We just can't bring ourselves to blame you any longer. This is a confession. It was us, after all, that ushered in the decrepit modern age.
When we were born, all soft skin and lumpy limps, our eyes were closed tight against the cold room, our wailing making our presence known to the surgeon whose delicate hands were still too gruff on fleshy, frantic features. Passed about the loving arms of the attendees to our celebrated arrival words like "hope" and "future" were spoken in the light manner of people who truly believe in them. Then you did us the greatest favor any mentor can give, you opened our eyes to everything.
There's a scene at the end of Apocalypse Now. See it if you haven't. Marlon Brando's profile is horizontal in the shot, his eyes terrified as he whispers "the horror...the horror..." maybe you know what I'm talking about. He's not an old man expressing his shock at the true depths of misery. It has nothing to do with Vietnam. He's an infant, complete with clean shave and bald head, the look of a baby seeing something the first time.
If we could see it all, every detail so fine, the world itself at once, then we needn't waste time on mere pieces of the puzzle. But I can remember how the flooding brightness burned our tiny pupils, how the filth seemed to cake itself instantly on new eyes. I remember the wrinkles on the corners of the mouths of the ones who came before us, that piece of lint on their left shoulder, the smudge on their shoes, the spill where they stood, the hole in the floor across the room, the peeling wallpaper over crumbling drywall, the cracks in the ceiling. I remember bloodstains on their hands, hastily and carelessly wiped clean so they need not explain where it's from. Our tabula rasa filled with scratches across the board dug deep by panicking, desperate fingernails. We did the only thing we could do. We closed our eyes. And we did not open them again.
