He's not so much half-heard and half-seen as fully
perceived and consciously dismissed, lacking in the ethical hurdles and
staggered viewpoints associated with the beggar and altogether less of a
political minefield than the outwardly and obviously disabled. He causes them
to vicariously live a life of ridicule and misunderstanding for which they
resent him, doubly when the resentment turns to guilt. Not enough to make them
act upon it, never enough to prompt a display of sympathy or an offer of help
but always too much to be forgiven completely. Guilt feeds back into exclusion
and revulsion gives way to verbal assaults directing themselves at someone who
is already, in essence, a series of red, white and blue concentric circles.
Our parenthetical pariah patrols the perimeter of the
place, praying for pleasant perceptions, pitying pathetic prejudices and
passionately pleading, pre-emptively predicting the persecution people pour
prosaically upon him. But it's not enough and it's far too much, his voice
won't be heard if it hides forever under his breath but the words it says,
alternately venomous, wise, understanding and naive are trying to force too
many things into a box which just won't fit them and refuses to open its lid
far enough to try.
Weary beyond
words without altering the situation, the routine orbit continues unabated hour
by day by week until he's a regular fixture like the filth in the streets and the
vermin in the periphery. He's gone so far into his own head that he may very
well be out of his mind. It stops seeing each person as a new opportunity for
relief so much as yet another faucet of dismissal. They blur into one constant
stream of loathing and ignorance and like a current shearing against a rock
they gradually wear him down into a pebble underneath the surface, barely
causing a blemish in their surface and certainly not doing anything to alter
their path.
Until, at last, during the march for want of anywhere
to remain, a pair of broken eyes meets a pair of shattered irises. An oppressed
body approaches an avatar of suffering at the hands of those with the neglected
power not to cause others to suffer. The journey ends. They see something in
each other that no-one else sees in either of them. A kinship neither one thought possible but
both had clung to as the dearest dream and ambition they had left, ever since
true acceptance was made an impossibility. The walls flex, the boundaries grind
together and the gates bend until the two who were forced to the outside,
staring inwards, become the sole inhabitants of their private paradise with the
fetid world that they rejected breaking against their fortress in futility.
But wouldn't it be a shame if they were paedophiles.
But wouldn't it be a shame if they were paedophiles.
