The Explanation

I have always been terribly interested in why someone would cut themselves.  I suppose that deep down I understood it - a physical interpretation of the pain one feels inside, a frustration that needs an external release in some fashion and the pain doesn't run off into someone else's life.

I've just never been one to follow suit in that type of performance art.  My personal belief is that there must be some other type of expression that leads to far more productivity.  And, you know, not having to explain the scars to anyone else is always a bonus.

But, I suppose that in itself would be a test of sorts.  If a lover can see past the battle scars of externalizing an internal problem then doesn't that in some kind of way prove that love triumphs?

The hypocrisy, however, is hilarious.

Everyone has the problematic affairs that we are dealing with.  From the man who drinks incessantly to the woman who buys herself into ruin - or the woman who drinks incessantly and the man who buys himself into ruin.  It is all just a means to deal with the internal struggles of life's existential problems that no one wants to face up to.

And as I'm laying here, I grow increasingly tired, exhausted.  Like the life is just seeping from my veins.

I believed that if you had unlimited money then the world's problems didn't touch you, when I was young.  It was like the penguins having water just run right off their body.  A type of bullet proof vest that made it impossible for life's turmoil to trouble you, but that was just young naivety.

The rich find themselves equally as troubled as the poor, but that is also when it came to me that it isn't a class problem, it is a societal one.  A society that wrings the life out of every person placed as a cog in the working wheel can never have room for a society in which the human life has more value than the productivity of their job, and being rich still leaves no value in the individual's life - just a dollar sign sitting next to a name.

And that is why one must stand in protest.

As I'm doing now.

As my veins drip the remaining drops of my blood upon the floor, and with it my ability to be another cog in your systemic decay.

The systemic destruction of the human condition.

And this is my...
explanation...
for these...
scars...



A morbid short story by Dustin S. Stover

And You Said Life Would be Easy

There is a radical design stitched into the very presence of every human being. From birth we are molded into what others perceive and expect us to be, never fully grasping any individuality in those desires.

Then, as we age, we begin to understand the world quite beyond that in which we've been forcibly exposed to. Whether it be through television, music, the introduction of new people, books, or whatever other external sources that could influence our otherwise pristine conservation of familial and close proximity world's desires. The rebellion of such things is what begins that massive chasm of separation between the world of old and the world in which one creates for themselves.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that the chasm always maintains distance. Most people end up conforming in massive ways – their rebellion of underage drinking and casual drug usage is found out to be the same coping mechanisms of their parents, the same ones that refused to acknowledge their own usage of such things at the same age. The conformity of finding a job that satisfies just enough, typically through the paychecks that come in from said job, yet leave the rest of life unfulfilled. The conformity of giving up on the things enjoyable in youth – the discovery of things outside the pristine world in which one was raised in.

Raise a glass to yourselves if you can pretend the satisfaction of such things is enough for you. Down the contents of said glass in an effort to dull the pain of pretending, go to tuck your children into bed, and proceed to post more pictures of what you made for dinner on social media in an effort to bring an encouraging vindication to your very conformed notion of what reality should be, all the meanwhile keeping that pristine barrier around your own children.

There are those of us who are philosophers, artists, believers that the value in our lives are created solely by the things we leave behind – not the value of ourselves, but the value of the things we do to make tomorrow a better place. We live and die by the sadness we're forced to face, clinging to the threads of life's fragility only because we understand that someone has to suffer the consequences of societal norms as a means to bring greater understanding to it tomorrow. We do that through our words, our paintings, our drawings, our songs, and any other means we can birth our pain and suffering into the world as a form of educational entertainment.

If love is but a mechanism to ensure a mating process, then an artist's pain is only a mechanism to ensure purity for a better tomorrow. The next time you see that painting that disturbs you, or you read a passing paragraph in a book, or you hear a song that hits an emotion you don't want to experience take it as a sign to pay more attention. The reason you feel the way you do about it isn't because the painting is ugly, those are easily ignored, it is because you don't want to face the emotion the painting is making you feel.

-Dustin S. Stover

And don't forget, if you want to support my writing then buy my collection of short stories.

Kindle: Happiness in a Void of Darkness

Nook: Happiness in a Void of Darkness