SHEATHING

Appeal to your inner troll that it should try and be more impartial in your judgements. You cannot suck at everything. It’s not realistic. There must be slipups. You go about in one state of mind probably not all that regularly. You change, your thoughts change. Your movements change too. There isn’t a single day where you do the exact same things you did yesterday. No one day is ever the same as the one that came before it, or the one that follows it. Don’t listen to your brain. The little things will make all the difference to someone who is looking for the slightest chance to make a break for it.

Let yourself walk the paths of the shadows unidentified. Find the uninspired paths and create a way. There is no glory in following the footsteps of our ancestors.

To ‘be’, is very demanding, very tricky. For the war is fought on many fronts. And you, thinking you are just the one, cannot be easy. We wake up defeated under the eves of leafless trees where there’s no shelter from the blaring sun or the cold drafts of the wind that immobilise us while we sit. We labour under them, with our backs bent, and our minds searching for the familiar, in everything we see, smell, or touch. But we know the final destination is long in coming. If it is coming at all. Colours, once distinct in shape and hue, are all just one big, dull, blurry landscape now. Perhaps the waters won’t be so bitter, once we get used to it. And the recall of memories won’t bear such a consistently painful edge.

Perhaps we will stop noticing how each hope was lost in its exact sequence. How each loss brought with it a feeling of acute helplessness. Mapping the exact route of how we got here. Until all that remained was a barren landscape of despair and you cannot tell where one sorrow ends and another begins. Perhaps I will stop noticing many things. Perhaps I will acclimate and become like the wolf who survives the cold winters even when there is little to go on.