X.
Is it possible that some feasts, in time, may begin to consume the feasters?
All of us have come to think of our most preferred and coveted prisoner as a never-ending resource. A continuous banquet of light and shadow, joy and despair, love and hate. Of life itself. No matter how much we take, how deeply we drink of all the life within him, there is always more. He has never even come close to being emptied, though we have emptied many others among our charges before.
But is a steady diet of Sirius' heart too rich a delicacy for our own peculiar constitutions?
We have never before contemplated such uncertainties. Never before has there been any occasion to. Yet another new thing in our domain, then, where novelty itself has previously been only the vaguest and most tantalizing of rumors.
Ten years now we have dined on this most desirable of prisoners – the premium commodity in our prison larder of repasts. And in this decade of feasting on him, novel experiences have been available for our taking with gratifying regularity. We have greedily fed on the clarity of his passions, the exquisite depths of his sorrows, the searing brightness of his joys, the adamantine will of his constant resistance. We have become…fond of him. We have come to experience a sort of a bond. We, all of us, have come to expect to savor the rarest of novelties in every encounter.
We have come to expect. And, of late, we have come to wonder if expectation is truly that greatly removed from need.
And from a starting point of need, how far a journey would it then be to envy, or to discontent, or to an awareness of some…lack …within ourselves? We are not constituted to experience pain or pleasure or hope within ourselves; our way has always been, rather, to consume these delicacies where we find them in others.
But can it be that some more rarefied dishes might carry an additional freight of infection along with all their rewards? The hidden poison of self-awareness, perhaps?
Self itself is not an idea we are particularly familiar with, in truth. Identity has never before been a concept we would have applied to our own existence.
We will never be alive in the unique way that Sirius is. He is nothing like us. We are nothing like him.
But then…
What are we?
Nothing, our quick-tempered and ever-resistant pet would certainly say. Nothing at all.
Have we stuffed ourselves so full of him for so long - that we, in our turn, have ceased to exist as ourselves?
Has a ten year long feast of Sirius reduced us to nothing in the end?
And does it truly matter? Though there may be dangers; a certain toxic quality in all the life we've stolen from him to batten on ourselves, we can hardly turn away from the great allure of that shining life now, fatal to us though it may ultimately be.
It is Sirius, after all.
We have spent too many years at this feast together, we and our absorbing, endlessly persuasive guest.
It has been too long. We cannot resist him.
