people often say something to the effect of that "Deep down, we are creatures of love, and we channel that warmth and humanity at our deepest levels. It is fear and anger that are the veneer, that adulterate the truth, that overcover the goodness within." Okay, very few people say those exact words, but many people mean them and believe them.

I am finding that I think the oppsite is true. At our cores we are terrifying, any pretending at humanity or kindness stripped from us, any veneer of nobility or grace gone, and we might as well be animals in a pavlovian experiment, responding only with the base elements of fear or rage to whichever stimuli set us off.

My knees are turning black and blue, and all the polish had been shattered off my toes. There are cuts and scrapes. My feet have bloody blisters on them. The muscles in my left leg feel as though they had been wrenched or strained terribly. I do not know how this happened and I view it now like fingerprints rising from a crime scene, one in which I may have been the murderer but my memory has been erased, and I watch with amnesiac horror at the evidence slowly surfaces.

I remember someone telling me once, "When you tell me you are sorry, I just hear that you want me to forget what you did." And I wanted so much to say how sorry I was, but then, then I couldn't. Because I didn't want him to think I wanted to be absolved, my trespass forgotten.

I hadn't really done anything that wrong, but he was unkind. I guess I was too.

And there is guilt too, horrible, useless to everyone, to all involved, but still bending me like a spoon, leaving me dull and numb and without much sensation.

In our lives we all go about with the view of us as the little earnest protagonist, the main character, but I wonder now.

There is evil in us all, and we can all be stripped of anything worthwhile, until there is nothing good there at all, nothing redeeming, to the degree we might as well be dead.