Skip to main content

Scout on the Journey/ End Scene

 I never noticed how the paint behind the toilet had bubbled up into pimples. I had lived in the same house for almost six years, and it still went over my head. The only thing I can remember is the number of steps at each stairwell and the color of the walls. On my drive home from the grocery store, I had never looked to my left and seen the house under construction or the painstakingly modern mansion. Perhaps I cared more about my time and reaching a certain point than the journey to get there.

It often feels like life is much more serious than it is. We take everything that occurs into our hearts and believe we have this ultimate power to decide our future. All it takes is a certain glare of light to realize that our livelihood is a play in which we have no control over the setting. The melancholy you believe in keeping at bay is switched in before your eyes, and no matter where you have run, it will slip in when the curtains are down. The failure you think you can resist by not trying will drag you back by the end of scene one. The act you establish will eventually end and will replace the person you truly are. It’s easy to define yourself and the things you do by the people and recognition you receive, but unfortunately, value is harder to identify.

 The worst thing about characters is their inconsistency, and the worst thing about living in a play is that the sky is always the same, no matter where you go. For years. You’ll make it out and back into the same hole, never understanding why you’ve returned until you realize that the set won’t change anything except the background and the foreground lies in you. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scout on Siblings/ Mazes in the Chinese Church

The mind chooses the worst times to be vacant. Not a single thought came to my mind on the day I left. I looked, I ate, I walked, but I can hardly remember thinking anything at all. It was never like that before, when my brother and I 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. 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 I so deeply wanted. Now, I have access...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

Scout on Trying/Mud

  The mud was the first sign. It was freezing outside, and I couldn’t find my gloves, so I tried to push the ice away from my car with my bare hands. They were numb, but it felt good. I was told my car would have trouble because of the ice, but it was the mud that kept swallowing it back into the ditch. I think that sums up maturing pretty well because what people tell you will be a problem almost never is. The ‘virtues’ of life come in as Trojan horses, and I naively let them in with an open heart and a blank mind. My mind was blank then, too, when I was pressing the gas as hard as I could, and instead of moving, I was treated with the fine smell of gas and burnt rubber. They told me to get rid of the mud so I could get out, but I couldn’t get rid of the mud unless the car got out. I was met with the same paradox that my therapist had presented me with: to become happy, you must practice the things you love, but I could only practice the things I loved once I was happy. Eventual...
Post a Comment
Read more