The weight of the world
Sometimes it is mind boggling how heavy it is; the world. The weight of this ball of spinning entropy on my shoulders makes a heavy purse seem like a paper gown compared to the silk and diamonds strapped to my chest, the jewels of real life.
Carrying around the expectations, the hopes and failures, the promises to and promises broken, the forgotten dreams and the long remembered slights; carrying this around is giving me a hernia, it's giving me ulcers, it's giving me tennis elbow, and it's giving me an appreciation of every other human soul on this planet. It's showing me where the line is, between people I will fight for, and those i would gladly slaughter in their beds. Eye contact engaged, and blood warm, i would remove these pests and these lazy fucks from my life, from the world. If only we acted like that - outside of books and table top games.
But we don't, we nod to them on the street, shake their hand at the meeting table, and thank them for their shitty comments on the way out the door. We fake it till we sort of make it, and count it good enough. We brush it like dirt off our shoulders, and shake what the good lord and our mamas gave us. We apologize for their lack of understanding, and our overly extended effort to explain.
It hurts sometimes, how deeply these imagines slights, and real ones, it hurts how deeply they cut, how sharp the knives, how ragged the tears in flesh - it hurts to pull on a fresh shirt and pretend the blood seeping through is just a surge in hormones, in natural bleeding, in a healthy cycle. It's easier to acknowledge one injury, regular and strong, that we all know about. It's easier to say I'm sorry it must be me.
It's easier to die alone, in a bed you made yourself, than to trust anyone else to help you find the corners of the fitted sheets. Even finding them once, doesn't mean that they will ever find their way back to you.
So we shrug it off, tug it off, and play it off like a trip on the corner that Willy Wonka would be proud of, tumbling in circles down the street in an attempt to use absurdity to cover up the fear of failure, of stumbling, or being human. Of being in the throws of a slow death that we all must suffer. But to talk about would be too much.
It's heavy, this weight. This existential weight of why do i do it to myself day in and out. Why do i make as much pain for myself as possible in the shortest time. Do i do it just to feel alive? I must. Because the weight is killing me slowly.
A pile of stones, and I am the tribunal, I am the jury, I am the accuser.
I am my own worst nightmare. Living, breathing, come to life, and full of bleeding nerve ends. But it's fine. It's normal. It's part of the human experience. It's a monthly tide, the moon in my veins. It's the way it works, for half of us at least. In a world we all have to live in.
The weight of the world, it is heavy when your fingers are slick with your own blood, with your own mortality, in a life that was promised to be unending for the good ones.
I've never been one of the good ones.
