It’s Not Your Fault

Story by Marthell on SoFurry

, , , , , , ,

A short story about you and why you’re not to blame for this, or for anything at all.

Content warning: bigotry and hateful language.


You are a vessel for rhetoric and culture and genetics. You are, ultimately, what is made of you. That means it's not your fault that you're intolerant of other cultures, for that you can blame your parents for their emotional distance, or for passing down their politics, or for being poor. You can blame your teachers for seeing you struggle and reacting by pushing you aside rather than reaching out, or the other students for bullying you, or your big brother who once called you a faggot, or these days FOX news, X, and a whole slurry of grifter manosphere influencers. Hell, blame the entire media pipeline aimed squarely at people just like you: the over-represented, under-educated, underprivileged and angry. And of course you're angry, you'd be crazy not to be! I mean, have you seen the state of this planet? It's sick. You believe it when you're told by rich men with well-manicured fur and too much time on their paws that the world's ailments stem from immigration, from a loss of family values, from woke culture gone mad. It's not your problem if you vote for a party that wants to hurt people who are different to you, you've been lied to all your life, neglected, hurt. You heard a male, sunglass-wearing rat with a bald patch say that the way to get what you want (something you've never had) is to grab it by the balls and take it. You heard pumping iron and eating more meat and calling women bitches will make you more powerful, more popular, more attractive. You heard your country was the best in the world and that all these institutions that have failed you have done so because we don't love our country enough. It's not your fault: you love your country, you know it's the best and most important on the planet. It's the fault of those other people: the weirdos, the ones who don't love this country like you do, the ones who don't deserve a voice at all because they aren't the decision makers like your kind are, we're talking about the not-normals, the unmarried women, the gays, the animals from far away lands, especially the ones who pray to a different god than you. These ideas have been fed to you so many times that you had no choice but to believe them, of course it's not your fault if you've grown hateful and cold. Sometimes you wonder if things didn't have to end up this way. Not that you care, you don't care about shit, but... You wonder sometimes, you know? Sure, you've got followers stacking up on your socials now, you pick up and fuck dumb bitches weekly, you're out there on your grind, you're making money, a living at least... Yeah, and if those at the top are making a million every time you make a dollar, well, that's the system's fault. But, fuck blaming capitalism, that's for lazy-ass, bitch-baby snowflakes, it's the damn Government's fault, it's the fucking taxman. And if your man is in office, well, it's those sissies who were in before him who fucked the system up. Or it's because of those tigers and orangutans who keep shipping themselves in, or those border hopping jaguars from down south. But, sometimes you lie awake at night and your mind is a maelstrom and you're right back there again. You were sixteen, you only had one friend, a collie with a cow lick and a crooked smile. One time, on a cold Saturday evening in February, in the local park, sharing a cigarette, you both sat on a fallen trunk in a clearing between a scattering of tall trees. Their leaves rustled gently in the breeze but the sound wasn't enough to drown our your racing thoughts, so you said: it's getting chilly. He laughed and wrapped his arms and tail around you, said: is this any better? Even though it felt good you pushed him away. You have been told it is a weakness to let anyone in, to let anyone get too close. So you laughed and told him that anyone who has their arms around you better have your meat deep inside them too, so unless he wanted to strip off he should cut it out. You're getting angry, now, remembering all of this, didn't you block it out? Didn't you forget all about how his laugh petered off and in the quiet that followed he looked at you, just so. Or when, despite all of your bravado and all of his, he shuffled up against you, clasped your paw in his. You don't believe any of this. As far as you're concerned, none of it ever happened. You made a conscious decision to label that night as a false memory but, somewhere in the depths of the prison you call a heart, you know it happened. You know it did. You know, when he kissed your cheek, that you wanted to melt into him and re-solidify as someone new. You know that would have been the right thing to do, that maybe if you did you wouldn't be so angry all the time. Not sad, never said, because whenever you might feel sad instead you only get angrier. And you lash out at yourself, yes, but mostly you lash out at those below you: the weak, the ones who make being a straight pure-bred American man so difficult these days, there's plenty of them. You didn't melt into him, no. You almost did, but you didn't. You turned to him, he thought you were going to kiss him, but instead you right hooked his jaw, sent him reeling, called him a fucking faggot, kicked him in the balls and ran home crying. That was the last time you had a real friend. That was the last time you let yourself cry. You make TikToks now, showing off your muscles, telling men to be men, making fun of celebrity queers. Sometimes, in the dead of night, you know you're living a lie. Sometimes you come to consciousness with bloody knuckles or slit wrists that you remember/don't remember, remember/do not remember, causing. You block it out every time. When was the last time you weren't angry? Even when you're fucking, you're angry. It's always a drunk bitch, or a quiet bitch, or a head-empty no-thoughts bitch you found on an app or deep into drinks and music. It's never more than a one night thing, you decided that was your choice (and, to be fair, you don't even enjoy the sex) but sometimes it occurs to you that none of these sluts have ever actually tried to hit you up again. You decided you needed a bigger dick and bought some dodgy pills online, they didn't do anything but make you horny. You spent the entire day jerking off. The last meat-beating of the evening was to a gay orgy video on PawHub, five canines straight up pounding it for forty minutes. You barely made it three. Afterwards you had what other people would call a panic attack, you would call it a rage. You tore shit up, punched walls, filed another memory away into the vault. It was the pills' fault; it's all these woke companies making estrogen-infused faggot pills to turn us all into limp-wristed pansy cucks. You threw them out. You found yourself with bloody knuckles and matted fur around your eyes mapping the paths of tears that you know for a fact you did not cry, because you don't cry. And you know it's not your fault, it's never your fault. Everyone around you - all your life - has treated you like shit, shit, shit. They never exposed you to love, they poisoned your mind again and again. None of this is your fault. You are a vessel for rhetoric and culture and genetics. You are, ultimately, what is made of you. And you're gonna make your fuck up-parents; the bullshit, lefty, pedo-elite funded educational institutions; the backwards, babbling, 'I no speak English' creatures from faraway lands; the high-heel wearing, makeup-caked, airhead bimbo bitches who pretend they know what power is and the sissy, tree-hugging, limp-wrist, butt-humping faggot cucks of the world pay for it. It's their fucking fault you're so damn angry all the time, it's their fucking fault you're so (damn it...) sad. You have never had control over the course of your life and you never will.

All that said, if you were back there in that clearing with him, your friend, that collie, his cow lick, his crooked smile, you would kiss him. You would cry against his chest, in his arms and let it all out(and there is and was so much to let out). You would take a knife to the strings above your head and cut loose the puppeteer. You don't know if you would be any happier, but you know you wouldn't be so angry. And while you'd still be what was made of you, you'd be yourself too. You have been failed over and over your whole life, and while what you have become is hateful and insular and destructive, what else could be expected of you? You have been systematically and repeatedly let down by the institutions and individuals meant to care for you, so it can be understood why - when it mattered most - you failed yourself, too. But, you did fail yourself. It's not your fault, but it is your fault. It's not your fault, but it is your fault. It's not your fault, but it is your fault. So you grit your teeth and spend another decade making the world a more miserable place before your mangled body is retrieved from the wreckage of your car on a cold Saturday evening in February. Blood samples confirmed that there were no drugs in your system at time of death. They blamed weather conditions, but the truth was far simpler: you had at long last made a course correction of your own.

They said it was a tragic accident. They said nobody is to blame.