The Quandary of The Game

It's the game we all play. Ebb and flow, life and death, love and hate, gain and loss. The quandary is that we both love and hate the game. Duality at its finest, there. We hate the game; what it turns us into, what it makes us do to those we care about, how it eats us alive. And yet we love the game, for it brings us happiness and joy, peace and security, if only fleeting. We try to quit playing the game, but it sucks us back in. We try to hate on the game, but the game hates on us. We swear it off, but we come back to it like addicts. We cry for it, but we refuse to swear off the tears.

Do and don't, stop and go, start and stop. It's an endless cycle. We look with burning jealousy upon those who seem to be free of it, until we realize at long last that they are liars and false - that they, too, are as entrenched in the game as we. We swear by the hope that sanity finds us as it found them, until we realize that there's a touch of insanity in them as well, lurking under the skin like a virus.

I can't get out. Neither can you.

I've tried for the entirety of this short existence, swimming against the currents. I turn about and let them carry me into a maelstrom of destruction. Then about I go, against the rapids once again with maddened, futile strokes.

And so do you.