I have decided to betray someone. The thought comes like a kind of revelation. I don't know who I want to betray; in fact, it isn't really relevant. What I do know, though, is that for some time now I have been turning this question over in my mind, sure in the knowledge that whatever I finally decide must change my life forever. Will I betray a trust, or not?

You might well ask why I should want to betray anyone. A fair question, and the answer is, I don't. I know how much it would hurt me, but it's for just that reason that I feel tempted to do so. I want to free myself from something within which I seem to have got ensnared. It's a kind of general goodwill, but something less than that - a kind of quietism. I applaud whatever goes on in the world, just for a quiet life. It doesn't matter to me if it's happy or sad, kind or cruel; I always just take the side of the majority - not because I feel the majority needs another to swell its ranks - but because this way nobody notices me at all.

But to betray someone would turn all that on its head. Suddenly life stops acting the way he expects. A pillar of his convictions is removed - he finds his trust in me mistaken. Consequently, his world changes, and because it changes as a result of something I have done, my own world must change too.

It's only as I search around for someone to betray that I realise my mistake. Because I have never involved myself in anything, there has never been any reason to confide in me. If confidences could be symbolised as shadows, then trust itself is a kind of conspiratorial darkness, where secrets can only be shared in gloomy seclusion. But because I have always pandered to the lowest common denominator of a friendship, there is a kind of lightness, an insubstantiality about me which could never conceal anything. There is no one to betray, and even now the world seems to be crumbling about me in its own translucency, as though there were only light without objects to block or break its general illumination. As though there were only light in this world - light without forms.