A Caged Bird Freed Is a Sight of Pity
Why do you fall face-first into everything? You don’t even dive in, you just fall. Because you are scared of diving, and you never learnt how to swim anyways. Great, now you have mud on your face, and it doesn’t even taste like the kind you’d eat as a child. You have spent your entire life chasing something you had. But did you ever really… have it? Memory is a beast beaten and cobbled to almost unconsciousness and then caged in the zoo of your mind. You are the spectator. DO NOT FEED THE BEAST. DO NOT FEED IT YOUR WILLINGNESS TO WALLOW IN NOSTALGIA.
What is the difference between you and the caged beast anyway? Didn’t we all come from the sea? Aren’t you the same person from your memories?
Routine
I sweep and mop. Nothing is ever fully clean. I wash my hands until I feel the skin stretching. I scold my kittens, asking them to behave. I pick out something to wear and end up looking like a foreign object in my own body. The desires never have the desired outcome. Love is beautiful but it is also a solid matter – taking up space, sometimes pushing me to the corner. I feel evil no matter what hour of the day it is. I have not had time to sit and be quiet and still. I haven’t had time to repent for things and apologise profusely. I haven’t had enough on me for anything. This is not life. This waiting period, like any other, is situated within an uncomfortably chilly room with hard steel benches and my entirety is dried out, I am parched, and I am like a wounded animal sent by its tribe in the city to get some medical attention. Nobody is paying attention.
As my body hits the worn-out mattress and I imitate sleep until the real thing dawns upon me – usually at dawn – I hear the monks in my head settling in for the night too, prepared to relive tomorrow like today and yesterday and the day before. I should learn from them.