Fauxbia

The deep and sonorous voice of his defeatist self-talk was paternal, and torturous, reinforcing the force fed message, "There is no happiness, only gradients of misery," leaving him indifferent to the present, careless of the future. Reared in the shadows of perfection, parental conflicts played out as the "self-made men" of a fathers' generation chased ambitions beyond the cramped lives of their own youth. Affection and approval, bestowed and withdrawn by the performance scale; he was a sundial numbering only sunny hours, with little of consequence to say, a lucid, inquisitive and fertile mind. His native endowment a vivid sensibility for the beauty of words. He learned woman from his quint-essential sisters yet remained profoundly ignorant of women; if love were happiness it generated a loneliness made all the more desperate by the intimacy of severed connections. Psychic numbness, and fauxbia, yes, he feared being false, had plunged him into darkness, with his vision of a minimum level of connectedness, the raw ache of personal loss, the empty feeling of helplessness. Forced to live as that outsider trapped inside a familys' feuds; being bonded to survivors, learning to live with the understanding he would be jettisoned for others to survive: emotional dishonesty became necessary for survival. Denial was the best defense since he could change nothing and repression had long since ceased to offer relief; he was too articulate for that lie. The tightly packed crowd contained inside his head was momentarily frozen by the question "How to unlearn the lessons of his youth?" To love and be loved, a necessary condition, a prerequisite to a happiness that could not exist? Now, he works, and writes, and trusts in simple verities; chaos, pacified by distance and routine, serve to mitigate the sting of realitys' reminder - he'd found that so urgently sought, only to have lost it in the finding.