If you hate me, please punch me in the face.

If you have compassion, do not be lukewarm in your sentiments. Deal the coup de grâce. For the heaviest blow you can deal is not corporeal, but an ethereal indifference—a vagueness that leaves me groundless in a liminal space where the oxygen is thin, the tears run dry, the blood runs thick.

Please be forthright in your indifference

Allow me to bastardize micro-aggressions into a minority group of one. Kill me not with your guns, but by holding fun house mirrors in front of your face. Sartre proposes that the self cannot know itself without the other reflecting its image—so what does it mean that all that I see is a creation of my own perception? Would it not be better to escape the room ignorant than remain with these empty promises of redemption? You wage the most effective war by turning away as my hands morph into daggers, effectively posing an ultimatum of straight backs.

What is the purpose of civility, but to place a veneer of plastic on the polished shells we encase ourselves within? As a proper citizen, we will shake hands with smiles stapled to our faces; the least cynical must search in our dead eyes to ascertain the truth to our silence.

If the stream of apologies and effusive sentiments are not sufficient to make you stir, then shall I spit cobwebs at you until I capture that one moment of anger? Fill the void of my self-concepts with your disgust and allow me to walk away whole, decorated in certainty. Do me the favor of letting me know that I am horrible, atrocious, a doomed failure.

What would it take to make your stiff upper lip tremble? We wait until a tragedy unfolds on stage before we let bitterness seep into our muscles and sinews. Stoicism has become the preferred practice of the greater good, until a resolution is reached in this indefinite process.

Do not be neutral, do not be kind, do not be civil. Be savage—bare your teeth and pull out the dagger beneath your coat. Confess your verdict. Lay me out on the stands and pelt me with garbage. Rage until you are hoarse, rage until your fist flies, rage until nothing remains.

You’re the arbiter that kills by never giving a judgment. Better to roast in purgatory than freeze in the darkest pit of hell—but I am drowning in the indeterminate depth of “I”.

I cannot open myself up to the indifference of the world, gentle as it may be. I refuse to live in sterility, breathing in faint hints of disdain between whitewashed walls of civility and thin amity. Do not dislike, but hate—burn down these walls and let your shrill warning sound through the halls. And amid these ruins, I will answer with an embrace of gratitude.

Thank you for letting me know.