Skip to main content

Scout on the Past/Dusk

And you know you’ve been set up. You know that you’ve been raised on the defense. You know you had no chance from the start. But you pretend that you are focused. You pretend that their calls don’t tempt you. You pretend you don’t sit staring at their pictures regretting your decisions. So, you walk with your head high. You block them out before they can have the courage to enter your heart. You don’t give them access to who you are. Break, on the dawn. Mend, at sunset. Dissolve, at dusk. Watch the pieces run down the drain as you wash them away.  Watch your reflection disappear in muddy puddles.Watch the sun rise again knowing nothing will change.

Dissolving into your dreams, ask yourself how they let themselves into your home. How your mind became weak, how you wondered what a lack of loneliness must feel like. How they are not what you want, but their silhouette is something you could get used to. How the idea of them is intriguing, intoxicating, incomparable. Twist them into the person you want. Turn them into a person you could have. Destroy them like they would do to you if they got close enough.

Switch your perspective. Switch your gaze. Switch your environment. In the end, the mind you share with your past will always be in control. The mind meticulously formed out of fear and inferiority will convince you that it protects, not hinders. The mind in which you disappear in and out of consciousness is infallible. To what end can you hide? To what person will you turn? To what desperation will you reach?

Yet that isn’t the issue, but you will place the blame there. On your past, on your surroundings, on anyone that got close enough to challenge your peace. The issue is that you stay on fences. You build them, stand behind them, support them. You were raised on the defense, but you choose to stay there. You choose to break at dawn, to mend at sunset, to dissolve at dusk, and to do the same thing again the next day. You choose to let your reflection change in muddy puddles, never trying to see yourself in clear ones. And you know you can change. And you know you are responsible for who you become. And you know you have a chance.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Scout on You/ Focus

Focus. Carry yourself through the movements and the rhythms, the light and the dark, the sun and the moon shining on you as you stare into the sky every night and every day, not for answers but for distractions. Carry me away, you tell the stars. Carry me away because I can’t focus. Get used to the silence, to the droning of the wind like the sky, telling the world to remember you when you can’t remember the person you were just last week. Focus on the voices that enter the beats of the wind and stars as they sing to you. As they tell you to focus. Chase the pavements, chase the promises they tell you as you skin your knees. Someone was just around the corner, you tell yourself. Someone who could tell you to focus, someone who couldn’t sync themselves with the sun, the stars, and the wind. You remember them, but will you remember you? Your rhythms are defined by their shadow, incapable of finding their definition without the sounds of others. In this atmosphere, you pour yourself. You ...

Scout on Siblings/ Mazes in the Chinese Church

The mind chooses the worst times to be vacant. On the day I left, not a single thought came to my mind. I looked, I ate, I walked, but I can hardly remember thinking anything at all. It was never like that before, when me and my brother ran through mazes alone, finding each other and nothing else for years on end. I don’t think I thought anything then either, but I wish I did so that I could remember those times. The places and people that became so far away now engulf my mind when they have become so out of reach. I can still feel those memories, in a distant corner of my heart that gets warm when anything vaguely familiar is nearby. Sometimes in my dreams, I run through the mazes looking for the old him, for the old me, for something that feels right. Now I feel mature and intelligent, but I felt those things then too, even if I wasn’t. I feel wrong and right, but I simply want to feel that time. When I lingered at boards with art, writing, festivals, and any semblance of life that...