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“No matter what form the cruelty takes, it often births an offspring called regret. That emotion of remorse, where you wish you’d never acted the way you did. You wish you’d never made the girl you love think you hated her. You wish you hadn’t told your daughter you wouldn’t accept her unless she conformed. You regret writing the story that pushed that pop star over the edge and caused her to try and take her own life. You tell yourself that even though someone was cruel to you by stealing from you, you should never have sunk to their level and tried to steal something back.
“So, you see, in essence, cruelty is a cycle. A person inflicts it and it spreads. It simply breeds more and more of itself in a loop. The father inflicts it on the son, the son inflicts it on a girl, the girl inflicts it back on the son and I’m sure the son will return it to the father eventually. But maybe that’s not true, because even though that boy was hateful to you, you were never hateful back. You might have defended yourself, but that’s all it was, right? But oh, then you look deeper, you examine your own actions and make the startling discovery that something in the fabric of life’s order has twisted. Suddenly, the power has shifted, and you’re the one inflicting pain on another. You, when you’d always considered yourself the recipient of cruelty and nothing more, are now the perpetrator.
“You look at your life and see that your fear has caused you to destroy a man’s heart. You look back over the years and realise that you’ve been causing others pain the whole time without even realising it. Your sickness caused your family to worry and agonise for your welfare. And sometimes you were passively cruel just for the fact that you were present. Because a girl wanted you but knew she couldn’t have you. A boy did, too, but he couldn’t have you, either, because you would never forgive his many small acts of hate. Perhaps if you weren’t so shy and guarded and sick, other people wouldn’t find it difficult to break past your barriers. Perhaps your way of keeping yourself to yourself was cruel to the people who wanted you to show them your insides.”
Rubbing my hands over my eyes, I shake my head. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, cruelty is a fundamental part of our psyche. You can look back over history, pore through text upon text, and even if it’s not showing on the surface it’s there somewhere, insidiously poisoning everyone it touches. Like a virus, it spreads and grows, sometimes even mutates into other things like fear and revenge and exploitation. But at the end of it all, it is a flaw in our design, and it seems like the only way to purge it from our lives is to remove ourselves from every kind of human interaction there is. And there lies the rub, because a life without human interaction is no life at all.”
My voice goes quiet as I utter that last sentence. Then I stop speaking entirely, feeling like I’m rambling and not making any sense. Slowly, I become aware of the fact that there are tears streaming down my face. I look at the dozens of eyes staring back at me and get a fright. For a moment it felt like I was alone, simply theorising to myself like a crazy person. Fareed begins to clap and then others follow, and soon there are people approaching me, putting questions to me about the speech I just gave, asking me to elaborate on my points.
I can’t give them what they want. Now I know what Fareed meant when he’d given his talk about David Cameron; he’d just wanted to say his piece and leave it at that. Sometimes over-analysing stuff kills it. And so I tell those around me that I’m sorry, but I have to go.
In a trance I walk to an underground station, headed for home. The words that spilled from my mouth like lava, thoughts I never knew I had until I’d articulated them, spin in my head. That’s when I have my epiphany. I know what all those thoughts were meant for. I wasn’t simply figuring out my feelings about me and Robert, I was coming up with a theory. A thesis.
Maybe all the craziness and heartbreak of this summer wasn’t for nothing. Maybe I was meant to go through it all so I could see the bigger picture, realise what I’m really meant to write my dissertation on: “The Nature of Cruelty.”
Experiencing its cycle in real life has allowed me to understand it in the mythologies I study. All of a sudden I can understand why Medea killed her children. Why Athena turned Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her beautiful face so ugly it turned those who beheld it to stone. Why King Laius wanted to end the life of baby Oedipus so that he wouldn’t grow up to fulfil the prophecy of murdering him. Of all the reasons — revenge, jealousy, disgust, fear — none of them are pretty. They’re real and complicated and brutal, just like people. I get that now.
When I arrive at the house, Sasha’s out in the back garden, sunbathing. I sit down beside her on the grass, not speaking at first.
“I think I have to go home,” I whisper, breaking the quiet.
Shading her eyes with her arm, she looks up at me sadly and asks, “Is it because of Robert?”
I nod, unable to speak when tears catch in my throat.
“I had a feeling this was going to happen when you two broke up. It was all so intense, and then poof, it was finished.”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice scratchy. I pull a daisy out of the earth by its root and roll it between my thumb and forefinger, watching its pretty white petals swirl around and around.
