Forced Gratitude
I'll never understand what makes us so... broken. Needing a fix. I forget, in all my inconvenience, that having groceries is not guaranteed. Yet I continue to find complaint. I could have fresh produce all day, every day, wherever I go. Instead I crave a package. I read the label, "natural flavors." Artificial sweetness.
All of this, given, has tuned us into parasites. We, most of all, have lost the sense of graciousness.
I made a life exactly how I wanted, and I still don't like it. Where does desire come from? Where do decisions? That's the me I search for. I thought, all this time, that contentment was sloth--a sin. I was convinced I needed tension: emotional wreckage, insurmountable challenges. I need depth. Dig. Drown. Sink my bottom.
Why am I here? I find the next answer every year. Am I...? To see, feel, taste love? Respond to sensation. Or is this a test of freedom: to follow, defy. Search to never find.
Another excuse: not enough of me to do everything. Who do I choose? It always used to be you, until my soul tortured me for avoiding the truth. Honestly… it’s not that I care about you so very too much, I just don’t know how to care for myself.
I’ll never know enough to know anything. For certainty. Some parts of life are not to be planned. That’s when you start living, planting seeds for the subconscious to do. Noticing. Believing outside the mind.
I don’t remember much, least of all a childhood. I know, from others, that I had one. A good one. There are pictures to prove it, an authentic smile. Happiness. If only that could be captured without it spoiling in our memory jars.
Age may be the forced attention to subtleties. Life its own force. And as it, impossible to observe. If you ever meet yourself, I'll be there too.
When I started remembering, the memory said:
I am a split person, an abstraction, testing imperfect evidence. Thinking and doing are separate, like me, until they contaminate each other, like me.
I used to consider every action as the tip of a domino on the tumble to my fate. The weight of cosmic importance sat on my shoulders, every decision a potential misstep on my stumble to irrevocable failure. So i attacked life, flapping my butterfly wings, hoping they would evolve ethereal and take me to where I want, angelic. I had forgotten, desire is direction, not destination. My mind was born to fly, my feet confused. somewhere in between, the power of walking lost its influence.
I’m better at running anyways. if I can’t fly I’ll just have to whirl these limbs into spindles. I need speed to find enough proof that I’m alive.
Maybe someday all that spinning will collect enough evidence for me to weave this life into a person. One confident in existence. Made by tugging at the fraying of everyone else’s reality.
Freedom, we call this. Free to explore, achieve, think. Freethinkers, imprisoned by themselves in the mind. An idea, captured.
Free time doesn't feel so free when every activity feels like an obligation. We created this world, based on transaction. Rewrote picture stories to warp the gift with silk. This is love: go earn it.
