I spent hours in my childhood believing the world knows not but to cradle and swoon the growing adult within me, making reality of my fathomed dreams, kissing me softly and whispering reassurance. I thought the ground would soften as I walked forward, thought the skies bore witness to my laughs and cries and would bend the heavens to dry my tears. I hoped and prayed and laughed and stayed up into the ticking sunlight wandering my expanding imagination. I relentlessly iterated my desires to the adults that sheltered me from the brewing storm. I never dreamed the world to be so heartless that it would rip the ground from under my feet and rain whilst I cried.
I didn’t think the world could hold such cruelty that it would blow me ten steps backward when I made a relenting step forward. I didn’t think it would knock me on my back as I stared up into the same sky that gleamed blue with my fictitious reality, a sky now grey with emotions like envy and hatred and filled with the crackle of lighting that illuminates a myriad of failure and broken dreams. That same sky now rumbles in thunder that quakes my being, breaking my soul in two and laughing as I stumble in confused thought. How could this world be so cruel?
I have grown to resent this world – its nature, skies, people and songs. The songs that once swayed me to sleep and woke me up so gently were tainted with words that I had not yet understood, tunes that bring the hairs on my skin standing guard to the despair that this world has begun to reveal. When the glint of childhood fogged and faded into the past, the harsh reality took reign and the perils of life played before me in a dizzy spell.
I began to see and hear, understand and revel at that of which I had paid no heed to. I heard the long-winded spew of hate speech that seems to never come to an end, filled with words that depict differences in varying shades of disdain. I heard the playground bullies that mutter rhymes poking fun at children with disabilities, the bullies who mutter disgusting verses that tear apart persons of colour and race, women of one kind or another, a man in a wheelchair, a mourning mother, a broken father, and everything in between. These bullies are nothing but cowards that hide behind their words – words that break bones and hearts, and cover souls in a veil of pondered existence.
This world is a vast barren. People are propelled forward into a land unknown, and the path they take is filled with bumps and bruises clustered in the form of mundane pain. This feigned haven of ours is home to terrors that curdle blood. It’s an abyss of landmines of wars, famine, torn apart races at war with one another, the ill and the old, the battered young, disregarded lives, and brutality from those who swear to serve and protect. It’s a home broken by the weight of abuse, nature begging for breath, wildlife choking back tears, and parents fighting over trivial property. It’s a school that teaches false history of a glorified villain, a masked man with a gun walking the halls to clear the path of scared children, and bullies hunching the backs of kin in lyrics of sticks and stones. It’s a ghost town of shattered foundation as the winds picking up whispers of broken people who witnessed catastrophe from the balconies of their homes that collapsed upon the heft of overseas terrorism. It’s parents sheltering their baby from the bullets of illusioned promises of help that tear apart nations, compelling populations to migrate to foreign land in this world or the next. It’s a Syrian child crying out a promise to iterate this terror to the man in the sky in one last breath. It’s our Mother Earth devoid of maternal bone, promising to burden those unborn. This world is an alien world that I refuse to call home, as it has shown me no mercy despite my strangled cry out to my mother’s prickled embrace.Â