personify

a creative prose submission

by hawks (pen name), Contributor

perhaps i personify things too much. 

all the words and flicks of wrists and twists of hair living quite vivid lives without their proper context(s). it is a lot to sustain. it takes from me, like casting a spell to orchestrate dancing mops and brooms to clean up psychic messes.

things encountered, things noticed are taken into myself and assigned properties. the things are then rigorously tested – brain full of bunsen burners and scientifically earned bruises. everything is alive, a full being capable of autonomy and love and hate and doubt and fear and was that sneeze aggressive? are ficus plants just generally the chatty sort? is that bird talking shit about me? hypotheses to hypothesize.

maybe i should try instead to see the world and everything in it as a series of cubes. grey cubes, free from the burdens of character. things to merely be blocked by and stumble over, or to use to my advantage and hide behind. 

being chased by sheets of paper appearing to be evil or enduring a haunting by a letter “k” that seems to have ulterior motives is an education on feeling everything, all at once. it is a shitty education. a corporeal punishment based system, bent on making your mind bend and break and your sleep erratic and full of all the things you encountered but then forgot. 

but then the most wonderful thing happens. you rub your eyes one afternoon, blinking against viscously sneering light and you have an endless cheat sheet. 

you know the secret entrances to people’s hearts. the best ways to cut through the back alleys of depression, elaborate series of hand gestures to create the perfect things to say and specific combinations of colours to shape ideas. the whyfor of the henceforth. there is no more wondering. the answers are there if you care to know, because you’ve become acquainted with the world in this exhausting, endless way.

all your suffering, all your keeping track, it culminates in being able to see all the hasty dotted lines holding the whole mess together.

but i’m still not happy.