Day 96 Ruminating And Writing

Freak

The neighborhood children ran around me, shouting, “Freak, freak!”

All they see is my bald head, my lack of eyebrows, and my towering figure. At first, they were scared. They sniffed around me to see if I was dangerous. When they deemed me a gentle, freak giant who never said a word back, they started their name-calling, cycling around me with their bikes.

The adult thought of me as half-witted. They said nothing to their children. They barely greeted me as I walked by. I was not welcomed. I walked amongst them for a year, watching their children grow. I heard their sobs and sorrows. I listened to their fears and desires. They spoke freely around me. They thought I couldn’t understand.

Human lives are so short. It is no wonder they fear so many things that my kind sees as part of existence. I’m what humans would call an ambassador to Earth. I have no agencies or leaders with whom I converse. I’m here to witness the human race and negotiate on their behalf with my people about whether humans should be eradicated. These people here in the neighborhood would be happy to hear that I’m impartial and immune to their juvenile slander. What will sway more are their deeds as a whole. They haven’t yet learned to cooperate. They have a hierarchical mind. I have asked my people to let me witness a little longer. My people are not convinced. They want to move with the plan.

Universe

She stepped out from the crack between dimensions to the universe that deemed itself to be the main thing there. She found a copy of herself and was saddened to see how she lived her life. In her universe, there was no pull of money, hierarchy, or power. Everyone in her universe was content to experiment, to understand, to discover. That was why she had found out how to move between the universes without destroying herself. Her dimwitted sister, her alternative version, was pursuing a perfect body, and clothes were destroying her environment. She thought she was enriching her inner mind. That she was somehow different from the others in her world, who pursued superficial things. She was the worst. She was kidding herself with her noble ideas, yet she was trapped in the same cycle as anyone else without awareness.

She slipped out of the universe, feeling saddened by their existence. She was not about to intervene. That was one rule. She searched for other universes where her sisters had more to them than their bodies.

Three Words

Her voice was like a call dying
She screeched with her mind for absolution
But the only thing she knew how to do was to hunger for more
The imperfection
The need to be loved
The acceptance
Weighed her down
They drowned her
They made her go against all she believed in
She was trapped with her own death call
No one could free her
They stood with her
In a word that knew nothing more than hunger
Pain

The Prompts are from the book A Year of Creative Writing Prompts.

I finished reading the Cobalt book, and I’m trying to figure out what it all means. Our world is built on unequal ground. Some people die just because they have been born. There are infants who are poisoned by their environment and never get a chance to be something or someone, not even to run, sing, laugh, and bike around their neighborhood. The riches and excess in my life are built by those people. Imperialism hasn’t died. I was watching a speech by a Kenyan, who spoke about how the constructions of Imperialism still exist in everything. There are no more empires that govern and exploit people. It is the markets. It is all of us, fueling the inequality and discontent in our societies. The Kenyan proposed that it is competition, the thought of superiority, and the pursuit of that which corrupts cooperation and communities.

I recognize that all in me. I have been raised in an individualist society that tells every single person that they are not worthy unless they possess this, have that, look like this, think like that, earn a certain salary, and hold a specific title. I watch how my own mind deteriorates. I see in my work how the children don’t even get the fighting chance that my generation had. They hunger for things to alter their moods, to feel valuable, to feel content. None of them ever do. Neither do I. Yet, I can still feel the same hunger, the need to feel valuable, the need to feel loved, and the fear of not being. Our world is a shitty place to live for a conscientious mind. We don’t have a fighting chance. Those who are too sensitive, too something, are deemed crazy or in some other way defective. I watched this woman speak about ADHD, and telling people, all people, to forgive themselves, because this world is not made for us. The demands we face and the life we are supposed to build are too much for everyone to handle. No perfect anything will give you or me that absolution.

I have been breaking my body and mind slowly, trying to gain that absolution, that sign that I’m enough. Every failure I experience, for example, in climbing, feels like a sentence. Feels suffocating. All the muscles I have gained take me farther away from that ideal body I am meant to want. My short, muscular frame is something I detest every day because it’s not an image that stares back from those videos, those ads, those perfect female bodies. And I see other people around me feel the same. Those people whose minds can accomplish great things, shape communities, create new things, and make breakthroughs in science, are often left to pursue absolution from a society in hyperdrive, which values the wrong things and is breaking down communities, identities, and our minds and hearts.

I’m not sure how we can liberate ourselves. Is it like the Kenyan said, fighting against our own desires to be better than others, to feel valuable, to act unselfishly towards others, and to support others and their pursuits? Or is there an answer somewhere else? I have read about Henry David Thoreau and written before that the answer is not in seclusion, as he and so many others thought, as a remedy for the scariness of the world. It lies somewhere else. In action, on a small-scale level. Something has to be done. I need to do something, or this world will take me with it. I don’t want that. I want freedom to create, to move, to be, and enjoy myself and others.

Thank you for reading my ruminations! I hope they make some sense. I wish you a beautiful day ❤