Finding The Conscience

“Do you think you have a conscience?”

I’ve been asked it so many times, that I’m beginning to wonder if I really don’t. Perhaps it’s been lost for so long that the search for it has become too tedious for me to pursue. I am Butterfly, the somnambulistic vessel, the antagonist for your preachings on love and the voice of logic and reality.

I’ve never really bothered to understand the whole concept of having a conscience or a heart, since it only served to make people vulnerable. If only they commodified emotions and sold it at the mini mart, then I could buy ‘conscience’ off the shelf, and maybe during a promotion, I could get ‘orgasm’ at half the price.

The weekend with MS subsided from the pillage of vodka and champagne on Saturday’s Halloween bash, to a lazy Sunday confined strictly to the bedroom. It was the very kind that would have passed every Christian doctrine, except of some instances where we might need to go to confession for.

It was the very kind of weekend I needed. One that was more emotional than it was physical. You see, the problem I have is that my heart is so inured by nonchalance and disregard for everything except to live life accelerated by carnal pleasantries, that I no longer understand why love makes people vulnerable.

Slowly, and in a very masochistically warped derivative of love, I actually find a lot of pleasure in being vulnerable. Which also explains why I have a penchant for impermanence and find the need to attribute a time expiry on things capable of bringing me happiness.

I love that final countdown against the clock. To know that everything we had, will soon be accolades of memories. To feel sadness gripping your throat. To not have words come out your mouth, even when your heart desires a prose of honesty. To know that your moment of silence with them, will last an eternity in your mind.

Where men fall at this vulnerability, I thrive at it. Perhaps, this is the one time I’m allowed to feel, human again. For the ones that have come and gone, – and the few who have had enjoyable comebacks – my lack of conscience has prevented me from feeling anything more than gratitude to their deeds.

I’ve never needed to feel indebted because I’ve always believed my philosophy was well capable of apologizing for my actions. I’ve never needed to lie to anyone to have had them lie on my bed and I’ve always been perfectly honest with how our story was going to end. As such, I granted myself impunity against all subsequent pacifying and guilt.

I’ve always been well capable of censuring myself if I ever allowed myself to wade too deeply into vulnerability. Yet, MS peeled off too many layers too quickly that she had my ‘I am an asshole’ t-shirt and my ‘love is a waste of time’ boxers on the floor before I could even say stop.

In the finality of it all, past the points where I stop and look for redemption in showering people with verbal pleasantries, I don’t see how the wild will be tamed. Perhaps I’m tickled with a weekend indulgent, but beyond the concepts of companionship and sex, is still a ambiguous horizon that I’m not convinced is for me.

I’m finding it. The conscience.