The Con Man

Those with a lot of confidence get little hate. Their mercurial mindset is what sets them apart from the rest of us, building atop their mistakes instead of drowning in them. Once the dust settles and the sun sets, the con men go to work on their next excavation. For them, this world has a lot of resources to take with little to no karmic consequence.

Lives are treated as levels, their strength replacing vulnerability with each heart they decide to take, break, and leave scattered; they know this only puts them ahead in this game called life. Con men are simply products of their condescending environment; confident and cocky, they love waking up at the crack of dawn just to disturb our dreams with the palpable notion that as soon as the sun awakes, as does he. What signifies a “grind” to them grinds my now groggy gears.

He is better at not feeling anything at all, which I have grown to be very envious of during moments of embarrassment and fear. What is most frightening is their ability to look through their naive victims’ faces though surrounded by the world they had built together under the contract of forever. For them, it is not cruel to be kind, but weak.

I love con men because they are invincible to the little upsets in life, knowing that what simply is was only a blip in the grand scheme of things. I wish I had not given them access to my dreams, each now seeming so stupid to believe could be. I wish I was a con man so I could stop fantasizing make-believe. I wish I could be a con man so I could never feel the burn of their meticulous normalcy. I wish I was a con man so I could live a life without real connection and push away any painstaking realization that I had been beaten.

I wish I was a con man to live my life as one big trick. If the trick to being a con man is to deceive, why do we believe in their honest devotion to being able to love us as more than an idea, to love ourselves for who we are?