To…me,

I am writing to you because when tomorrow comes, you will be a different man, and this writing will be the only record of your thinking before it all happened. I hope that by some chance, though admittedly small, you may read this and remember…

Yes, I did commit murder. In fact, I took the life of not just one other creature, but several, and despite what you may be thinking, I believe it was necessary. And justified.

Let me first explain to ease you into it. Before the act, I felt detached from life and all my surroundings, as if someone had put me behind glass doors while the world hurried along on the other side. In nature I did not feel that sense of wonder and of beauty that was central to me. Birds no longer sang but just mouthed decibels, and the sun – you know how much I, I mean we, love the sun -no longer looked happy, but just something arcing its away down to darkness, over and over again every day. For a very long time I agreed with what the doctors said: “take this pill for a bad case of anhedonia, we’ve seen this many times so don’t worry”. But it got worse and physicians had no answers. My friends fell away on by one till I was alone.

On the evening of January 8, 2067, the trajectory of my misgivings took a radical turn because of a completely coincidental thought. I happened to be in one of my very rare better moods that evening with my mind thinking my situation. I remembered part of a very old documentary about research done back in the mid-late nineteen century in the Congo, about chimps hunting other chimps. Walking in single file very quietly, they wound their way through the dense forest with their big dark eyes tracking the canopy, stopping every now to assess new sounds.  Then something unmistakably familiar breaks the silence, sending them into a frenzied rush after what ever was making that sound. A few minutes later the hunted, a monkey, was on the ground being torn apart into pieces and eaten. The narrator had said the hunt was not for food, for their main diet, fruit and nuts and termites was plentiful. There was something deeper here. It was about the hunt and it was about connecting with each other through the hunt. Running the scene in my mind, the thought hit me: what if we had a deep rooted instinct to hunt, to kill, and not fulfilling this drive made us unhappy? What if, what if, what if…..my unhappiness what due to an unfulfilled instinct?

I stood up from our wobbly couch so quickly I almost fell. A rush of excitement came over me for the first time in months.  

Then I went out, found three dogs…. killed them. I did it because something deep within stirred me to this fateful act. I did it because I was depressed so much I had to do something. I did it because my ancestors did it. I did it because it was actually normal to it, and ultimately necessary.

I sit here now waiting for prescribed treatment passed on by the judge yesterday to banish away the neurons responsible for these heinous murders. I am writing to you so will read it after you wake up. Remember, please. Don’t let them rob you of a natural instinct under the banner of civilization. You are meant to be part of the circle of life. to hunt, to form bonds with your fellow men in the hunt, to connect viscerally to your own flesh and blood by taking away that of another life. Only then will you find your roots. Only then, will you be free.

yours truly,

Me