It's odd. For a generally happy person, I seem to have kept my old love of depressing and passionate songs. Radiohead, Moist, blaring out of the speakers as I sit here alone. I like to sing along, even if I can't hit all the notes or remember the words. That's all right. It feels good just to get it out.
I was up until at least four AM last night, talking with my love about times past, and what we felt that each of our individual purposes in life were. It's hard for me to think about the past now without wanting to cry or hit something, because there are so many things I should have done differently. So many things I would probably do the same way if I did them again, just because I so rarely think about these things.
For just about everyone, life is relatively simple: "I am myself. I am real." Very few other people are real to each of us.
Allow me to use an analogy here. It's like an RPG. "I am the main character. The rest of you are members of my party, meaning you follow me for a certain amount of time and affect the way that I act: you help me in times of crisis, you become a role model of some sort, etc.
It's as if I've lived my whole life like that, where I was the main character (in my mind, anyway), and everyone else just sort of, existed. I hurt people, I threw people away, because I didn't stop to think about it. I focussed my life around myself, because it pleased me and I felt that that was all that mattered.
If I stopped to think about it, the fact that I thought of myself as important, I began to worry, because I felt that I wasn't doing enough with myself, and whatever destiny was laid out for me would never be fulfilled. I couldn't see what it was, and I worried myself sick over it constantly.
Then, several months ago, after a long talk with my love, something new occurred to me. I was thinking about it Friday night, too, more extensively than before. What if I wasn't important? What if I was merely a pawn for Fate? I looked back over my life, and saw that although I was very rough with a lot of other peoples' feelings and lives, I unintentionally taught many of them lessons about life, whether we knew it or not. I may have kicked some people around, and I'm not proud of it. But they've all come out of it having learned something about themselves.
Now, don't think this is me trying to make myself seem like a good person for being an asshole. I'm just trying to explain about this.
It feels like Fate has been putting me through some experiences, just giving me a situation and leaving me to deal with it, because of where I will end up. I've done stupid things, yes, but I've learned. Some things actually repeated themselves, and afterwards I felt like a student whose teacher just handed an assignment back and told me to do it over again until I got it right. I've hated a lot of things that have happened to me, but overall I think they were necessary.
My previous relationship, a long, painful experience with a lot of stupidity and yet also quite a bit of self-analyzation, led me to where I am now, contemplating the fact that I'm not really the one who is important right now. Perhaps one in a million people in this world are actually important. To use a chess analogy(I love analogies):
The really important people are the queens, because they can go in any direction they choose, can do anything they like. If lost, it is so much more difficult for the rest of the players to succeed. The queens can work behind the scenes, or out in the open, but either way they are important.
The other players, the rooks and bishops and knights, are there to help the queen get where it wants to go (those who don't are compared to the players on the opposite team). Killing the king is not something the queen can do alone: likewise, whatever destiny is set out for the queen in real life, it cannot complete it alone.
The pawns are the masses, the ones who don't really matter. They are born, they live, they die, without affecting anyone very much. Something I like to quote:
"They go to work to get the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work until they fall over dead." -THEY (I think by Robert Heinlein, although I can't be sure)
The queens (or even the other players, sometimes) are the ones who tell the pawns what to do and when to do it. "Mob mentality;" that is the pawns.
The king. The King is the important player who must be protected at all costs, who is the crucial point in the game. Whoever owns the one king is the one In Control. The king can't really do anything. He is the one in power, although he is told what to say and do by everyone around him. They make the decisions and he announces them to everyone else.
I'm not a king, or a queen, or even a pawn. I'm a bishop, sliding through the hidden cracks in life, my moves not always noticed until too late. Affecting the way things move, person by person, barely noticing things myself until later on.
If I hadn't been sent into my past relationship (affecting him as well, dammit), I wouldn't have met James. It may sound like heartsick bull to anyone else, but I've seen things, heard things that give me reason to believe what I believe. Our not meeting the way we did would have had a definite negative reaction, for a significant number of people.
But I am a ripple, that shakes the frog and wakes him before the heron does. I am not important, but the ones I affect might be.
It's an interesting thought.
I've always wanted to just live, to lead a "normal" life and be happy with it. But I have conflicting images on that. On the one hand, I see that content, "normal" life as it could happen, yet on the other hand I see things happening. I think our future holds some events that are going to change the way things work for a long time, for a lot of people. And I'm glad if I can help. I don't have the nerve to be a queen, but I have no problem being a bishop.
It's sort of comforting, having some idea of what is going on. When you don't, you ask Why? a lot, and the silence afterwards is never pleasant.
Most people are smart enough to know that the answer(s) to that particular question are rarely what they want to hear.