Zombies.
The reanimated dead.
Those who still walk this earth, yet soulless and faded, void of any personality nor emotion.
But I'm not gonna talk about their craving of flesh or how they're scary or they're being such a potential apocalypse scenario or whatnot. I'm not even talking about movie or game zombies.
I'm talking exactly about the absurdity of their soulless, yet active existence as a concept.
I'm talking about me.
The current me as I've perceived myself as we speak, at least.
The thought begins as I reviewed several late events I've experienced, and how I acted towards them. To put it simply, lately I've been meeting people. New and old ones. What put the occurrences in the same basket are that they are not ordinary meetings. It's personal ones. And a lot of outpouring of emotions happened. If not face to face, they're relayed by sounds. These.. previously rather insignificant individuals I've known in my life, one day they just came in my life and interacted with me intensely, while baring all their deepest feelings. Not too deep, perhaps, but I'd like to think that these matters they have shouldn't have been so easily talked about to other people, lest the ones they've not usually interacted with.
At least, I won't let myself do that kind of things.
But that's not the problem here. Moving on.
The thing is that while I, with all my active senses, listening and perceiving all their emotions,
..I feel nothing.
It's like I have no empathy. None left. There are just a few, if exactly none, of their feelings that makes me feel the same. The most interesting thing is, it's not like I'm unable to completely receive them, it's more like..
I refuse to receive it.
I refuse to empathize with them.
I refuse to let my heart moved.
Then I realized,
that I've been being like that lately.
Refusing to feel. Refusing to say how I'm feeling.
Refusing to give any meaning, any importance to my feelings.. and sadly, however soft, other person's feelings.
And if feelings is what makes us apart from logical machines, our soul, then I've been soulless.
I've been a zombie. A walking dead.
If I can see myself when I'm interacting with people, I'll see it clearly that I have the dead in my eyes. I wonder what they were seeing in my eyes when they talked to me. I wouldn't dare to ask.
Because deep inside I know, that I'm the one that close the door. I may have been a good listener. But that's it. I just lend an ear. I'd liked to ask if people feel like they're talking to a wall when they talk to me. Lately.
There is one person that made me able to open up a little.
But I ultimately push her off.
Clinging to an archaic concept called consistency, and a twisted sense of fairness. I've been pushing back others feelings, while constantly eliminates potential feelings growing inside me.
I have realized it fully when I saw with my own two eyes how my close friend deal with such an interaction. He was full of warmth, even if his responses were mainly few words that, for me, has little difference in quenching whatever storm I might have in my mind. But for other people, apparently they're enough.
I'm still confused if I'm really a person who doesn't need those kind of consolation words, as it's a fact there are so few circumstances in my life where I decide to share my feelings with someone, or if I just refuse that my feelings is such a big deal in the first place.
Either way, it might not so much dare of a shot if I were to say right now I'm just like a zombie.
Through these dead eyes I walk this Earth, seeing how the world is colorless. Yet it might be that I'm the one who refuse those colors.
And at this point, I don't know what to do.
What is clear though, is that whenever I attempted to open myself and receive others feelings during their session of sharing with me, I feel pain.
It's like a surge of bad memories are also quickly getting inside and making a mess of it.
Even though their emotions should have no connection with what I've been dealing inside with.
So I guess my way of retaliation is that I won't let myself feel anything anymore.
It shouldn't be an important aspect in this practical world I decidedly delving in.
If I just eliminate such potential circumstances where the door I close are knocked, I guess I'll stop feeling bad. I guess I'll be fine in carrying on with my life.
It really shouldn't be such a big deal.
I can still be a kind person, even if it's done by clinging to the norm. Not by having any empathy or real compassion.
I wouldn't give in my values of right and wrong, even though maybe it's dictated by the cold logic of utilitarianism and not humanitarian wisdom.
A person I know - the one I had pushed off - constantly said that I'm a human, not a machine. That I have to embrace that illogical part of me that gives me soul, that gives me passion.
And I deliberately put those advice into deaf ears.
Maybe I'm better suited to be a machine. Maybe I'm better suited being a zombie.
But maybe I've been throwing bit by bit of my time growing to be fully a man.
Maybe.
But this time, I'd rather walk soulless.
May someday I have a change of mind.
