thirty-ninety

the truth is that my ambiguous and pretentious nature was merely plastic that clung to my body, a makeshift suit in which to clothe what I was ashamed of. I lacked the audacity to make someone out of myself. My insides never meshed with anyone else’s. And, really, that’s okay. I’m very much in love with life, and, ultimately, I’m two-parts perplexed as to why I so often yearn for death to pacify me and make me null. I often have, at the pinnacle of my emotions, felt like I am too much like a doe; In which I am concerned too often about the lives of others for I am ultimately apathetic about my own. My life has often felt like a very monotonous piece of film. I tried to break the foliage surrounding the inside of my chest, but, really, I don’t mind it being there. And, really, watching my father die was truly the only time I feel like I’ve ever been alive. I mean that in a visceral way, in which to convey that my existence has never felt very palpable. Every being I have had the privilege to meet, I have felt their atoms dance, rekindle around others with vivacity, with a force of luminosity that I have grown to envy; I was merely limbs, a dead tree that housed others in its arms or in the roots of my body. I have watched myself, over the course of nearly two decades, become usurped by other parts of what was designed to shelter me, watched the negligence of my hands light my stomach on fire and regurgitate the remainder onto things that did not deserve the conflagration. Many days, I have found myself failing to orchestrate a smile in accordance to another’s feats. If God was not an absentee mother, a tale concocted by those who granted their wares the ability to direct the lives of others, I would have been granted respite by now, a bird with its limbs crushed, its eyes kicked in. I would have been the bird with the hollow chest: “Look on, for I am empty. I have flowers to bear, but they produce no nectar! Tell me, what bees, what mad men, would land inside my chest?”