The Most Evil Thing

Fredrick Backman writes in his book, "the most evil thing about men like Joar's old man is that he wasn't evil all the time", and I don't think I have ever agreed with anything from a book more (Narrator: absolute lie, half of her Fredrick Backman books are annotated with quotes that seem too relatable).

The most evil thing about everything

About planet Earth

About its residents

About the words they say

About the things they do

Is that it's not all black and white. Nothing in the world is entirely black and white. In fact, it is a thicker shade of grey (and boy, am I color blind). You don't necessarily realise it when you're younger, not at all actually.

Up until the illusion breaks, the world consists of bad people and good ones; there ought to be a clear segregation between the two. No bad person can ever do a good thing, and vice versa. That is why villains and superheroes exist, don't they? They're opposites of one another, and they depict reality. Of course they do

Until they don't anymore.

The truth uncovers gradually; good and evil coexist inside of us. The people who love us are meant to hurt us, just as we are meant to hurt them. The wound that never stops bleeding is not a reminder of an arch nemesis but of someone much dearer. That is why it is a wound that never heals.

In fact, that is why it is a wound to even begin with.

The same hands that taught us love are often, if not always, the ones that teach us betrayal. Perhaps that is why we have such crooked definitions of love. It can look like a cruel mixture of pain and comfort, both fleeting in nature.

I watch in despair as someone who would burn out of love for me, hurts someone else ever so effortlessly. I blink my eyes, trying to make sense of the reality that has newly unfolded in front of me. I try to come up with a justification, one that keeps my version of reality intact. I can often conjure up one, but the truth still sticks out like a thorn somewhere inside.

Maybe that is why this coexistence is like the 8th wonder for me. In my twenty-three years of existence, if there is anything I have been unable to digest about the world, it is how good and evil, love and pain, tears and joy, all exist within the same being.