As You Wish Inconceivable

The day itself dawned painfully unexceptional for the unfortunate happenstance of Youth Nature’s folly. Still my friends honored our morning traditions in a way that tethered me to the simplest of joys and was a happy foreshadowing of countless thoughtful gestures of appreciation.

It was a beautiful day, a harmonious balance of sunshine and moderate temperatures until mid-afternoon when its started raining. It was a quiet day with simple pleasures and good company with the first ever birthday gift, thanks to “nani”. Still, if I tell the story of my gratitude I am conveniently excluding the complicated pieces of my truth that undermine the complexity of an internal uncertainty.

Perhaps it is better to draw only on the positive, to edit our narrative for our mistakes that we might be remembered for our best.

It’s always nice to have high expectations, to tell myself that the next year — hell, the next decade — is going to be the greatest time of my life. But I have to understand nothing actually changes when the calendar switches from.

The only thing that might change my mind-set. And, honestly, that’s all I needed.

If  continue to dwell on the past, to chase after hearts who are wrong for you, to allow myself to be walked over, to surround myself with the wrong people, to mope about how much I hate my life, next year  is going to be exactly the same as yesterday. Nothing is going to change. The next ten years are going to be exactly the same as the last few years.

It’s up to me to change the behaviors that aren’t happy with me, to dump the people who are bringing me down, to walk away from the situations that are causing me more stress than happiness, to reinvent myself and revolutionize my world.

It’s up to me to decide that I cannot keep living the way I’ve been living lately. It’s up to me to take risks when it comes to my career, my relationships, and my happiness. It’s up to me to say I deserve more than what I have been getting, I deserve more than what I have been telling myself all these years. 

It’s up to me to start exercising more, start studying more, start traveling more, start socializing more, start dreaming more, and start hoping more, start doing more of whatever it is I wish you’ve been doing all along.

It’s up to me to take a look at my surroundings and admit that I am not exactly happy. It’s up to me to figure out what needs to change, what I need to do in order to inject excitement back into my life again. It’s up to me to find happiness, love, satisfaction, faith, or whatever it is I feel like I’ve been lacking. It’s up to me to make my life feel like a blessing, not a punishment.

It’s up to me to make the next year the best decade of my life, because if I keep doing the same things I’ve been doing, then nothing is going to change on its own. Nothing is going to get better without my help. Nothing magical is going to happen as soon as the ball drops. There isn’t going to be a change in the air — but there might be a change within me.

I can never let myself forget I in charge of my own destiny. It’s up to ME to pave a path for myself and follow it toward my dreams. If I pour my effort, time, and energy into creating my ideal life, then the next decade is going to treat ME well. But if I continue to make the same mistakes as I’ve been making throughout this past year, then nothing is going to change. I have to be the change.

I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.

The world might be sunny-side up today.

The big ball of yellow might be spilling into the clouds, runny and yolky and blurring into the bluest sky, bright with cold hope and false promises about fond memories, real families, hearty meals sitting on a plate in a world that doesn’t exist anymore.Or maybe not.
Maybe it’s dark and wet today, whistling wind so sharp it stings the skin off the knuckles of grown men. Maybe  it’s raining, I don’t know maybe it’s freezing it’s hailing it’s a hurricane slip slipping into a tornado and the earth is quaking apart to make room for our mistakes. I wouldn’t have any idea.
I don’t have a window anymore. I don’t have a view. It’s a million degrees below zero in my blood and I’m buried 50 feet underground in a training room that’s become my second home lately. Everyday I stare at these 4 walls and remind myself I’m not a prisoner I’m not a prisoner I’m not a prisoner but sometimes the old fears streak across my skin and I can’t seem to break free of the claustrophobia clutching at my throat.

I made so many promises when I arrived here.

Now I’m not so sure. Now I’m worried. Now my mind is a traitor because my thoughts crawl out of bed every morning with darting eyes and sweating palms and nervous giggles that sit in my chest,build in my chest, threaten to burst through my chest, and the pressure is tightening and tightening and tightening.

Life around here isn’t what I expected it to be.My new world is etched in gunmetal, sealed in silver, drowning in the scents of stone and steel. The air is icy, the mats are orange; the lights and switches beep and flicker. It’s busy here, busy with bodies, busy with halls stuffed full of whispers and shouts, pounding feet and thoughtful footsteps. If I listen closely I can hear the sounds of brains working and foreheads pinching and fingers tap tapping at chins and lips and furrowed brows. Ideas are carried in pockets,thoughts propped up on the tips of every tongue; eyes are narrowed in concentration, in careful planning I should want to know about.

But nothing is working and all my parts are broken.

I’m supposed to harness my Energy,It’s  said. Our gifts are different forms of Energy. Matter is never created or destroyed, the said to me, and as our world changed, so did the Energy within it. Our abilities are taken from the universe, from other matter, from other Energies. We are not anomalies.We are inevitabilities of the perverse manipulations of our Earth. Our Energy came from somewhere,they said. And somewhere is in the chaos all around us.

It makes sense. I remember what the world looked like when I left it.

I remember the pissed-off skies and the sequence of sunsets collapsing beneath the moon. I remember the cracked earth and the scratchy bushes and the used-to-be-greens that are now too close to brown. I think about the water we can’t drink and the birds that don’t fly and how human civilization has been reduced to nothing but a series of compounds stretched out over what’s left of our ravaged land.

This planet is a broken bone that didn’t set right, a hundred pieces of crystal glued together. We’ve been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we still function the way we’re supposed to. But it’s a lie, it’s all a lie. I do not function properly.

I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.

Events have collapsed at the side of the road, abandoned, already forgotten.  I’ve taken up residence on a bed of eggshells, wondering when something is going to break, when I’ll be the first to break it, wondering when everything is going to fall apart.I should’ve been happier, healthier, sleeping better, more soundly in this safe space. Instead I worry about what will happen when if I can’t get this right, if I don’t figure out how to train properly, if I hurt someone on purpose by accident.

We’re preparing for a bloody war.

That’s why I’m training. We’re all trying to prepare ourselves to take down The enemy  and his men. To win one battle at a time. To show the citizens of our world that there is hope yet—that they do not have to acquiesce to the demands of The Reestablishment and become slaves to a regime that wants nothing more than to exploit them for power. And I agreed to fight. To be a warrior. To use my power against my better judgment. But the thought of laying a hand on someone brings back a world of memories, feelings, a flush of power I experience only when I make contact with skin not immune to my own. It’s a rush of invincibility; a tormented kind of euphoria; a wave of intensity flooding every pore in my body. I don’t know what it will do to me. I don’t know if I can trust myself to take pleasure in someone else’s pain.

All I know is that The Enemy ’s last words are caught in my chest and I can’t cough out the cold or the truth hacking at the back of my throat.

You have   no idea that The enemy  can touch me.No one does.

He was supposed to be dead because I was supposed to have shot him but no one supposed I’d need to know how to fire a gun so now I suppose he’s come to find me. He’s come to fight. Happy Mashujaa day.

Perspective

For everything you have missed, you have gained something. For everything you gain, you have lost something else. It is about your outlook towards life. You either regret or rejoice.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life’s simply a matter of perspective. Everyone’s fighting a hard battle, every single person we meet has lost someone they’ll never get back. Each and every one of us wishes for something that, most probably, we’ll never have.

But what we think about all this is crucial.

I’m going to be honest. When I think about the whole half-full/half-empty glass thing, I’m usually the one who thinks of himself as being without a glass.

And it’s not about envy or greed or whatever, because I don’t like to compare myself to others. It’s just that I have this grand vision of who I should be as a person, and most times I fell short of that. I always see myself as I really am when I look in the mirror, and yet I can clearly see who I want to be.

And the two are not alike.

Funny thing, but those two are never alike. What we choose to do about it, though, is what really matters.

Do we panic? Do we give up? Do we make ourselves miserable?

It’s not about the destination, but about the journey. It’s not about reaching a place, but about realizing that the long road toward that place is, in fact, the place itself.

There’s no pursuit of happiness. There’s no reaching for something.

It’s just us and the long and winding road.

It’s just us and life.

And the way we choose to see things.

But maybe it’s worth remembering once in a while that we never see things as they are. Our vision is distorted by who we are. We perceive everything around us through a lens composed of qualities and flaws. We compare and we remember and we analyze.

The things that no longer are will always be compared to what is. Or what could be. Or what will be.

We try to make sense of things. To find meaning.

But let me ask you a question: do you think that “meaning” is something to be found? Or given? Created from all our previous experiences?

Do you think that we find who we are after years and years of wandering or do we create that self?

What I’m really trying to say is that how we look at things is how we look at ourselves. What we see around us is what we see inside us. If there’s no beauty and magic in the world, you’ll never find beauty and magic in yourself. Or happiness.