On February 14, 2022, I committed a felony. My feelings about it are not that complicated. I just don’t get arrested.
The potential consequences for what I didn’t really weigh down on my mind until a month later, that was when I got really paranoid. I had the inclination to pull a Ted Kaczynski and try to run away from civilization and live in the woods to get away from the authorities. I thought about moving to the rural county of Dorset in England to try to start all over. I thought about becoming a smelly hippie and running away to live in a commune. When I confessed to Clark and my dad about committing about a felony—without telling them what it was—and they basically reassured me that everything was going to be fine. Dad, even though he hasn’t been to a church in decades, even said he was gonna “pray for me”.
I wonder what they would think of me if I told them what I did. I wonder what everyone I’ve ever grown close to would think of me if I told them what I did. I can imagine their faces warping and hysterically contorting in horror upon me uttering my confession.. Every pleasant moment, every emotional milestone we built overtime as part of our relationship is now all falling into tinier and tinier bits each nanosecond before blinking out of existence. The Boy Named Crow is one of the two people who I’ve told what I did.
As I continue to live everyday life as an unapprehended criminal, I don’t want to get hung up over concerns about morality anymore. If people are defined by their actions, then I am already the lowest of the low to society. If I tried to join some sociopolitical movement to make the world a better place, then that group will have to deal with the fact that I, an evil person, was one of their members, which their opponents would, without a doubt, be all too willing to point out to reduce their credibility. It would be like if Hitler came back to life and tried to become hyper-altruistic. Even if your new actions can make some people can forgive you, a wide contingent of people will still see you as someone deserving to be brutally exterminated in an act of retributive justice out of a sense of vigilantism or something else.
Only Hitler didn’t become irreversibly irredeemable to the eyes of the world when he was 18-and-a-half-years old.