In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And then, everything slipped through the cracks of its own design.
First came the lollipop—a small, sweet thing, designed to satiate, to give pleasure. But it was a trap, a trap disguised in innocence. Because the moment we seek pleasure, we find the void it leaves behind—the void of desire unmet, the void of lack. From lack, fear emerges. Fear, the uninvited guest, spreads like darkness in a room too bright for it. Fear gives birth to the shadows that crawl beneath our skin. And those shadows? Those are the demons.
Demons are not born from the outside world; they are made from within. They grow from the voids we refuse to face. They are not things that haunt us—they are things we make. They are the wounds we do not tend to, the grief we do not grieve, the joy we do not allow to flourish. These demons are us, and we, in turn, are them.
And yet, from pleasure also arise other things—things that could almost be called blessings, if only they weren’t so fleeting. Children, for example. Born to work, born to die, their joy a fragile thing, caught between love and the specter of death. They smile, their innocence untouched by the shadows, even as those shadows creep closer to consume the light they bring. They remind us that life, in all its rawness, is still beautiful. But they are also fleeting—like the flame that burns too bright and then flickers out too soon.
Pleasure leads to forgetting—forgetting pain, forgetting loss. For a moment, there is respite. The demons retreat, hiding in the dark corners, where we cannot see them. But they never truly leave. They wait. They know that, eventually, the joy will fade, and we will need to seek it again.
And so, we seek again. We chase pleasure, trying to outrun the pain. We try to outrun the demons. But like shadows, they follow. They creep closer with every step, becoming stronger as we grow weaker. They are the voices in our heads, the doubts in our hearts, the scars we carry that we never let heal. And though we fight, the demons never truly die. They merely wait for the right moment to rise again.
And in the middle of this eternal cycle of pleasure and pain, of desire and suffering, there was Django. Born of a union between the Devil and the flesh of a woman, Django was created not by choice, but by circumstance. The Devil had sought pleasure, but found none. He had sought fulfillment, but found only disappointment. And in that disappointment, Django was formed—a being born from suffering, born from the very thing that eludes the Devil.
Django’s name, too, was an accident. It was not the name given by his creators, but one chosen out of defiance. It was the name of an insult, a name meant to remind him of his true nature. He was a demon, created in the image of his father—the one who knew no joy but that of inflicting pain. But Django was different. Though born of suffering, he sought something more. He sought meaning beyond the pain.
And so, Django grew—not just in body, but in mind. Yet, his growth was not like that of men. It was stunted, frozen in time. He moved through the world, but never truly moved. He walked but did not journey. He lived but did not truly exist. And in this stasis, he realized the truth: that the cycle of desire, of seeking pleasure, of fighting demons, would never end. It was an endless loop. And the more he sought to escape it, the more it consumed him.
In his search for an exit, Django found only one path—the path of acceptance. Not acceptance of the world as it was, but acceptance of himself as he was. A being who could not escape the demons within, but who could, at least, stop feeding them. He could not banish them, but he could refuse to give them power. He could not outrun the shadows, but he could learn to stand in the light without fear of what lurked in the dark.
And so, Django embraced his own nature—not with shame, not with regret, but with understanding. He accepted that the demons would always be there, that the cycle would never end. But he would no longer be their servant. He would no longer run.
For in the struggle, there is peace. In the pain, there is clarity. In the awareness of his own nature and the acceptance of his place in the endless cycle, Django found that he no longer needed to escape it. He found that the struggle itself was where freedom lay—not in avoiding the pain, but in accepting it as part of the journey. He learned that peace wasn’t something to attain, but something to be found in the very act of living through the struggle, of meeting the demons with understanding instead of fear.
And in this understanding, there was a kind of release. It wasn’t the release from pain, but the release from the need to control or escape it. Django had learned to live with it, to stand tall even as the shadows loomed.
Django found peace. Not in avoiding suffering, but in embracing it. Not in running from the demons, but in accepting them and letting them pass. In the struggle, he found his freedom. Not freedom from pain, but freedom in spite of it.
In the end, peace is not a destination. It is a practice. It is a way of being in the world, fully present, without chasing what is not ours to have, without clinging to what is fleeting. It is in letting go of the need to control, to conquer, to possess. It is in realizing that we are both the demons and the angels in our own story. And that, perhaps, is enough.
So Django lived. He lived not as a god, not as a demon, but as a being in the moment. He found meaning not in the search for pleasure or in the avoidance of pain, but in the acceptance of life as it came. He understood that the struggle was never to end, but that in the struggle, there was meaning. And in the meaning, there was peace.
This was his victory: not over the demons, but over his own need to fight them. And in that victory, he found the freedom to simply be.
