I Would Like To Know Where We're Going, Since It's Getting Kind of Dark

It is difficult to cope with growth.

This is not news nor a grand revelation to you, or anybody else with any shred of knowledge about how life works. It's a painful process, physically or mentally, to shed layers, to grow and become something different, to take on a new form, to be born again. It hurts, in the best and most tragic and masochistic way possible. You knew this. Intimately so.

It didn't make it any less painful.

But that was the whole point, no? Your training was supposed to hurt. It was supposed to push you, bend you, break you, melt your mind and fracture your consciousness until you came back stronger, goddammit. You were training to be a SOLDIER, and what is a SOLDIER? Better. Different in the best way possible. You knew this; very much so.

It didn't make it any less painful.

But that didn't, nay, shouldn't stop your gratitude. You were in a position of immense privilege; you were currently under the tutelage of the Sephiroth. It was a position that many would, literally or metaphorically, kill to gain. How could they not be drawn to such extreme measures? Every time you look at your master, you're also looking at the object of many dreamy-eyed children (and adults), those who stare into his admittedly mesmerizing eyes, the eternal depths that seemed to draw so many to him, praying that they, too, could become that strong, that smart, that efficient. A mere pipe dream for most, something so ineffable as to be eternally out of reach, was your reality. You had something far, far greater than most people wished to achieve, much less actually acquired, and you were no fool! You knew this.

It didn't make it any less painful.

But you took the pain willfully, graciously. Ready and poised to accept the lessons that came with it. You were ready, you were strong, you were capable, willing to change and bend and break and take whatever you had been given and become a SOLDIER, worthy of veneration and idolization. You had, by all means, what so many people wanted and you had, by all means, done everything right up until this point.

Yet, when you began formally training under Sephiroth, you had begun to learn that you had been doing everything wrong. Nay, correction - you had been doing some things right, but you still did most things wrong. Many things are wrong, yes, so many that they must be corrected this very instant: you must stand up straight and speak the right way and cast the right spells and keep your eyes in the proper places. While you were initially going to be trained as any other SOLDIER, Sephiroth, for reasons unknown, wanted you to be by his side as a second-in-command, ratcheting up the difficulty even further, making you even more wrong. You were very good as a SOLDIER, up until that point, but you needed to do more.

But, but, but. There's always a but.

-

Staring out at the stained-glass skyline, you felt a strange sensation of hollowness forming in your stomach, twisting into knots, slipping into your bloodstream, and pulsing throughout you. You did not know, nor did you understand, why. (As you had begun to train, a lot of things stopped making sense, and you began to get the sensation that you understood quite a lot less than you thought you did). The answers seemed elusive and vague, distant and hard to grasp at your fingertips, generating constant hunger for things that you could not identify. With the lack of identification, there was a constant internal monologue, trying to diagnose the source of your newfound malady - maybe just stressed out by all the training or maybe I'm just hungry or maybe I'm just lonely-

Well. Maybe.

It was something that you grappled with quite a bit, the newfound loneliness. It crept up on you at the most random times, a sudden shot directly to your heart, making sickness well up in your chest, a slow and creeping infection. Sephiroth had recently drilled into you that friendships were temporal at best and useless at worst, a concept that you were struggling quite a bit with. Part of you found it ridiculous and backward - how were you going to live with this sudden space where others once were? What is a man to do but fill the hole that he is born with, by nature, with more nature? What else to fill it with but the other humans, those equally as empty?