A Permanent State of Flux

Help! I cried to myself, and I held my mouth shut to stop my stomach leaping out of it and closed my eyes tightly to stop the tears from bursting forth and knotted my morose brow into a stern and defiant frown. But why did I do all this? Why did I stifle my own cry for help? As though my 'better' judgement had kidnapped my natural soul and clamped a rough hand over its mouth to prevent it calling out for freedom. Was it fear of rejection? After all, people cry out for help all the time: I am no different. But there was something else. Perhaps I did not wish to disappoint. I'm a hero, not a common civilian who cannot bear the burden of life, but a hero. I love this idea of myself more than myself, and so it was this idea I have to maintain in the mind of others. Yet clamping and paralysing myself into submission rendered me just as useless as everyone else.

And there I had it: It was not life that bewildered and crushed me, it was myself. It was not life that had tied me up with thousands of ropes, tugging violently in different directions, it was me. It was all me. I felt as though I had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia: all this time I had been blaming a figment of my imagination for harming me, when it was myself all along. Ha! To have summated that Life is but an imaginary friend, a scape goat. The ground seemed to give way beneath me. My face was wrenched downwards as though unusually predisposed to the Earth's gravity. And lo, the tears were pulled from my eyes and gathered on my eyelashes like the morning dew on a spider's web. And my 'stern' frown unravelled to reveal a wide, vulnerable brow that opened up to the sky. A symphony of birds erupted into the bright grey expanse and as they spread into every corner I realized they were in my stomach too and there were no corners, no limits, to this fluttering feeling of elation. How wonderful it all was! My heart reached out to them and yearned to grasp the beauty, to taste its deliciousness.

But the desire to contain beauty can never be satisfied, and I made my way home.