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. 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 no longer felt that sense of wonder and beauty that was central to my character. Birds no longer sang but just mouthed sounds, and the sun – you know how much I, I mean we, love the sun – no longer looked happy, but just something arcing its way 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 until 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 about 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 as if fixated on something then carefully moving again.  Then something unmistakably familiar to them 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, nuts and termites was plentiful. There was something deeper here. It was about the hunt, it was about the kill. They were simply exercising a coded instinct. Running the scene in my mind, it 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…..my unhappiness what due to an unfulfilled instinct? Remember, we and Chimps are practically the same.

I stood up from our wobbly couch so quickly I almost fell, and began pacing back and forth wringing and twisting my hands together until red. A flash of excitement came over me for the first time in years, enough to put me into a frenzy. I wanted this feeling to stay for it was so brief. Brief but long enough for me to remember a time very very long ago when I used to feel this. I began to cry. Then I realized what I had to do.

I left the house. I found three dogs…. and killed them. I killed them with my bare hands. And oh Lord! How much better I felt after the first one. The release! Like an eternal darkness that had blanketed my chest for so long just decided to lift itself away. I could see rays of light coming through the clouds in my mind like you see in those classic paintings. And that’s when I went for the second, and then finally the third. Each one parted the clouds further, each one let more and more light in. Why three? Because there were no more clouds after the third. That one hit the spot. I still remember the moment when the paws on that little thing went limp. In that instant I felt light as a feather. A lifelong bottling up of millions of years of evolution released itself back into the world of darkness where it belonged.

I sit here now behind these bars of steel and between three white walls, waiting for the prescribed treatment passed on by the judge yesterday to banish away the neurons responsible for these heinous murders. I am writing so you might read it after you wake up. Remember, please. I did it because something deep within stirred me to this fateful act. I did it because my ancestors did it. I did it because it was actually normal to, and it is our society today that is so abnormal. Everything is so kosher, so harm-free even in movies. What kind of world is it when you go to jail if you deliberately kill an ant? Humans are suffocating and they don’t know it. A certain level of violence I now believe is like a vitamin we need. I swear it. How else could you explain what happened to me? One day I think soon you’ll wake up to see people going nuts at each other with machetes. I swear it.

Remember, please, and give this letter and the thoughts here at least some honest attention before you judge and discard. 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 and death, to hunt, and to connect viscerally to your own flesh and blood by taking away that of another. Only then will you find your roots. Only then will you be free.

yours truly,

Me