Just read the guidelines carefully, girl. Just read the wise lines, just read the details.
What if, sir, what if I say I can’t even process your guidelines, what if I can’t swallow your plastic happiness, what if I just choke with laughter every time I even try to chew. What if your guide to happiness just makes me want to revolt.
Your wise words just make me want to retreat. When your readymade recipe is shoved into my face, sir, I just feel like I want to return to my mum’s womb. Fight or flight – I really can’t choose. What I won’t choose though is to follow that ‘path of courage’, the road that – according to you, sir – is less travelled by. Go on and tell me that the youth is wasted on the young, go on and tell me that I should seize the day, that I should live life to the fullest. And then I can happily tell you that your ‘path of courage’ just lacks the originality it advocates.
How can you tell me to head north or south, east or west, how can you tell if I should choose right or left, when I can only know right from wrong once I’ve felt the sting of failure in my own skin? Once I have felt enough to comfortably define victory and defeat?
The defeated will always warn with tales of epic crashes, conspiracies of that giant spider web ready to trap us all into a life of everlasting, torturously repetitive loss. The ‘victorious’, on the other hand, will rush to stick congratulatory badges on themselves, to quote and cite themselves as if they are already the proven heroes of a time that’s not over yet, of a time that is still ticking away, ticking, ticking, ticking away for a younger generation that submerges itself into the pursuit of certain dangerous type of nothingness. Of a type of nothingness that likes to disguise itself as happiness. The ‘victorious’ will pave the way for us, only because they have trained themselves to be too confident to admit that they get nightmares too, that they fear the day their time is drained like blood from body and soul.
The ‘victorious’ forget that we must all fight in different ways, that in the end we all find different ways to push through hurdles, before we return behind the white starting line to prepare for the end. Before we prepare to finally form our answers. Or simply before we sign out with a smile and no answers on our blank sheet at all.
I don’t know if I should search for answers anymore.
If I should make the effort to scroll.
To scroll down the pages, to switch between screens, fonts, faces, lips moving fast, moving faster, spouting out truths so spoken that they can’t scratch open those wounds that were stitched in manic efforts to save whatever sanity I had left from chasing those who sometimes glorify ‘adventure’ and sometimes glorify ‘inner peace’. I am tired of analysing the audiovisual information that I have surrounded myself with.
The devil is in the details, baby, and I just can’t analyse anymore. I just can’t zoom into the details anymore.
I just can’t scan the books, process rock solid words until they are fluid with meaning, until I can say I am ready to copy into my book. Paste, a messy representation of somebody else’s life, ready to be served. Ready to be posted.
By me. To me.
Post, screen shot, paste. Observe, adapt, paste. Clean page, blank words that are detached from a reality so smooth yet so rough on the margins, so eloquently spoken yet so colloquially misused. How can the real version of life be matched to my unreliable, pseudo-scientific, over-simplified version of happiness, to my – mostly originally – cloned version of it.
No battery left, quickly girl, search for a plug so you can clone the process of copying. Something in the details just doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think I can copy and paste what is sold as experience but is really unwritten future, memories so well presented in packages yet still in foetal form. I don’t think I can continue sticking to the habit of collecting cut-outs of wise words, cut-outs of images, trips, goals, the secret envy that I was unwillingly fed. I don’ think I will be sticking to the habit of gluing words that are not true to my heart on my yet unstained future wall. I don’t think I will build my future – or even assess my past- based – primarily- on foreign sets of eyes, foreign senses, foreign advice.
It’s all but foreign energy after all. And I got no battery left to hold onto the exhilarating anxiety of fearing what is yet to come. Of trying so passionately to prevent impending disaster that I cannot help but be distraught.
I ain’t got the energy, baby. I ain’t got the time to stop the clock, to rechannel my life so I can avoid your mistakes sir (not mine), your scratches sir (not mine), your self-triggered fears sir (not mine), your lost life sir (not mine). I ain’t foolish enough to give away my life while I consume the blogs, the magazines, the expert information, the common sense, the new scientific research, the old fables… While I consume unfounded evidence on how to live my life (not yours).
I don’t know the simple words to describe how it feels to be fooled but… They have been feeding us their conception of happiness, you know? They have been feeding us the reheated advice that they themselves have left in the fridge . And who cares really if in another life they would have eaten it.
Who cares if they are coming to our rescue, if they say that the intentions of the ‘experienced’ are always intentions of the good.
I say they are pulling the strings, both defeated and ‘victorious’ alike, I say they are mostly pulling on opposite ends, I say they are pulling us apart.
And the devil who deals with the details just can’t deal with their inconsistencies, just can’t deal with their insecurities anymore. Who is going to pick up the leftovers now for a life not lived as it should? The devil proudly declares ‘Not me’.
PS: Music to accompany the devil’s thoughts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrlNN-RsJUc
Rational Artist 