The Stories We Tell / 006

A sense of aggression burns deep. You’re unsure where from or directed at whom.

A sense of entrapment, wanting to break the boundaries, the confines. Then a realization that there are no confines but the ones you placed around yourself.

You want to fight something but there’s nothing there to fight. You want to blow things up just for the pleasure of watching the flames eat them. Relationships, lovers, friends, family.

You want to dip the fountain pen of life deep into your skin and etch the words and feelings from inside your head straight into the unblemished surface.

The blood and pain only serving to further validate the “it” you fight.

You hurl your lungs out the window at 90mph, cutting corners like a thrill seeking missle — You want to FEEL.

Feel the music, the wind in your hair, the bass beats drowning out all semblance of organized thought and leaving room only for pure expression.

You want to relate and feel the pains, sorrows, highs and lows of those that came before you and those that will come after.

You crave the validation of others, while refusing to acknowledge your ingrained narcissism. You loathe yourself, constantly berating your every negative move and tendency — inflating and magnifying your inadequacies till they form the backbone of your personhood.

Judgement seeping out of every pore in your body, a warm and sticky maple syrup.

Crushed between this need to feel and yearning to be felt exists the true human that you are, who is ceaselessly beat into submission depending, quite truly, on which shoulder your devil should choose to perch.

The only thing that matters at the end of the day is the voice of this devil, for, taken over a lifetime, this, becomes the story you tell.

And what is culture, what is civilization, if not a compounded and expanding set of stories. Yours. Mine. Ours.

This world is a chapter book. And our lives together — the stories we tell.