Answers In the Sky

I have often wondered, in my younger days, why and what makes people love? Certainly not the heart; the heart is an organ which pumps blood through the body. Not the mind, the mind is for thinking and rationale.

Why do people love? I don’t know. What is love? I couldn’t tell you.

If love is caring about someone, being willing to die for them, hurting when they’re hurt, then I guess maybe I’ve got an idea of what love is.

Is love caring about someone? Or is it simply a break in hate? Do we spend our lives loving with streams of hatred? Or do we hate with scraps of love?

My mind wandered quite often as a child, touching upon each of these subjects. Surely, I thought, the answers must be written up, up high in the sky where nobody can see.

I told you my mind wandered often.

Now… oh, what now? I’ve been in space. I’ve fought monsters and people and monstrous people and monsters who were people. I’ve cried and laughed and smiled and sobbed. I’ve screamed and kicked and pleaded and begged. And I still can’t see the answers in the clouds.

I’ve asked myself, recently, what is a monster? Is it something big and scary and ugly? If so, why, then a monster is simply something or someone who has a physical deformity.

What is reality? Is reality what one believes, or is it the truth? What is the truth?

I nearly died, very recently, and a great amount of times.

Not that it matters.

I have my friends. But are friends enough? I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you, so don’t ask me. I never really had friends in my younger years. Oh, there were enough people around me. I just didn’t really want to be close to any of them in particular.

I can fight well enough, but what is the use of fighting. In killing to get to our goal, have we become as what we were fighting? Are we really any better than them, and what does better mean?

In our hands, do we hold all the answers or all the questions? If the answer to a question is another question, is it really the answer? If we succeed in making others fail, but lose a bit of ourselves to them, have they really failed and have we really succeeded? Or are we the ones who have failed while they have prevailed?

Even now, as I stare into the blue, blue sky and wisps of pearly clouds, I can’t see the answers. Or was that the questions I was looking for?

There comes a time in everyone’s life when one question’s his or her own sanity. I have, probably, done that many more times than an average person might have. And with the things that I’ve done and been through, I suppose that it’s really not much of a surprise. Not to me, at least. But it often has come into speculation, whether or not I am sane. Most people who know me would say absolutely, for there are precious few who may and can see through this façade, Vincent Valentine being one of them. We are closer friends than we seem, Vincent and I.

I have often dreamed of what it would be like to soar through the sky, fly like an eagle, see things no one has ever seen before. I would love to dive down, down with the dolphins and fish and other things that no one knows about. Either way, in the sky or the sea, it would be infinite. Not really, of course, but it would be like I was the only person in the universe. I would hang there, surrounded by the blue oblivion which is both full and empty at the same time.

But each time I pull away from that thought. Venturing too far down that road could be fatal, and that’s something I haven’t gotten around to yet.

No, I’m not suicidal. I just think about death. I actually am more of an inquisitive person than I will seem at first. I think about many things, and I love to acquire knowledge. To me, death is just another thing to learn about after I’ve found out all I’ve wanted to. And what I know so far is not enough to quench my thirst, this terrible thirst I have, one that doesn’t go away and one, I fear, that never will.

It’s not a horrible thing, but it makes me terribly curious. Maybe that’s a good thing; then again maybe not. After all, the saying is "Curiosity killed the cat." Then again, I’m hardly a cat; at least, I should hope not.

I usually am quite fond of animals, but cats are the one thing I cannot stand. I don’t know why. Perhaps it has something to do with the way one of my parents died; mauled by a large feline in the mountains, saved, only to die a few hours later. I really was quite young when that happened.

Oh, I know that I don’t fit your expectations of me. I suppose I am speaking more eloquently than normal. But then, every coin has two sides, right?

Despite all appearances, I do think a lot. I wonder, and stare at the sky, pleading for the answers I know are not there.

Someone told me once, a long time ago…well, I guess it really wasn’t that long ago. It was a long time ago for me. A whole…a whole different life. When living wasn’t based around fighting and killing and answers. Anyway, I’m getting off the subject again, huh? Someone told me that you can’t believe in science. You believe in religion, just as religion is your belief, but you don’t-can’t-believe in science. You have to know science.

Maybe some people will argue-you know religion as well, but for the most part, that’s not true. Have you ever met God? Have you ever shaken hands with the devil, or bargained with an angel? I’d imagine not. But science is not about believing you’re right, it’s about knowing you’re right. Perhaps that was Hojo’s mistake. He knew too much; knew he was able to do so much with science.

Or maybe his mistake was that he believed in Jenova and Sephiroth. Jenova was…something else, and, sadly, Sephiroth was a product of science. Perhaps…perhaps if Vincent had been there with his lover, his Lucrecia, then Sephiroth…maybe he would have been okay. But Hojo screwed that up for him, too, and locked Vincent up for thirty years.

I sound bitter, don’t I? Well, I am. I have a lot of hatred for that madman, who ruined my life…but I can’t help but wonder…what happened to him to make him what he was? What tragedy or accident occurred that affected him so greatly it stole his sanity out from underneath him? I hate them both for wrecking my life, but I pity them as well, because something happened to the both of them to obliterate their lives and their sanity.

You might be shocked, I suppose, that I have any pity left for those two madmen whose insanity and hate killed a close friend and nearly took my own life, as well as many, many others, numerous times. But I can’t help it. I couldn’t stop feeling pity for someone whose lives spun out of their control, and I wouldn’t want to; I know all too well what that feels like.

So maybe you’re wondering why I sometimes ask myself if I’m sane? After all, surely just a bit of thinking and depression doesn’t lead to insanity, right? Right? Well, maybe that’s true. But while sometimes…sometimes I’m okay, I’m happy and peaceful and content, though the thirst for answers still simmers, at other times it’s like I’m in a deep, dark pit, and I know that I’ll never come out, but at the same time I know I will. That is the type of thing that makes me wonder if I am truly sane.

I stare at his sword sometimes-we kept it, to remember our mistakes and to make sure people will never forget the price of science-and I hate it. I hate it so much, it’s…it’s like there’s fire burning, raging beneath my skin and nothing I did could ever douse it.

It’s taken so many lives, been soaked in so much blood. If blades could speak and think and feel, what I wonder would this weapon of destruction say? Would it feel regret, or would it be beyond regret, beyond a hunger for forgiveness? Might its desire to kill become cooling ashes compared to the intense fire that raged before? I have no idea, and I assure you that I have no desire to find out.

I think that…that once he started killing…it was so easy for her to slip into his mind and poison his thoughts. She provoked him and there were so many people to blame. So many people…Gast, for not stopping Hojo, Lucrecia for allowing that to be done to her, Hojo, for doing that to his son, and so many, too many, others. Jenova, the Cetra, humans, and too many nameless people to count, all of them had some part in what happened.

My, my. I’ve left a lot of questions unanswered and unasked, haven’t I. Never mind, I should probably be doing something other than laying here and staring at the questions in the sky. As for my sanity, I think I’ll be alright as long as I have a sense of self.

But I’m tired right now. So if it’s okay with you, I think I’ll just rest for a while, and do what I always have done to comfort myself, even as a child. I’ll just lay here and stroke my long brown hair.