There are certain kind of traits impossible to shake off. Once they might have been indeed part of the group pressure dynamics. Now even in solitude (perhaps only in solitude), they are soothing. In a twisted, self-assigned, self-harming, warm, sort of way.

Unable to speak for myself I encounter relief in their dry peat.

Eloquence is a tricky thing: in what way eloquent? In what language, even? I can escape forwards, steady into doom. I can escape – period. Or can I?

I might not be racing to a red light but this could certainly be the case of selective color-blindness after all.

What did my anti-heroes teach me, if anything? They were just narrating their pity for a dime. Living their stories for vintage clout, albeit admittedly – unknowingly.

Safe havens get smaller with age.

My intuition is unbeatable. I must trust it more.

When your personality is dictated by traits out of your control – what are you really?

A man, woman, citizen, language speaker, skin-wearing animal.

I don’t know mate. I can’t relate.

How can I relate to these feelings when I never experienced what they are telling?

Hearing about sob love stories reminds me of my monsters, the ones I escaped from. Only to find more around the corner.

Short memory.

Selective memory.

Shocking shamelessness.

Torture.

Psychological bullying.

Gaslight.

I can’t relate, yet I am affected by it. This is fucking embarrasing.

I’m still at the bottom of the trap hole, well inside the woods, in pitch-black darkness, guessing.

Wasting my life away.

You can never keep everyone happy. Often, it seems that I can’t keep anyone happy. Fuck. FUCK.

Everyone makes their own choices. Perhaps I should too choose to NOT choose.

Come for me Mr Durden. I’m going to mess the fuck out of you.

For you it was all take, take, take. And never give a single thing. Never give a single fuck.

A summer camp.

What have you really learned? Why did you come here in the first place?

I don’t feel like I belong anywhere in particular. We could look at this through an anthropological prysm even, and you would only see some traces of cultural rooting, both from “back home” and from here, too. I guess this is Back Home now anyways.

Of course you are free to do whatever the fuck you want, but I can’t help but despise the likes of you, always so right, always so ahead of everything yet beached in the most arcaic imaginery and cultural idioms of all.

Tell me anecdotes of what was like a weekend away for you, while I consolidate the certainty that moving here saved my fucking life. Perhaps not in the literal sense of it, but in a more abstract and obtuse manner – my future self (current, but at a different plane of reality) would have destroyed himself. I am sure I would have lacked even the most basic sense of self-awareness and possibly end up dead or in prison.

I observe that reality plane from my undoubtedly higher understanding of Life and the World now, and I can only sigh in relief. I am my best self, not one that is objectively better, but one that is able to actually understand HOW MUCH WORSE I would have been in every aspect, should I have stayed “back home”.

Yet here you are returning like if nothing had happened. Quite literally, Like If Nothing Had Happened.

I know you.

You suck.

These are similar looks but the actual opposite.

In passing, sometimes frugal, other times held for an eternity. Static on the trains. Ecstatic. Making me want to be assimilated by the seats, making me want to be part of the fabric patterns that repeat effortlessly, endlessly, so easy to remember and yet, forget.

When I was a child, instead, it was the cringe and (most likely) disgust that attracted such looks. Fat, odd, creepy little child. Thinking ahead of you, anticipating every turn, in silence. Well ahead. Well fucked.

Today these are similar looks but the polar opposite.

The eyes wonder, who, how, where, what if, when.

SENT BY GOD TO TEST ME. NOW THAT THE CHANGE IS ON. NOW THAT I HACKED IT.

I revisit and replay every scenario – both made up and real – and answer back in a vengeful routine meant to show them (all of them) what was what.

I am the only one hurt in the process.

Our ancestors would dream about hunting raids in order to prepare for the unspeakable – both made up and real – I dream to compensate for a childhood of silence and recollection.

Back then, the dreamt raids were helpful.

Today, they are just self-inflicted torture.

We could read each other with unquestionable accuracy. It fucking hurt.

Yet we were never able to talk.

What feelings do you leave behind with the people that you meet? Do they immediately miss you? Do they sigh in relief that you are gone?