Erotomania: The Prequel (The Dark Matter)

In the beginning there were the heavens and the earth. But I was yet to be born, I was yet to exist, as even a glimmer in the eyes of my parents, Lothgren and Rotvahl. I didn’t know what it was to experience that form of pleasure whose ending is a form of dying, and I was immune from my own mind. If desire is but the beginning of suffering, I had yet to bite the apple from the tree of knowledge, and so it was still true that what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. I’d been placed in a basket and sent down the river like Moses and Romulus and Remus after him, by the same seer who had been responsible for the abandonment of Oedipus on the mountain top, the same seer who had then caused Oedipus to murder his father and marry his mother. If nothing else, it was an early lesson: don’t put your faith in soothsayers. No one can foretell the truth, existence precedes as essence, as Sartre pointed out in Being and Nothingness. There was no plan or meaning to anything. Action created the world and action was the result of conscious decisions that man was free to make. As I grew from the monozygotic to dizygotic existence, conforming to the usual definitions of life by virtue of being composed of oxygen and carbon, I began to understand my place in the universe. Man was not the center.