Scout on Cycles/Without Fail

  

 

And so I return, back to the black and white letters and the soft clacking of the keyboard. I return after the rejection of my fragility, knowing now that the escape is temporary. How can I find meaning in this obscure trouble? How can I continue to be angry at the fleeting wind? When all is said in done, I sit in crowded rooms alone and listen to phones ring without an answer. I look around only to count how many people have run from me, mistreated me, and spit on my name. Shallow walls swallow me in whenever I walk, cloudy air consumes my sentences whenever I speak. That pit in my stomach doesn’t leave because it is my soul; broken, abused, self-pitying, and pathetic, but still my soul. It and I long for the day that it will be free to find its purpose.

Today, I watched the breeze shuffle through the leaves, and I remembered the days when I would stare up at it and wonder if it was all the same. Every road had trees almost exactly alike, which I learned from months of watching them pass above me as I lay in the car. But I made distinctions, I made differences in the monotony. Perhaps that is what life is; making it something it isn’t to survive. I would recognize the breeze on certain streets, the corners with trees changing colors early, and I could even tell by the movements of the car when I turned into my house’s street. I wondered if I applied that to the people I knew; the way I could predict their movements, the small mistakes they would make, the ways they would betray me, and how I would let it happen because I was afraid to be alone, or rather, insignificant.

I shiver on warm streets and melt on frozen lakes. My heart is never where my mind is, my mind is never with my heart. I make mistakes knowing exactly how they will play out, exactly how I will suffer the consequences of my words. But I make them anyway; maybe because deep down I feel like I deserve it, or maybe because I feel trapped in the chain of events I have started. I wear my heart on my sleeve for people who I know will rip it off; maybe because I pity their loneliness, or maybe because I pity myself. Over, and over, and over, the cycle repeats, each time more twisted and unpredictable than the previous. After enough time passed, I lost sight of what was a mistake and what wasn’t. I lost power over the game, over the consequences, over my position in it. Each loss and struggle results in the consumption of a part of myself, consumed by whatever person has led to the hatred of a new aspect of myself.

I am the patchwork of my past, present, and future. I ask myself on hopeless nights which one I should protect. The trees usually answer for me.