Giant Scissors: The Same Answer to the Same Question

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I keep living into the same answer.

It is the same answer because it is the same question.

I have hope. I have connections. I care for others, and I want to be cared for. 

I accept and respect others, and I want to be accepted and respected.

I give people millions of chances. I don’t start from cynicism. I make allowances for mistakes, fatigue, and frailty.

And still I am disappointed. I am hurt, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood.

Time after time, I reach the same conclusion of midnight desperation:

No More.

After I have invested the best of myself, my ideas, my feelings, my experiences, my learning, I discover that the people I am trying to help or impress or please or reform don’t give a shit.

I risk, I reach, and I am greeted with silence, with ice, with apathy, with malice.

So once again, I get out my giant scissors to answer the question. To cut all ties. 

Snip, snip. Goodbye, losers. Goodbye, wastrels.

People so twisted in their own knickers, they can’t accomplish anything. 

Can’t accomplish any act of empathy or compassion, restricted as they are by the fraying elastic of policy, the shields of protocol, the tags and the frills and the bows of bureaucracy.

Here I am, folks, sunbathing in the nude. Streaking away from the civilization that seems barbaric.

I have nothing to hide and nothing to show. I have no clothes for a nametag, no room for a briefcase.

I am dressed only in the rawness of my freedom.

I will not be bound to trauma