Sometimes you don't know you're undercover until you come out.
You may not notice to look at us, but we've had many lives. It's how we avoided existence, becoming people.
Lives, like ideas, like friends, need to be discarded when they outlive their usefulness, when nothing further remains to learn, nothing to absorb; when it all becomes a matter of redundant cycles and tolerated frustrations, pleasantries.
Like shed snakeskins: left behind they become brittle images so dessicated that you can hardly believe they once contained life.
Sometimes -- perhaps most of the time - you don't realize you're undercover. That's all part of it. You have to suck up the dirt, go native. You melt into it. You believe your own act, which is after all only what the rest are doing.
What makes us different, noncommital, not joined, terminally incomplete? Something that remains, the umbilical by which eventually we're pulled out, involuntarily, jarred out of believing we exist, just in time. Hasn't it always been tugging, that slight discomfort in the pit of the stomach? Didn't we always know, even through the temptations to comfort and certainty?
When you go they're shocked, of course. Because they all talk about escape. Interminably. For them it's a dream. For us it's a logical necessity. In actual fact you could never pay them quite enough to take the leap. You can never pay us enough not to.
Posted by robin at February 22, 2004 01:40 AM
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