A Brief and Mostly Fictional Story

I hope my readers will forgive my story. I promise that the events are fictional. It is just a diary of the soul, really. Specifics weigh things down.

It’s long and bony, and attached to an even thinner branch of bone. I just sit down and look at my hand. It looks like my arm is too small, more than that my hand is too big. Wearing a too-big jacket doesn’t help at all. The sleeves drape over my arm. It’s wasting away. I’m wasting away. Not like tuberculosis, or anorexia, or leprosy. Those things are diseases of the body. A soul disease, man, but who has ever had one of those? Either everybody or nobody. A soul disease, man.
It’s not even like my body reflects my spirit. Probably just my mind reflects my spirit onto my body. My eyes see through a wasting-away lens. That’s about right. I can feel and see my own decay.
It’s peculiar-like, turning into a skeleton. The thing about a skeleton is that you can add meat to it, shape it how you like. This is different. You can’t control it. The skeleton is the created thing, the end, not the foundation. You build your skeleton as the rest of you burns. The skeleton is you.
This skeleton is me. It has long bony fingers and too small arms. Too thin arms. It is gangly and tall and cannot convince anyone that it is tough. It knows it is all askew, but hates to accept it. The skin is filled with pallor, and the too long hair is the only thing growing on it. Everything else pulls taut on the gaunt frame.
I have perfect vision, but it’s blurred like a funhouse mirror when I look at myself. I see shadows of myself, or half a man, or some such illusions. Maybe I read too much, and all these books around me fill themselves on my soul, giving me vampiric ideas. Over here is “The Seducer’s Diary,” and here is Werther. All of the books are so terribly beautiful. I tremble when I read them, out of excitement to melt my flesh the way Dr. Faustus did. Dorian Gray, too, although his is just a retelling of Faust. The way Adam and Eve found knowledge was by fruit. My knowledge comes from aesthetic experience. It is wonderful, really.
I mean, the other night, I was wandering the streets. It was raining, so that this story can have a little atmosphere. That light misty rain that darkens the streets, without really making you miserable by soaking your bones. The blood on my hands warmed them a little. But it wasn’t really blood. Metaphorical blood, maybe. A young girl who trusted me, who I even convinced to love me. I ruined her entirely. Her blood, or body, or heart, was hot with a passion I could not understand. That is what it means, I thought, to be an aesthetic. To give in, as she did, to the desires of the soul.
She was wiser than me, even though she woke up colder, and more alone, and without comprehension as to where her lover had been spirited away. I didn’t try to make her suffer. But I didn’t mind enough to change anything. That there is hate, a really terrible hate, not to care enough about someone to even desire their suffering. A man who kills another man, is not guilty of hate. He is guilty of love. He loves the man so much that he changes the man. A man who does nothing to benefit or suffer another, he is a hater, in his apathy worse than any man of the passions.
The seducer has no real feel for art. Or should I say, I have no feel for art. Art is felt. Emotion doesn’t have to be suppressed to never love. Art is love. Art is passion. Emotion, fun, happy, these things are not art. I am not an artist.
I am the seducer, but I can never really make it an art.