the weight worth falling for. anke one-shots

I feel angry; I feel everything.

I can’t work the thoughts into real, tangible words. They stick to my head, so stubborn.

I feel uncomfortable.

Like crossing and uncrossing legs, clenching fists into tiny balls of annoyance. You want to understand a world that is a thousand years ahead of you.

I feel sad, but it’s not heavy.

I wanted more from my life. Nothing ever goes as planned, and I hate it I hate it I hate it, screaming like a petulant child that it isn’t fair, that I want to go home, that I want to fast forward through all the hardships of present tense, with threats of a future cut short at the end of a rope. Your friends are gone – that one friendship group you thought you’d stick by your whole life – and everything seems too hard. You want a reset button, but you don’t even know if that’s the answer. And you’re so frustrated with your own tears because you know you’re only upset that you have to do more, try harder, be better than you were willing to be. Reminders that this isn’t a bad thing, but it’s hard to listen, and there’s that anger, sadness, discomfort, betrayal, ignorance. Twisting into a big ball of messiness. Fuzzy thoughts, like someone’s erased half of the world and expected you to draw in the missing pieces. Only you’re not an artist, and you have no hands.

But you should never feel useless. You are so much more than that, so far from those harsh words.

I’m learning that the world only cares for the ones who roll up their sleeves and scrunch up their noses at anything that isn’t their own self-assertion. I’m a fragile soul, where that doesn’t sit right. And so, a lesson, for we don’t have a choice. We aren’t born with bruised self-esteem, but to be vulnerable and small is something that’s always been in our blood and bones. It’s a collective wound.

They want to stitch the holes back up. But I can’t breathe with needles in my chest.

I want to believe in more than this manufactured cheeriness. Something more than cleaning surfaces but not opening drawers. A dream of big bright white flashes. The world is so much more than looking back in order to look forwards.

Held, there. A memory. Of a golden hour, only its grey and green. Birdsong and marmalade jam. Mama holding my hand tight. Coiled around the base of an oak tree, oscillating between the sun and the shade. Clover moss, aching hearts.

It’s a circle or a cycle, but they never existed. So why can I never be free?

These windows are for show. There’s nothing worth seeing beyond black-out panels. I see dragon eyes in the darkness – gemstones, maybe one day I’ll become more than a fairytale monster.

I resolve to a trap; it’s a circle, after all.

It’s 1am somewhere in my corner of the world. Freezing, to the bone, with the surrounds of a quiet night. Contraband books stuffed under mattresses, “self-deception remains the most difficult deception”.

I want to feel something. Something that makes sense. But it’s 1am, and I’m falling asleep with my toes dipped into the shallows of eleutheromania. Blooming gloriously for a self.

So it goes.

evyenia