Elucidating Questions

I hate how guilty I feel for making small mistakes

I feel so supremely wrong

Like I feel like my skin gets tighter

My chest gets tight

Maybe that’s why I get so bent out of shape when people accuse me of doing something wrong when I haven’t

I know when I’ve done wrong

I know so well it haunts me for hours, days

I fear messing up again

I get hyper vigilant

My pain levels go up as if my body itself is punishing me

Sometimes I wonder if it is

I just want to be decent

But I fail over and over again

And I can’t be anything but hard on myself

I feel if I’m not hard on myself people won’t believe that I know I was wrong

I feel like if I don’t feel guilty I’m not properly accepting responsibility for what I did

There will never be anyone more hard on me than me

But I don’t know how to recover from it

How do you face people after feeling shame that strong?

All my life that’s been a struggle

After I do something wrong

To come back and act is if everything is okay

I don’t know why I feel like I should be exiled

I don’t know why I feel like my mistakes are so much worse than anyone else’s

I’d tell anyone else not to be so hard on themselves

But I’m ashamed

I’m ashamed to be me because when I am me, I’m too much for people

I’m too much

So I should feel ashamed

But no one else should

Or something

I don’t know

I’m sorry I’m a failure

You know when you try to do something decent and it just blows up in your face?

That’s my life

I have tried so hard to just be fucking decent

And as far as I can tell

Without the threat of Hell

Most people have not

But being decent doesn’t pan out

Over and over I try to do something just decent

That’s it

And it never really matters

I’ve started doing less decent things

Selfish things

Not always

But I’m having these moments

And if you want to call me out for those moments then, fine

But people call me out for attempting to just

And you can let me know

Hey you failed at being decent

But it’s always attacking me for it

I’m told my reactions are over the top

But people

People get so angry at mistakes

I suck

I hate myself

I’ve failed so many times and had the book thrown at me and all the feelings everyone else is allowed to express but me

I know

That stupid saying someone made up

Done is better than undone

No, it isn’t

Every time I make a move it blows up in my face

Board games are a metaphor for life

You have to make the right moves to win

Sometimes it’s up to a dice roll 

And I just suck at strategy and planning and understanding what does what

Unassuming as hell yet somehow leaving wreckage all over the fucking place

It’s hard to never know

I’ve been frozen into this fear

Knowing any move I make is going to implode

Nothing stays good

And, if there’s meaning behind it, it will blow up

And I’ll lose someone

Or a whole bunch of someone’s

The internet isn’t a safe place

And I’ve tried so hard not to provoke any people lately

Provoke people with human rights for fuck’s sake

I don’t know

I wish I could properly express myself

Without my brain properly processing the information minutes later

And it’s hard to meet the requirements of people who are not cognitively disabled

I struggled with it growing up

I’d think of a better comeback later

But now I’ll actually not understand parts of what I’m hearing or reading until twenty, thirty, minutes later

It’s maddening

My wit may not be sharp (in fact it’s a very odd shape) but it was quick before

I feel trapped everywhere I go

Everything I do

I struggle so much to be heard and understood and I swear

I swear I’ve been trying all along to be a good little human and fit in

But I feel like

Like, I don’t know

I came from a species that values community above all else

And these creatures have evolved beyond that into pure exploitation

Devolved?

Who knows

And I just don’t speak their language or understand their motivations

Most of them are complete mysteries to me

I see parts of me in them

But they don’t see them in me

Unrelated

But my DNA says I’m related

I wonder what’s wrong with me?

It’s the slow settling in of terror

It’s grinning, mad, at the prospect that I’m once again undergoing trauma

Reinflicting every time my home was not my home anymore

I only willingly walked out of two houses

Out of how ever many I’ve left

My life never being in my hands

Forced to go from one place to the next

Just because the interlude was longer this time doesn’t change it

My nightly reoccurring packing dreams

But it doesn’t fit

And I’m not going fast enough

It’s so easy to inflict this kind of trauma on other humans

Or so it seems

Or so my grinning landlord makes it seem

To take away a home

I don’t know what’s wrong with them all

All these people

Maybe what’s wrong with me

Should it be easy to ruin other people’s lives?

They are so bizarre

I still think they should all have homes and food and joys though?

I’ve not seen the worst of humanity

Except through the news

But they certainly have ensured all my fears come true

It’s funny because growing up I wasn’t allowed to eat snacks because I’d get fat

And then I did get fat

And now I either need other people to buy my food for me or there isn’t enough

Sometimes both!

Still fat though.

Life’s so fucked

I see the worst of humanity through the screen so I can feel like what I have experienced isn’t so bad

Yet here I am

Losing my home and my freedom

With work suddenly only employing me for 4 hours a pay cheque

No friends

It’s not all down hill

Like that fucking boomer metaphor is actually an accurate description of what my life’s been like

Up hill both ways through six feet of snow with no shoes or whatever

Constantly having more demanded of me while my body forcibly makes me give less

Maddening

If I start hoping that what is happening to me happens to them I’m as bad as they are for their callous watching of what happens to me

I need help

And not the help I’ve gotten so far that’s like you’ll be good for five minutes and then fucked again

It’s like I’m drowning and someone will pull me out for a moment only to let me fall back in again

Why can’t there be a solution to this

So it doesn’t happen to anyone else ever again?

So that even if I did hope the worst on them

It would be moot because it wouldn’t happen again for the hope to be realised

There’s seven odd billion ways to be human

Some trillions of lives lived

And things may seem to resemble eachother, but every situation is different

Every lived experience

And they try to sell you boxes to live in

You’re this

So here’s the five personalities you’re allowed to have

And this is how you should look

And dress

Here’s what your interests should be

Fit in a box somehow

Contortion is truly the mental skill of the human

So desperate to fit in

When we should have been embracing our diversity

All of it

How we’re all different

We should have been uniting on understanding

The one-ness of the human condition

Fear of being completely alone

Where we are similar

Yet no one is the same

What is the point of wearing a thousand masks to match what they sold you about yourself?

We’re all free in our minds

Along with our demons and fears

How to learn to live in harmony inside and out?

And can someone tell me what the carnal sin of differences is?

I’ve not found myself in one of you yet I can still feel affection for what you’ve done

Who you are

They feel so outside of me

I’ve had to accept that I’m different

Why do they act as if they are homogenous when they’re seperate solids?

Water gathers with all water

Not just the water from this lake or that

If you’re going to try to emulate it

Do it right

Are you a liquid?

Do you become what is the same as you?

It’s not even a joining of roots

Roots make people stronger

Instead it is of what to fight

Whom

Foundations aren’t built like this

And I don’t know how to do this and not be right

I don’t want to be right

Sometimes you all look like eachother

But once the mouth opens the differences crack through

Once the body moves you know it’s someone else

Your billion billion similarities

Your trillion trillion differences

Can’t both be right?

Imagine humanity untethered

Where the media didn’t sell ourselves to us

This is how you, your body, your mind should be

Why don’t we protect eachother instead of creating boogeyman personas of what people who don’t look like us are like?

It’s always questions I can’t answer

Don’t tell me I know

Knowing is terrifying

Don’t you see differences as beautiful things?

Do you get angry when you see an animal you’ve never seen before?

Old humans used to do that

Draw terrifying images of the animals they couldn’t see in the dark

Are you more advanced than a person from, say, the year 900?

I would hope so

A millennium has gone by

Then again I wonder

They’re too smart for they’re own good

And too stupid to handle their own brilliance

I believe in you

But I also don’t

Your track record is terrible

Guardedly we look out

But it’s daring us to look within

Both of us?

And I never know whether he’s a fragment or an invasive species

If anything like that could happen

As protective and fierce

Perhaps as fragile and lonely

I envy it

Seeing and feeling

Instead of it just being a moment lost

Always so explosive

Self preservation

And talking is dizzying

Like a coin just flipping

How do we both have everything

And yet pieces each the other doesn’t have?

If he remembers his moments he’s never told me

But locked from the comfort of memories

As if they’re not his

Aren’t they?

We

Not the same yet changing is obvious to only me

Let’s call it good acting

My inheritance from my father

From a thinking, feeling, being to one who only sees red

I know he feels guilt even when he denies it

As ashamed of his anger and I am mine

But mine becomes him

And he is just trying to keep me safe from everything

Is it darkness?

Or is it a defender of light?

We don’t know his name either

I suppose we’re not summoning the end of the world though

Just damaged

Imagine if you had a mission

Maybe you’d feel less chaotic

You’re the inside of me that’s screaming about reality

I can feel you leaking into conversation

I keep thinking you’re quiet

But I think we just are

Content to flip at the moment

My wish to meet you face to face

Do you even have a face?

Then again I don’t really know if I do

This flesh I don’t recognise

I suppose if I have to have a protector it may as well come from within

I just wish I could see and feel you and prove you’re real

Mind Spectre

No it is not a TV show name

It’s you, nameless thing

Did you come from the thing outside of me within me?

An intrusive thought come alive

If you were, would I dream of you?

Are you the nameless people who love me only in my head?

The Winter has arrived

And I should be joyful

I live for the snow

Even if it’s showing up weeks later than before

But it’s the last time I’ll see this scenery

The world painted white from this angle

And the flakes are coming in to meet me

I can afford them a weary smile but I’m terrified

Disappearing into my memories

At this time next year will I just barely remember the home I spent years in?

I think this is the longest I’ve lived in a place

And bless the snow and the nourishment to the soil it brings

But it’s yet another reminder of Time running

The fucker

Running out of time

With Time running

And I know if you ask him to slow down he just tosses his head back and laughs like it’s funny

Is it funny?

Or is he laughing because it hurts?

Who knows

I hate watching you run out

Sand slipping through my fingers

As if I’m the hourglass

And I should be able to believe you’ll come back

I’ll catch you for a moment again

It’s what you do

And I know it’s not you that makes it unbearable

No, your contents

And you are separate

Like the Universe

Where it meshes together and becomes both of and not of you

I wish catching you was a done deal

But each of us catches Time for a moment

Only for him to dart away again

And fuck Fate

Even if I can’t escape it, fuck it

How do I look back to the me who saw this house

And thought, “it’s just temporary”

Do I tell them yes?

And of course everything is temporary

I just wish more things would outlive me

Like common decency

Shouldn’t homes outlive us?

It’s not like that

So many things that should be a way that aren’t

Another home that outgrew me

And the snow falls

But just reminds me of the temporary aspect of home

From the start that’s where I wanted to be

Time just tell me

Why when you run you take my home with you?