With All My Predator's Heart

Why is it that I refuse to stop trying?

Edited to add: After the conversation below - I know why. Call me arrogant, call me presumptuous, tell me that I'm blaspheming the sacred and committing every heresy in the book, but remember - I can't always be wrong.

Ever wanted to reinvent your whole life as a love song to that one person you'll never be able to have again?

Ever wanted to consume everything that you can of that one person - every word, every glimpse, no matter how fleeting it is, craving the sound of that person's voice, drinking them in, breathing them in, as if you could smell and taste and nourish yourself on that presence alone?

There is an awesome power, not only in forgiveness, but in being forgiven. Isn't that what draws people to Christianity?

In Astonishing X-Men #18, we learn that Scott knew he wasn't really shooting Emma, only manifestations from Emma's mind.

Scott understands Emma. Here he is explaining what Cassandra Nova did to her: "One tiny suggestion. Too small to notice, but clamped on to Emma's greatest weakness. Feeding, growing ... creating an entire reality for Emma." Hank: "And that weakness?" Scott: "Guilt. Guilt about falling in with Shaw. Becoming the White Queen, failing her students in Genosha ... surviving. Survivor's guilt is unbelievably powerful. The randomness of who lives. The responsibility towards those who didn't ... There's a voice in her telling her she's evil. She's always been evil. That even Genosha was all her fault. And she thinks that voice is hers."

And these words are being spoken by a man whose mind was just deconstructed by Emma - his lover - a woman he thought he could trust, a woman who betrayed him.

What an amazing thing it is, when someone who has been hurt as deeply as Scott was hurt by Emma is able to understand, is able to forgive.

Can one witness the extraordinary beauty of the human spirit - something that goes beyond the physical, someone who shines in a way that photographs cannot fully capture - and recognize that beauty with a fierce joy, and want desperately to live in the light of it, forever - and yet, be able to open one's hands, and walk away, and let it free?

( Advice to a Girl, by Sara Teasdale )

say anything "When I was with Emma, it was like flying ... I could say any outrageous thing."

I am the one who has always broken the rules, but that has become a rule in and of itself.

I'm not allowed to be "good," and it's so much easier to play the villain and accept that as my proper role than it is to break that particular rule - the overriding one, the one that says that it always has to be my fault.

I am so trapped in my own myth, in the story I've created for myself, that I don't know how to get out.

I don't live in "diamond form."

I've spent a lifetime trying to pretend that I can't be hurt, convincing the whole world that I'm incapable of caring, and now that everyone else buys into my line, I want just one person to notice that I'm real - just one particular person - and it won't happen, because I spent way too much time making sure that everyone is certain I'm a fiction.

I'd give up anything, everything, for that one person - but how can anyone ever believe me, how can anyone believe IN me, when I'm still unable to believe myself?

( lyrics - Iris )

Sometimes we wish that nobody cared. We wish that we could push away everyone who has ever mattered to us, so that there would be nobody left to care whether we live or die. We don't want anyone else's life to be touched by our own. We don't want anyone else to have the hope for us that we don't have for ourselves. We want to be invisible. We think that would be freedom.

And then we succeed. We look around and we realize that there's nobody left. We have pushed them all away, and we have that freedom to live or die, in a world that will remain splendidly indifferent.

When there's no one left to believe in you, when there's nothing that ties you to this world - in that silence, you must finally confront who and what you are.