Epiphany.
At dawn.
You give up. There is no struggle anymore. You are light again. You are not dead, however. You float. On the surface of all the raging waters you once thought was your life.
You give up. You offer no resistance. You are led to different shores, bits of you erode and you now perfect the art of living. You don’t seek hope because, for you, hope doesn’t exist anymore. Not from the outside world, anyway. You become Hope yourself. Hope festers, becoming you. Because you don’t care anymore.
Care to seek hope? Not really.
Care, to seek hope. Not your deal.
You rue the day you were born. A product of indecent haste, you are everything that nothing should ever be. Their mistakes reflect on you. Your mistakes loom large, magnified a million times over.
You look around, with overwhelming shame, at the lives of people.
The images taunt you, showing you how things should be.
Sometimes it gets under your skin.
Like an abscess.
Suppurated, like a gleaming ruby edged with pearls. And then thoughts fester in your mind. Thoughts find release in words, words that are twisted out of context, startling you with meanings you never thought possible. You now choose to mute yourself. Your silence says more than all the slander the world ever spewed.
You feel the dull throb of the sore you left unattended.
It bursts.
You are amazed at the oozing drama. The jewels of suppression, harvested.
Oppressed, your shame renders you numb.
Your thoughts, now, gather to fester, seeking blessed release.
A ruby and lots of pearls.
Pearls mean tears, don’t they?
You have tears you say. You prepare to shed them.
Your eye tears up. Mind you. Only one eye. They say the eyes never behave differently. Two eyes, one vision. But nothing is really normal, right? This eye of yours sheds a tear that you aren’t even aware of. You sit sipping your morning coffee and it trickles down your cheek. A surprised onlooker bothers to query and you attribute it to an unheard of allergy. Only you know, the secret revealed to you, it’s your life.
The epic tale of Murphy’s Woe.
You realize soon enough that there are people who have heard of legendary lives such as yours.
The great Murphy dreamed of a perfect subject like you.
You prove him right.
Every single time.
How?
Let’s see.
You are born into this family, you had no choice, really.
He didn’t know how to be a father. He couldn’t really.
She turned cold, even before you screamed angrily as you fought your way out, shrieking your fury at the unfortunate accident of your birth.
Accident?
Right!
You should have been crushed under the wheels of their drama.
But, no. Instead, you were beaten to pulp, every single time, but you were persistent, learning a lot from the Roadrunner Show. Flattened, you waited, popped your limbs out, cackled in glee and continued your mutilated survival.
You wanted to live, right?
You wanted to breathe, right?
You filled your lungs with painful gasps in the sewer of your existence.
Your deformed spirit is still an embarrassment to the wholesome lives around you.
Trees twist around their trunks, seeking elusive sunlight.
Roots claw into the earth, finding traces of moisture that doesn’t even begin to quench your thirst.
Everything snaps or wriggles away into the mud while you lie, on your side, head burrowed in the muck, willing yourself to find air.
You grow up too. Somehow. You make it so far. However, you don’t learn from the mistakes of the ones who begot you. You decide to play with fate. You go down the same road. But fate, she has other plans for you. Your choice after all. So endure it. Remember, she always has the last laugh.
Ha!
You look away. Out into the world. You try to make a difference and think, now it is all going to work out.
It’s your choice after all.
You add to your collection of rubble, crumbling bits of your mistakes as well.
After a while you are blessed. You turn blind. You stop looking anymore. You are now completely visionless.
Congratulations!
For now, you realize you’ve let yourself down.
You allowed one chink in your armor, one ray of light in your chasm to be the real deal and the walls close in.
You are trapped.
You are now in an incinerator of your own making.
You know there is no hope.
Not anymore.
Not for the likes of you.
How do you expect to hold on to strings believing them to be hope?
There are no more strings for you to hold on to.
Want to survive?
Stop looking for hope. On the outside at least.
It’s a battle alright.
Learn to fight. Or face it. Or give up.
Either way, it doesn’t matter.
Ever.
On second thoughts, why do I even bother telling you all this?
That is Epiphany.
My Epiphany.
At dusk.
Second Thoughts
