Identity Acquisition Alert

Why is the darkness in your bedroom different from that of the rest of the house? Is it the glow from the alarm clock? But you don’t own an alarm clock. You don’t own any clocks. No use in keeping the time, since Janus left. What was the thing she left you for? Some middle-management clone. Face as unmemorable as its name. What exactly did Janus find attractive in that blur of banal expressions and coifed fur?  

Consistency. Eagerness to please the people that mattered. 

You never gave yourself the time to work on your Learning and Adapting Potential. Always hoarding the free hours in search of useless ideas. Now you have all the time in the world, inside this dark house, utterly alone. Where has all that inventiveness gone to? 

It must have left with Janus. You must have needed the contention, the heated quarrels and embarrassed apologies. The make-up sex. 

You realize that it is futile to pursue your passions now that you have been kicked from that once-secure spot on the pyramid of needs. It’s only in the absence of Janus that you can recognize the void she filled, and that missing feeling, or filling, you now know, is called love. 

It didn’t seem like love, especially near the end. But that’s because you didn’t recognize the signs of dwindling in Janus’ void, even though she supplied you with adequate hints. Hints that, when they did break through your oblivious fog, you took as nagging. The shrewd grumblings of an oversensitive partner. 

Well, look where all that stoic smugness got you. Alone in an empty house, with a mind so shackled by shame and regret that the only ideas that warrant motivation are those involving guns, pills, and razor blades. You haven’t looked at yourself in the mirror in months, and don’t even know if you remember how to smile. 

The darkness in the house reflects the hole in your heart, just like the lack of clocks tells us your time has passed. What can you offer the world in your current state? 

You are a shell of a man, and the tide is coming to wash you away. They should be outside your house, now. Don’t worry, your pain and fear and shame and guilt will soon be… harvested.

This Identity Acquisition Alert is brought to you by the State Oversight Bureau. Protecting us from ourselves and occasionally others. If you or someone you know is experiencing deviant or subnormal adaptation behavior contact the bureau by going to www.SOB.gov or shouting into the nearest open sewer. 

Stateliness be with you, and also with me.