11 april

i keep saying: my life reads like a cheap novel. but that is because cheap novels do not merely appear, they are milked out of life's little pores; everything in them happens and is happening and has happened. only sometimes it is slightly more well-worded.

what if you could build up a past for yourself that never happened? if nobody would ever know? what if you could arrange all those little unchangeables into something attractive and cohesive? what if you lied?

or, even more frightening, what if you started to believe them yourself?

i wonder sometimes with people, when they tell themselves so much that they are something, whether they don't start to believe and become it. when they build a cage of Identity around themselves, not allowing themselves to breathe, to grow; there is no room to expand and Become. there is no moving past what Is, which is certainly safe; but perhaps safety shouldn't be the highest concern. there's a human out there that you're supposed to become, and if you contort your unstoppable growth around those safe same walls it will warp you, like a tumor. and one day the walls will collapse and you with them, reduced to a shell; you will see the person that you were supposed to be and you will want it, but you will be one tangled mass of knots of skin, unchangeably shaped around the person you once willed yourself to be.

are you willing to carry that bundle forever? the corpse of your fraudulent youth, and all the selves you've sacrificed?