Woulda' coulda' shoulda'

What good is learning when you want so badly to forget what you have learned? What point is there in this hellish field, where we learn only of that we cannot use, only of that we cannot stop, only of that we want to unlearn? What blessing is there in not just having the teeth of the Prisma so light against your throat, but studying those teeth carefully and surveying the sharpest among them should they decide to clamp down and tear your throat open?

The further I go, the less I want to know. I am supposedly at the 'front of my field', as Warden likes to say, but I get the sense when I speak to them that maybe they get it too. We have talked a few times about how they remember that feeling, but that over time it has faded. I envy them. I have dedicated my life to this study, and all it has given me is an infestation of nightmares and a knowledge of those things we were never meant to know, and of those things that I neither can nor desire to share outside of this organization.

With each step forward, I further want to abandon this path. Supposedly I am the light that illuminates the way through this treacherous and awful field of study, but I ask why it is that we want to illuminate it? Why do we cast a light into the depths we were not meant to survive, just to see the things that could lash out and reap us of everything in a moment's notice with no recourse?

I am told that we could use the data we gather to avert disaster and save lives, but I find we spend far too much time lingering upon those things we could scarcely 'avert'. My morbid curiosity has long since fled me, left in its place an inexorable dread, but not the organization at large, so it would seem.

What I wouldn't give to have never gazed through the Prisma. But, woulda' coulda' shoulda'. Too late now. I'm already neck-deep in this horror, and there's no way out, so down we go.

Don't join the I.C.A. It sucks.