A Split Personality

Declin­ing to indulge in the true opi­ate of the masses, I drifted into a lit­tle pipe dream of my own. Con­fronted by the angelic aspect of my shadow, was I split down the mid­dle as his sword came crash­ing down upon my head and cleaved me into two appar­ently iden­ti­cal clones of my orig­i­nal self. Left stand­ing there with a split per­son­al­ity, I quickly found out how dif­fer­ent were these two aspects of myself, when the reli­giously right side of me pro­claimed, as morally and polit­i­cally cor­rect, what the left side sought to over­throw as exclu­sion­ary. As either side stood there, call­ing the other a liar and a thief, I couldn’t help think­ing how right they both were, for the rich man on the right was just as much a thief as the one with noth­ing left to do but rob him of what really belonged to nei­ther one of them. And in spite of his great wealth, I real­ized the rich man was just as poor in spirit as the one left with­out much, mate­ri­ally. Beck­oned back to real­ity by our cabby’s sud­den announce­ment that it was time to go, I left this frag­ment of a fan­tasy, torn between my own desires for mate­r­ial things and those of the spirit.