Shrink Wrapped

1.

The journey to peace of mind must come from far away and take a long time to complete. It must be literally painful. There must be loss of sleep and dreams of mutilation. It must take so long and cost so much that a body has to wonder in the end if it will ever be worth it. The journey must not be all of a piece either. It must start and stop and start again like any of the old cars that you will drive. There must be long delays when nothing seems to happen and nobody knows nothing. There must be intervals of solitude, some welcomed, others feared. There must be long views out of wide windows at a land so empty that you’d never be able to find space of your own. There must be accidents and incidents and much drug abuse. There must be secrets to unearth and secrets to rebury and of course, there must be revenge. At the heart of every journey to peace of mind is revenge. That isn’t to say that it should resemble the end of Hamlet, bodies scattered about like 9-pins. No, it might be subtler than that because what is necessary, always necessary is this simple fact: they must know. They must know why you’re there pointing a dagger at their eye, holding a pistol to their temple, wrapping a garrote about their neck, plunging a hot poker into their nether regions. They must know what terrible act in their forgotten past has motivated you to cross as many time zones as necessary at whatever cost over however much time to get to their small circle of self. They must know because you must tell them. Perhaps that will be all because after all that is the entire point of the journey towards peace of mind. You are the agent of remembrance. You are the one who lingers deep in the subconscious where Freud fears to tread. You are the one they remember when they remember what they’ve done, how they lost their morality, their ethics abandoning them under the siege of hard realities. And when you arrive at your destination, your million miles covered in a billion steps you will face the final choice that we all have. You will be able to do one of two things. You can be the final agent of chaos, or you can be a messiah. There will never be an in-between.