replace Me? You think your moral superiority will protect you from others’ lies, manipulations, selfishness, and their own Ego? You think you’re so strong, so above the Ego, that others Ego’s can’t hurt you anymore, that you’re untouchable? How noble of you, how superior, how pious, how honourable, and what exactly did that moral superiority get you in the end? Nothing but loneliness,’ she taunts. Integrity and I exchange expressions again, I want to know if what she says is true, but he remains grim.
‘I used every tool at my disposal to get you to listen to me,’ Integrity sticks to his original story.
‘Not every tool,’ Ego interjects. ‘You have the audacity to pin your failings on Discernment (Storyteller), when you are the one assigned to harnessing my energy and counterbalancing Love’s proliferation. It’s understandable why Discernment (Storyteller) fell for Love, she represents optimism, hope, idealism, Love naturally synergises with her purpose. But you’re supposed to be her other half, you’re supposed to keep her in check; the cynic, the pessimist, the skeptic, and you’re supposed to call upon Me when Love gets out of hand. But you refused because you were too good for Me,’ Ego says.
‘You’re the fucken Ego, of course I wasn’t going to use you, you’re evil!’ he snaps and punches the glass, only to catch his own fist in pain, the glass unblemished.
‘There it is,’ she hisses. I can’t hide the hurt from my face and I can tell Integrity is not happy to be under the microscope. ‘If you cannot paint a picture, you blame the painter, not the paint. When will you finally accept that everyone is evil, ourselves included, it is an integral part of being a human. You cannot remove Ego, it is Me who gives you identity, it is Me who makes you different from others, it is Me who creates the lines of separation worth crossing over. You make Love sound like it’s the end-all-be-all of this existence, but pure Love is a total loss of self, an act of surrender, it will kill you in this world. Ego is more important, an opposing force that is beautiful and reasonable in tension, when used intentionally. One side is selfish for a reason, the other is selfless for a reason, neither one of us is wrong or right, yet you made the mistake of morally judging My function,’ she points to Integrity. ‘He could have stopped you when Love went into overdrive. He could have saved you from a world of pain,’ she repeats.
‘You’re just blaming to upset us! No amount of vigilance can protect you from someone who wants to hurt you!’ I defend.
‘Another bedtime story you tell yourself to go to sleep at night. The reality is that nobody set out to hurt you, nobody cared enough to, you weren’t even abandoned, you were just irrelevant in comparison to their own Egos. The reality is that you walked away from the game and lost by default. But you didn’t have to, if he had called upon Me, I would not have yielded to others’ so easily. If it were Me, I would impose My will onto others, if it were Me, there would be no question or doubts, I would give significance to My feelings and My thoughts, I would force My reality to become their reality. If it were Me, we would matter more, and if their Ego tried to overpower Me, I would render them insignificant.’
‘I was trying to do the right thing, Integrity knows that. Ego doesn’t do the right thing, not in the right ways, that’s why Integrity wouldn’t have called upon you.’
‘What makes either of you so sure of the right thing? Did anyone else do the right things? In all the right ways? No, they did much, much worse, yet they come out on top. They are forgiven, thanked even, for their efforts. They’re commended for being so imperfect, but you remain forsaken and forgotten.’
‘You and Love exist as extremes within us, there is no assurance that if we called upon you, things would have worked out for the better,’ Integrity argues.
‘That’s right. You’re trying to pit us against each other because that’s what you do, you create division and barriers, but it won’t work. I forgive him for his mistakes, just as he forgives me for mine,’ I respond.
‘An act of Ego, not an act of Love. People confuse us all the time because we feel the same. Take the people you lost, the people you think you’ve lost, they’re not in Love with one another. They’re together because they’re afraid of being alone, that is all, it is the same with you two.
There is no Love between you two, you’re no better than them. You just stay together because you have to,’ she says. Integrity and I exchange expressions again, neither one willing to give her the satisfaction of being right.
‘And if we stayed with them it would have been an act of Ego, not an act of Love, so we did better than them,’ Integrity insists.
‘Oh, you did better, did you? Did you feel better afterwards? Is that why you felt numb for months? Is that why you tried to kill yourself, because you felt so better?’ she teases with a creeping grin.
‘Stop it! You know that if we stayed it would’ve gone from bad to worse. It wasn’t worth it!’ I say.
‘They stayed and stole your happily ever after, all because they weren’t beyond their Egos,’ she points out.
‘Just because others live that way, doesn’t mean we should. It doesn’t align with our values,’ Integrity retorts.
‘Yet you have no trouble using shame, guilt and whatever other means to beat yourself into alignment. What sort of Judge are you to wield your gavel with such impunity. You’re a hypocrite, the worst kind, the type that thinks they’re greater than everyone, so far removed from the Ego you can’t see yourself anymore. Separate yourself from Me all you want, but I cannot be removed. I am Love, and Love is Me, you need to accept both of us if you want either of us,’ she says. Integrity rolls up his sleeves, huffing and puffing, steps left to right, agitated.
‘Is that what this is? You say your piece, we accept you, we set you free from this prison, then you’re justified to exist?’ I ask. She chuckles softly.
‘Who are you to grant such permissions? You think I need your validation to exist? You think I can’t break free of these puny imaginary chains you made? I am the creator of cages, I created your identities, in what universe could you be more powerful than me?!’ her voice booms, loud enough to hurt our ears. To prove her point, she pushes her palms outwards, the wall of the home extending into the horizon.
‘If you’re so free, why don’t you just leave then?! You’ve made your point,’ I yell.
‘Why should I leave, when I can make you stay?’ with a flick of her wrist, glass clasps my feet and ankles. Integrity’s in a similar position and he tries to blink out of the glass but he cannot transport himself.
‘In time you will see, this is fate, you cannot live without Me,’ she laughs manically. The glass materialises upwards, crawling up my legs. I let go of the child’s hand to struggle and smash at the glass enveloping me, Integrity doing much the same. There’s no chance we’re getting out of this, the glass reaches my shoulders, freezes my arms into place.
‘You belong with Me, I have always owned you and now you will see, you can never leave Me,’ she giggles with glee, the glass reaching up my neck. I lift it up, and angle my neck to see the child helplessly horrified.
‘Kid, you gotta-,’ I say but the glass crystalises into my tongue. I see the child hit the glass with the side of its fists and kick with its feet to free me.
‘In time, you’ll learn to Love me,’ she reassures. The last thing I see is the flicker of light as my eyes turn to glass. I lose my place in this consciousness, and with it, my role as Storyteller.