half and half

fight/flight

we're the kids with access to excess,
steeped in abundance,
overstimulated
overthinking
overwhelmed.
but over doesn't mean end,
for us it means the refusal to end-
the refusal to cease.
we need the white noise and the humdrum, the flurry of activity.
the sounds of weary civilization,
the cogs and gears of this human machine.

we have grand ideas and grander discourse about things that we think matter and things that absolutely don't.
warped perceptions about the world, we're peering through fishbowls,
peering into the future,
hoping that when we're all grown...
up, we won't be like the boomers, we won't be like the people who run the world.

the big corporations, the corrupt press, the criminal courts,
all their capitalist propaganda-

we won't.

and we are the antithesis.
we are the reckoning, the change, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse of truth.
we will unmask the ventriloquist snickering behind the scenes, the one who tried to control us before we saw the threads of conspiracy cris-crossing our realities.

we see him.
we gave him a name.

society--the behemoth that refuses to leave, till it's the last thought in our minds before we close our eyes, name on the tip of our tongues till the last breaths we breathe...
like a twisted sort of lover.
the toxicity of this relationship- self-evident, but so is the fatal interdependence, the fated tangled web of wants and needs coinciding.

he is the air you breathe,
the things you think and the things you dare not think.
he is the what ifs and maybes and the force fed litany of hate ideology.
he is the constant inner debate you have with what you've been conditioned to be and what you would rather you be.

he is the villain. and rightly so.

you dreamt of growing up and falling in love with him, or at least the idea of him.
the fantasy of his sweet caress and his small approving smiles, the praise and careful attention validating your very existence.
you grew up to realise this wasn't love or yearning and this utopia was arranged marriage at most.
another invisible thread, waiting to be tied.

so at 17, you knew,
you'd seen enough, heard enough, thought enough, felt enough.
you wanted to cut through the loosely threaded fabric of reality.

at 17, you closed your eyes in silent rage at the atrocity of it all. you wanted to fight. them, him, yourself.

at 19,  you're burning in an indifferent hell. why is it that you didn't ever open your eyes once you closed them?
you mustered strength, you read books and learnt not to trust every word of the news.
you argued, and learnt, and educated.
and you knew, you knew about the world. you stood your ground and found others like you, others that knew,
and you talked and fumed and bonded, over how you wanted nothing more than for him to change, and for them to believe, for them to listen.

but then again,
your chest feels lighter. your heart can beat again, you may still carry it on your sleeve but you no longer fear.
it feels good to not fear. it feels good to finally feel like your voice is no longer just stuck in your throat.
it feels nice to not feel like a stranger in these small spaces where the threads joining you and him are parted, even barely so.

you've said your piece. again and again and again. it feels good to let out your angry little thoughts out into malformed sentences, spoken without restraint, fumbling at first and then more forceful.

you've found your people, the ones who will help you fight, take your hand in theirs and march onward on a treacherous journey to some unknown destination,
a place where things would be better, the governments upstanding and the people brave.

but then again,
you can't remember, really. what it is you felt at 17.
the truths, the realisations, reality crashing down around you.

the fever pitch.

you know you wanted to fight, but you can't remember why.
that rebellion coaxing you, the flames of uprising sputtering in your chest, you can't seem to recall what that felt like.

you know it's not fair, you hate him more than ever before.
but at the same time you can't seem to care.

you're angry, you're seething, you're shaken.
you're complacent, you're captive, you're jaded.

you're a threat that's been neutralised.

at 19, you're still scrolling. the war you declared, abandoned.
a soldier yet to step on the battlefield, but still somehow bloodied and defeated.

you, a generation that swore to care, swore to listen and pay attention, awake to the cacophony, the humdrum of human voices and stories whispered through the cobwebs of society.

a generation that still fell asleep to the sounds of rain and nature.

just like the one before it.

+++

~20/6/20