How To Kill The Thing Inside You

An Orientation

What To Know About The Thing:

The Thing will recognize people and opportunities for what they are immediately, accurately. They will feel like you’ve seen them before. Everything else will feel like nothing.

Despite this, your path forward will be winding and incorrect, and every morning for about ten minutes you’ll have entirely no idea what you bothered waking for.

You will doubt the Thing. You’ll resent it. You’ll want to give in to a life that will work, and at just the thought of that the Thing will rally your whole body against you and you will feel like you are dying. You will make the right choices in the end, because choice is not choice, but recognition of the few places you can survive. 

Others will feel around for the trodden ground before them. Others will place trust in the steady laying of bricks, each in its right place. They will worship something less like certainty and more like sense. You will worship only that which you cannot kill. 

You will ask everyone who’s happy, how did you kill your Thing?

They didn’t. It may choose to die of its own accord, but you cannot kill it. You’ll try anyways. You’ll place it somewhere it cannot live. It will consume you instead and you will do whatever it takes to stop the burning. It won’t take long. You cannot breathe this air. You knew this. You knew this.

On a nearby street corner you will see a bland looking man with an ugly haircut and a well-fitted suit. He will dial a number on his cellphone, and raise the device to his ear in a way that lets you know he feels important. Your judgements will idle on how many times you suppose he pissed the bed in college. You will marvel at the man, and between you the distance will collapse until all that stands between is one single flame, not even a centimeter wide, the kind you might find at the bottom of a candle.

Thank god, thank god, it has not died.