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Apr 2016
Identity.  What are the things that make you, you?  What are the things that make me, me?  To wake up each day knowing that it is different from the last, but still I feel as if I am the person of yesterday.  My eyes gazed into the ether and abyss stares back.  My mind wanders around memories, nightmares, emotional relics, and there my faceless friends, fear, shame, and guilt.  Nervous to be, anxious to act, paralyzed by my doubt, and to live is to be guided by pain.

Indifference and numbness passively guide me into tomorrow.  Each night restless from the last, each second filled with invasive criticisms and judgements to affirm my parasitic existence.  Lost and confused, I pick up pieces of pathetic me.  Today, the day is bright but but my insides are filled with thunderous clouds, black, and grey.  My body is arrested, my mind preoccupied with infinite scenarios of what if, corrections, discipline, and defeat.

Years have gone by, still I awake to the dull pain of being.  Never did I understand what joy, laughter, humor, or happiness was for that matter and it has nothing to do with me and I had nothing to do with it.  My attitude demure with confusion as what is right and what is wrong, forward is the only place to go, I move.  Each morning white dawn breaking the sky, like smiles breaking the faces of people.  My day begins with mending the memories, further into delusion, further into denial, and the faΓ§ade hides my genuine me, I begin to countdown the seconds when I would need to trade one form of torture for another.  

Stress and anticipation overwhelm my realities that each day I wonder if today I might see blood flow instead of tears pouring, or feel the throbbing sting of parental love as a horse riding crop splits my back into two, then into pieces, perhaps the gentle touch of disappointment and neglect would bring mercy.  My little self, frustrated with myself, loathe my little self, would begin to break from reality that is to dissociate myself from the things that evoke emotions, to feel is to hurt, to hurt is to suffer, and to suffer is to live.  

Each day I pick up the memories I left at the bus stop, either coming or going to go to school.  Years had already gone by, emotions never realized, never affirmed, or never fully developed.  It was okay see those around me fall victims to their own devices.  I did not care that those who spoke about hair, here and there, that sensations from another were god sent.  To listen to those three to four years ahead of me, as I quietly do my work so that I have none to do at home.  The exploits of teenage boys and their pseudo ****** experiences, when an older man waits for me with **** in hand.  To suffer is to live.

I wasn’t different nor was I special but always a little person with no identity except as an adult stuck in the body of child as a boy.  Each day filled with chores, homework, ****, deceit, anxiety, and depression.  Somedays I would move my skin over the iron ore of the wooden axe to remind myself that sharpness are the experiences of life.  The sensation would inspire a perverted smile, almost a tickle, razors edge is a place where I dwell.  Careful I am, I move further to away from me, I am without saving, without rescue, without forgiveness, and without humanity, fri-enemies and defeat keep me comfort as I waste away days in hopes of a harmless demise.  I feel better.
Lyle Kirby Barber
Written by
Lyle Kirby Barber  Farmington
(Farmington)   
390
   Bianca Reyes
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