I think I maybe walked away from a murder today.

I... I don't know. Sympathetic magic, need to align some things again. What do you do?

The car shook and the horn blared and she screamed with that note in her voice that people don't do voluntarily. Nobody makes that sound voluntarily. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe they were playing around. Or maybe she died in that car and somebody else drove it out of the parking lot.

I was thinking about something today. What would happen if someone I love was dying? How would I be? What would I say? You see people's loved ones dying in movies, and they've always got a few seconds where there's time to talk, and the person's always, "I'm dying," and their lover says, "No, you're going to be fine." And I hate that. If somebody's obviously dying, the last thing I would think would be appropriate is to deny it, waste those last moments by trying to wish them away. But... at the same time I know I have this habit of never accepting that something bad could really happen until it does. So what if someone was dying? Would I deny it like that? Would I deny it to the very end and then when it really did happen be left there gasping for words and sputtering, "But... but I didn't get to--!"

Procell is a lot like me sometimes. Craven, cowardly. They use those words. I don't, necessarily. I don't think I'm a coward. But I don't think I'm courageous. I think it's about priorities. To me what's important is that I and the people I love survive. Everything else--everything else--can be sorted out later. To me so long as I'm alive I have a reason to be happy, so I'm never completely devastated. If I'm alive I have hope, and so I can never despair. I can never give up.

But by clinging to that life above all else am I letting things go? Letting people die who... maybe... might not have? Walking away when anything could have happened because my own life is more important than any other concern when it comes to a stranger?

And by never giving up, am I wasting time that I could use to say what I really mean, wasting it on refusing to accept that something really is coming?

By the pricking of my thumbs... something wicked this way comes.

Labels: dread, Introspection