My face is a stark, grinning skull. My story, an etched tableau of suffering—pain that’s been lived, endured, embraced. You look at me, Vincent, or at least you point your hollow eye sockets my way, and all you see is a monster. Yet what kind of beast are you? A man blinded not by tragedy, but by the foolish pursuit of false enlightenment, doubly blind in body and spirit.
You, my former brother, cast aside your sight voluntarily, surrendered it on the altar of the Third Eye cult. You handed over vision, the essence of your human experience, believing it would elevate you. That such grotesque mutilation would somehow unveil a higher truth. Somewhere along the way, Vincent, you lost your way. Traded the tangible for the unfathomable, preferring the empty echo of imagined wisdom, to the clear tolling bell of raw, visceral experience.
My path was not by choice. I was meant to die in a cell, just another nameless skeleton on the assembly line of the terminally condemned. I made a pact, an unholy bargain that granted me freedom from the reaper’s cold clutches but not without its own gruesome cost. My face was burnt away, erased by fire and replaced by this soulless skull. Every remaining nerve, a testament to agony. Yet, I would not reverse it.
I stare into the abyss without blinking, for I am pain incarnate. I bear scars beyond physicality, baring my suffering for all to marvel or recoil in horror. Yet in each mark read a chronicle of human agony, of life distilled to its most potent essence—pain.
You traded your eyes for darkness, seeking illumination in the void. Yet, what do you see, Vincent? What great truths were revealed when the last vestiges of your sight were cruelly ripped from their sockets? You preach a path of enlightenment by loss of sight, bringing a cruel reign of darkness upon your misguided followers. You leave them stumbling in the dark, broken and forsaken.
I, in stark contrast, became the embodiment of torment, the living insignia of suffering. You might think this a curse, but I call it truth. Pain, Vincent, is our birthright, the grand inheritance of the living. It sharpens the dull, carves the soft, and defines the ambiguous. It is a maestro conducting the symphony of existence, a brutal choreographer dictating the dance of life.
You thought you’d see more by taking out your eyes—what a tragic paradox. Lost in the echoes of your vacant sight, you surrendered the one thing that connected you to the world. I still see, Vincent, unequivocally, unflinchingly. I see beyond the veils of pretence, the stilted niceties, the delicate delusions. I see all stripped back and exposed, raw and red, in every beat of the human heart.
You stand sightless, a hollow mockery of the truth you sought, believing your void is filled with divine wisdom. I am here, pain writ upon my bare bones for all to see. Your sightless ‘enlightenment’ is an empty illusion, Vincent.
Real truth is etched in the raw wounds of pain.
Embrace it.