funny creatures we humans are
The snow in the mountains began to thaw, and I had been buried beneath it at the foot of the cliff for several weeks before the weight of their decisions dawned on them. They were forced to face the cruel truth that they were, after all, mere mortals caught in the game of a god.
From the second day of my murder, they searched for me; their illuminated wands sweeping the woods precariously where they believed they would find my corpse among many others. A mothers’s screams echoed through the trees, cries that perhaps were only meant for the ears of a god; a mother who no longer believed to find her daughter alive. Why should she?
The world had lost all hope, or perhaps humanity had ignored the truth behind its absence; the truth that it had never existed, and until my last day I knew that this fact had never been a dreadful thing. Nietzsche once wrote: "In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments.", and I had never been blind or doubted these words.
Hope . What was hope but the act of pretending not to see the truth through all the fog, of constructing one's own version of a castle whose decay only brought more torment and destruction to the mind? With hope came thoughts of waiting, as one could not accept a definite end. In the mother's mind, her daughter died over and over again, until every death and every suffering had appeared once before her eyes, and then they repeated themselves, forcing the mother to see it all over again, just so that the cruel hope could have something to smile about.
A golden feeling (almost like happiness) pulsed in my dead chest as they searched only for my corpse and not for the living girl I once was. (I wondered when they began to only search for his corpse.) A true gesture of true altruism, for I wanted to spare them all suffering and grief. Something I would never have said in my life.
My voice, so full of money and ignorance, never would have said it. Back then I didn't care. I was apathetic towards the world and nothing stirred even the vaguest interest in me, as if I was truly just an empty shell. My friends (I will always call them that, although beyond fascination and money we had shared nothing) always seemed so passionate about the world and its arts.
They were delighted by nature, by books and their wisdom, by the power of magic, or by words that described everything. (How many hours did they sit together, discussing the wisdom of others as if they had created it themselves, while I sat beside them, never quite understanding everything.) But even if they were shaped by selfishness and egotism, they were still delighted by themselves. In the end, they all loved only themselves.
They looked into the mirror and saw something that made their hearts beat faster; they touched their hearts with such hypocritical surprise when others repeated the words of their own minds — "Oh, you are so beautiful!" - "Oh, I wish I possessed your talent!" — although with every sentence and gesture they uttered, they were only preparing the path for others to follow, leading them to the prepared compliments from which they could choose.
Most compliments, however, were just lies. People found pleasure in lies, loved them almost more than themselves. Lies had become a virtue, and no one understood me when I spoke it aloud. The world and its people are fragile. They collapse as easily as a house of cards, struck down by our strongest weapon. No one needed a sword or a bomb, magic or monsters. A human being was most vulnerable when he was gifted with words. (Let me enlighten you about life and its tricks; me, the girl who moulded her own death.)
Lies. Oh, we have lied constantly. Not a day went by without it, and not a day will go by in the future without it. No one was spared — enemy, friend, family, lover, daughter, father... No one was spared; we were all equal in the eyes of falsehood.
People are frightened of telling the truth; we are frightened of the reaction to a truth; we are frightened of losing our sympathy with the truth; we are frightened that the truth will hurt our counterpart and leave us alone. (After all, it all goes back to Aristotle; man was a social creature and feared to be alone, feared the disapproval of others). So they lied.
Back then, it puzzled me to see him lie so weaving falsehood so freely (though 'back then' is such a terribly long term, yet it wasn't until the last autumn of my life that I began to distrust him and discern his true nature) , for he did not lie out of fear.
Never out of fear.
One might argue that even a charlatan lies out of the dread of rejection; spinning tales around themselves till they shaped a new shell, fearing that their raw, unadulterated selves would not be embraced as their innermost desires demanded, but this was not the case with him.
He did not lie because he thought he would not be liked otherwise. I believe he lied because it was his pleasure to create someone else. He distorted and reshaped himself until a new persona emerged. He even abandoned his old name. (What a metaphor for his life... how he shed everything like a snake, but wrapped his lies around the lifeless shell, not the new skin.)
Tom Marvolo Riddle.
I could fill pages with him and indeed I fear I will. I enjoyed observing and understanding him back then, and I believe in the same breath, he enjoyed being observed and understood by me, even if his concept of understanding was synonymous with ‘admiration’, and cruel as it was, I seemed to have truly admired him. (Oh, how could I not?)
Tom Marvolo Riddle had become perfect through lies. No word that left his mouth was unkind or implied that he (like everyone else) lied to make his counterpart feel better and watch them lay their hand so hypocritically surprised on their beating heart, while he actually just repeated the words already echoing in their heads. (There was a different reason behind each word, but wasn't he acting like everyone else back then?)
No one who knew only his old, discarded name (which he hated as a prisoner hates the chains that bind him) feared him for the reason they should have feared him. Instead of fearing the monster, they feared not winning his approval. Banal and foolish, they fought for his approval as if it were that of a god.
People feared him because people fear perfection, and Tom Riddle was that perfection. No word was wrong. No smile too broad or too faint. No flaw in his performance. They feared him because they believed they paled in comparison, and in every human being there was a Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection, or a comparable jealousy like that of Aphrodite, who wanted to strike down anyone more beautiful than herself.
May the God who brought only cruelty to men be my witness, and may my words be his truth: no one understood him, and no one ever will. Tom Marvolo Riddle, the enigma that will last forever.
There was a time — the last half of my final year — when I thought I knew him. Arrogant and conceited, I believed that only I would ever understand him! Only I would understand him, no one could ever be as clever as me. (Funny creatures were humans. They always believed that the sun and planets revolved only around them. Even after being proved wrong, they never stopped believing.)
I later learned that many felt the same way, and that he merely enjoyed convincing people that only they could know him. He was undoubtedly fascinating.
The wind whipped around us, the sky glowed with darkness and the snow covered his black hair like tiny stars in an infinite universe. He kissed me on the cheek and said I should have known everything, for I had moulded my own death.