heart of a jealous man

Jealous (adj): covetous, showing extreme cupidity; painfully desirous of another's advantages;

I think as far as bad feelings go this one's pretty much up there. Asides from just being a painful thing to experience in and of itself, it's worse than others because it exposes someone's insecurities. If you think you want something someone else has got then that just makes clear to you that you don't have it. It causes your heart to ache. It makes you lose confidence in yourself. You wonder what that other person's got that you haven't, and even if it was clearly just a question pure luck, the human psyche is an interesting thing - it's always somehow gonna be able to find a way to attribute those advantages to shortfalls on your part. You get jealous and you start to think maybe you should have done something differently: maybe you should have gotten up earlier; perhaps you should have put on the blue shirt; maybe you should have studied harder; maybe you should have been taller, or practised more, or cut your hair when you had the chance. It's always things like this - things you think you should have done otherwise that would have led to you ending up in the stead of whomever you're jealous of.

These feelings creep up on you and they consume you; they take over your whole existence, to the point you cannot think of anything other than the person you're jealous of and the reason why. You start to feel smaller and smaller and less capable and weaker and all those things that mean you're inadequate as a person. You lose all your self esteem. And then you pick up a knife and you slash your wrists [ok, not really, only if you're one of those already-disturbed emo kids]. It's one of those things you don't think you'll ever get over, like when you get a tattoo in a dark alley down Kirinyaga Road where the hygiene isn't on the top five most important policies in the procedures manual and then you carry around that scar forever.

Anyway, I suppose even it ends, with time. It's like that weird writer says:

He stops at the window.

He stands.

Greyness. Silence.

A room.

He stands at the window.

And a voice says: Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes.

END