Author’s Note: All phrases in bold come from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit; all the great heroines of the world in one. I have been shaped by each of the dead who have influenced me with their writings—imprinting onto the world an essence. And as to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul, so I have given away bits of myself.
I am the bravest of mankind, only afraid of myself. Yet I refuse to define myself, by darkness or by light, by wrong or by right, because to define is to limit. I revel in the fact that I can feel, but I refuse to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear my laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of my passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. I want to fall in love with a man or a novel or an abstract thought, and remain a happy prisoner of my passion, become bound to a family or a project. Always striving for the very best, intellectually and emotionally, I look to the inevitable future, as the past can always be annihilated. I rebel against shame and guilt, as the only thing one never regrets are one’s mistakes. Memories tarnish, details fade, but regret, denial, and forgetfulness cannot touch what is to come. Because behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic, I am familiar with the special relationship held by beauty and misery. I am the triumph of thought, the antithesis of every accepted notion.
I take pride in the consumption of words. How terrible, how clear and vivid and cruel they were! The careful spell weaved inside your head, the inescapable intrusion of ideas inside your mind deceiving you into believing you formed the thoughts yourself… was there anything so real as words? They can be spoken, written, delivered by whomever, concealing and distracting from truth more than revealing it. Subject to millions of interpretations, one unfortunate combination of letters can break a heart, while another unintentional combination can restore faith. Since they dither between saying too much and not enough, I find myself stuck between both, despising and adoring words. They are clung to when they are all that remain; they are clung to when they are a promise of that to come.
Words have the power to break me, the power to seduce me… They are a part of me and I am a part of every piece I have ever read. I am a whole universe. I am other people. I am every single person I have encountered. And it seems my life’s a mimicry, my passions a quotation.