From before

[Sepia]

We follow them to the brothels and churches, we follow them to find their answers as we are no longer curious of our own. We grew disinterested in the questions that drive great men forward and we acknowledge our shame as we walk gently past them, offering them water and moral support on their journey. We give them advice and we make them doubt as we lull them into sleep, tell them tales of fairies so they can reside from the reality they live in. They never talk about it, why they journey, why they seek but we've already seen so many of them, we've driven them to success or to ruin, we are forever catalyst in their hearts. We are the future wives in a world where satanism has rooted, following ten steps behind our masters, lurking in the shadows as they think we do.

We do. Make the trains run on time, make life out of clay but it is not us who put the binding word on it to let it loose upon humanity to see if it has its own, to seek the answers that will blind us to what really is there, what really is brewing in the hearts of us all, is god hidden in a temporal lobe epilepsy? Is the soul another word for mitochondrial dna? Are we more than the sum of our memories and knowledge?

It begins innocently enough, it begins perhaps when you're sixteen and you're at this awkward party that used to be tossed at rented houses because you're out back, home and awkwardness is after all your life before you grow more up. It is an age on innocence and that's why you want that chick because she seems so far from it, you want someone to take you out of that cold, you want to be brought in to a different set of life and lights and you talk with her as you both get your coats to go outside for a cigarette and you're standing there and smalltalking, ending up behind the barn making out and then she asks you if you want to do something you're not supposed to and you say yeah and she asks you what can change the nature of a man and you remember this again years later when you're peaking on acid at the tender age of 24, realizing it is not the life you would want to lead.

You begin asking questions and it will never end, keep asking questions long enough you'll become what you deem as realistic and asking them even longer gives you the eyes of the cynic before bitterness takes all. These are not necessarily bad traits. Rip the word from its meaning, look it up, find different ways to use the word but don't argue that those words leave a foul taste in the mouth, don't tell me they aren't you because they don't span the complexity of your being, don't hate the player.

Their quests and journeys end, often in the same churches and brothels they began. There is something in the familiarity that drags them in, makes them content and keeps them happy and many of them decide on that, unlike ourselves they find what they are looking for or something good enough. We are not the driven but there is little room in our hearts for compromise and that room we never give to ourselves, never to our employers, we reserve it for the yearn still in our hearts as our souls have extinguished and emit only a slight cold to the touch and we see them as they become priests and whores and cooks, giving us what we need to live through the day, a civilization as a whole. It ends before it begins anew, and more questions become revealed but none more important than what you've heard before.