The Edge of Being.

It’s back.

Whether you claim to want it or not, you check—you want to see it happen. You are drawn to it.

It’s a high fall. I walk on the tightrope, not balancing anymore. I use the time I have efficiently, but time is long and mine doesn't feel like it. I fill these hours with music and strange white noise, as my mind can’t exist in silence. I think all the time, and that’s what the world wants: never being enough, and yet being too much.

I think what you want me to think. The silence is unbearable, I say but I know it's my mind. You only hear it when you listen and who listens to strangers? 

Keep your distance.

One only wants to be itself. You were born as broccoli. No picky child is going to eat you. You aren’t a punishment. You don’t have to be processed to be digestible. You might not like the taste of yourself, but how will you ever know if you never try?

I know what’s coming; I don’t want to try. Now you are the picky child.

Stop protecting yourself from suffering. Suffering will find you; your way of shielding yourself will never work. Neither will being emotionally stunted, bottling up, and pushing everything under the rug.

The fear of being yourself—how dare you judge yourself when you haven’t even begun to be?

The realization that you can create is terrifying. For all the people who haven’t understood you, you are one of them. For all the people who haven’t understood you, you could understand yourself. I wonder how God felt? I wonder how He feels?

I feel as undone as my bed. The blanket is strewn and pressed into the metal frame, the bulges spilling out in between, like my personality from my mouth. Do you notice the gap in my teeth, or was it something else?

Please be superficial and fake, because I know how to deal with that. You are superficial and fake. I am. I don’t know how to be anything else.

I don’t like the taste of myself. I am the child. I am the broccoli. This is a stupid metaphor. Maybe I am an acquired taste.

The rope digs into the bottom of my feet. I keep walking, knowing the rope beneath me is frayed, but it’s a lie I can live with.