Yours Truly, Insecurity

A Poem by AntCity

I shove the facts of my life at him, and I convince myself that I'm making progress. If I tell him everything, I won't be hiding anything, including myself, right? Every few seconds I reanalyze the validity of my thoughts. I can't share them, they aren't perfect yet. So here are the facts: I work, I see a friend or two, I come home, I inhale something or another, I ingest the former or the latter, I absorb a few of the same, then I have trouble sleeping and pointing this out makes me feel stagnant. To give myself a healthy amount of criticism, I wonder if I'm using him to fill this particular void, that of the need for progression in my life. So a logical part of me advises, "let yourself indulge in the meaningful parts of whatever pace ensues without your control" and an illogical part of me admonishes, "make yourself insignificant so you don't f**k it up. In fact, you caring so much about f*****g it up is wrong of you because it implies you need this to work out, and is that not the real root of insecurity? It's destructive to put that kind of pressure on him or the relationship, you'll be expecting too much, too fast, can't you see that? You're going to focus too much on the success of the relationship instead of on him, you should just slowly fossilize, hold onto every detail but give them the facts. Hold inside of yourself, behind an exterior gilded in ignorant reverence and light vegetation, all of the imprints on your insides that you hold precious not because you value them but because you're the only one who will be able to see value in them. Be greedy with yourself because if someone cracked you open, chiseled at your muscles, tense from desensitization to stress, and your joints, gnarled from Sisyphean popping and pushing and pressing and pushing and punishing - they wouldn't have the capacity to process what's there. It's not their fault, really, they simply weren't born with the right chemoreceptors; they're actually missing the tastebuds to which your flavor appeals, so save us all the trouble and do the Pavlovian thing: pick up a trick or two that gets them to drool some other way. Chime the bell as many times as you can and watch them show up to an empty bowl, prove to yourself that what's easy for you is enough to keep them satisfied. What's more economically savvy than dogs you make hungry without having to feed? What's more ingenious than training them to come to you without promise of satisfaction? What's more god complex than rerouting their digestive systems and associated nerves so you can control when they're hungry, when that hunger is satisfied, and then analyze the s**t you've provided so much oversight in the making of? Is Pavlov God or was he just more aware than us; was he kept up every night with visions of humanity as one layer of an onion closer to superficiality, just thinner, and a bit more transparent, than the last. Did he see our ailments as nothing more than experiments of beings in the layers beneath us? Are these the layers of reality we label as hells without wanting to acknowledge their existence? The more you indulge in experiments, the closer you are to the hell beneath the one we're already in, until you earn your place as far down as you can go and become as many demons as you can become. Not to worry, though - in each layer you leave behind, a version of you will remain that will have slowly fossilized, cemented with every detail of you, lined with every fact, gilded in ignorant reverence and light vegetation..."