Freedom

For ––

This freedom that we have waxed lyrical about for nights upon drunken night is a concept that we have never really understood, I think, till now. Freedom, you see, is at its fleshy heart a release so far catastrophic to the mundane patterns of daily life – of inveterate society – that we did not really know its implications. Freedom – do you see? – is a thing that is meant to scare you to life – to your true life. We cannot pretend that our own personal freedom is not an unlatching that will eventually lead to the listing of casualties on the morning bill. Freedom is a price to be paid, granted, but also too a world to be won. And it is only those who in themselves recognize that they are in their truest of natures a supposed affront to the mores of society – society, at whatever level (interpersonal, familial or civil) – who are best placed to understand the cost of what it means to be, in the absolute, truly free. What's more, it should not be an illusion to them – these modern Byrons of the world – that though their freedom is a calculus esoteric to the vast majority of their peers; their freedom, even at the very dying of the day, is a recourse, a setting, that they cannot ever really escape. Even by their best efforts or the good graces bequeathed upon them (falsely or otherwise) by the uncaring and unkind and individually irreverent hand of society, their freedom will still invariably come knocking in the midnight hour.

M.M.