#my prose
“your moments of stagnancy have something to teach you. you’re not stuck, not moving, or not progressing. you are simply where you need to be until you absorb and learn everything that you need to learn about this current phase.”
— iambrillyant
The ink is dry.
You have written your dissertation and now must defend it. It is just us and the chicken. You open your mouth and out tumbles a mess of words you never thought you would say. You talk about the beginning the middle and the end, you talk about the facts and the speculation, you put everything into context and know your audience well.
The ink is dry and you talk your voice hoarse because this defense will never end. The chicken asks no question and so you guess. You stumble your way through, crawling on hands and knees, through the mud and muck hoping maybe you will see an end.
You are trying to prove yourself, because that is what dissertation and defenses are for, after all. They are proof you know, they are a promise that you are capable of finding out.
You continue on, your voice long since losing its inflection as you predict questions that will never come.
Despondency with reality. Or is it delighted? One can never remember when it oscillates to violently between the two, a glass bottle broken over a drunk man’s head and the brush of a flower petal against the tips of fingers.
Was it the chicken or the egg? The egg being the universe and the chicken, well you know what the chicken is by now don’t you? But was it the chicken or the egg that came first?
They say that everything is sentient, perhaps no in the definition of what you believe sentience to be but sentient all the same.
Perhaps then the big bang was but a thought, the birth of the universe in the moment of waking. Perhaps it is actually that the chicken is the egg and with its first thought it came into being.
What a despondent delight then to be caught between two half that never were supposed to make a whole and yet here we are.
Here we are.
There is a beast prowling through your chest.
Maybe you don’t know it’s there, but it is and it paces back and forth between your ribs, trapped there. It can be seen sometimes, in the chaos at the back of your throat, in the way your eyes flash and you choke on the ice you ground down with your molars.
Many will say it differs per person, this manifested beast, but it doesn’t. Not really, anyway, and not in a way that matters, at least.
They say that when homo sapiens crawled into the world there were other humanoid species and, well, it would seem there no longer is. The bones of the other humanoid species are cracked with violence, from war and fear, and yet we remain.
Yet, we remain.
The beast has always been with us, they are our closest companion, after all. Maybe we share them, the beast, and between our collective breaths they heave another growl, with every beat of our heart they watch through our eyes.
One could speculate that it is the chicken the beast is after, our individual and collective chicken who always dances out of reach.
Or perhaps it is the chicken that is the beast, the image by which we see a mirage of what we want. And maybe that is why they never let us catch them, because they know they would never be safe either.
Because they know we are never safe.
The bones held violence, after all.
It’s not particularly profound.
You know it isn’t, many words uttered from the mouths of man are just lace around the reality of what we are. A useless frill at best and something to obscure the ugly at worst.
In the end it’s all lies. We start out early, after all, and talk about magic and beauty and this sours to law and order in the world as we grow older. If you take the world as it is and drag the sand through your fingers you are left with nothing but what is not, what could be or has been. In the palm of your hand there is only life and death, the chicken is gone, the tree left long ago, the ice is melted and your tongue is no longer numb.
Is there a right or wrong? Should there be a right or wrong?
You will always be the villain of someone’s story, the hero to someone else, and just a passerby to yet another. It’s really not that complicated, you are inconceivably small and yet you are all that there is to the universe.
There is no chicken, there is no tree, there is not ice between your teeth.
In the end there is no I, just you and the lies chose to believe.
Maybe is such a loaded word. There’s a space for it, in your vocabulary, but you never mean it when you say it.
Maybe is such a liar, it speaks of ambivalence but truly it isn’t. Take a coin and flip it, maybe is the space before you begin to yearn for an answer. You are always yearning and yet the word you say is always maybe.
Always is another loaded word. There’s a promise of consistency when all there is in the reality of humans is irrationality and chaos. You order it with an always and smile thinly with a maybe.
There is a tree, remember it is wise. It is draped across the ground and you are alone in a world of maybes and always uttered like the promises they are not.
Reality is a dyslexic writer with only the chicken to check their work. No fonts to help, no spell check to watch, just a writer and the blank medium between their mind and their hands.
There are mistakes. Of course, there are mistakes, sometimes it’s a letter off sometimes its not even the right word. But reality is trying, their eyes darting across the letters they write, and it seems right to them.
Who is to say it isn’t?
Reality has ink on their hands even though they type your world up on a keyboard, they keep rewriting the same line over and over again because nothing seems right but still the lines remain because the backspace broke long ago. The chicken pecks at their hands and is docile under their gaze.
Maybe its actually the chicken writing the story and the dyslexic writer is you, maybe its easier and easier to see your own mistakes, maybe one day you will turn on spell check and find a font to help.
Maybe it will be easier some day.
It’s pseudo intelligence. That is, the world at large is pseudo intelligent. A writer with too many words to describe a scene, that keeps writing the same thing over and over again until it seems profound.
What is the meaning of life? To never be.
What is the meaning of life? To simply be.
This is deeply personal.
Or perhaps it’s not.
The chicken never leaves, but it slips through your fingers every time you think you have it, a brush of feathers the tickle your palm.
Who are you?
Who am I?
We are a pair, you and I, both chasing our chickens. Or maybe it is that you are me and there is just one chicken to be chased. The chicken either way will not be caught, no matter what we try.
We pick ourselves up and throw ourselves into labels, communities, opinions, hobbies, illnesses, and define ourselves by them.
What are we? Are we more than this? More than the chicken? Are we trying to catch the chicken or is the chicken trying to catch us? Predator or prey aren’t they the same.
Still we chase.
Its complicated.
Maybe you are making it complicated but nonetheless it is complicated.
The chasm between what you want to be and what you think you are is vast. The valley between what you are and what you can be is subjective. The place between your hands, the space there, is yours to make.
There’s a love story to life, a genre to the thread you are walking and you are the author. Maybe its with life at large, this love story. Maybe it’s a story of friends or family or maybe it’s the feel of a lover’s embrace.
There’s a tragedy to life, a coiled muscle at your back as you gaze upon what is done to you by the world and what you do to the world. It’s the grinning skull of humanity, of life, as it sits in the hands of many. Authority waging war and war wielding authority.
There’s a starving wraith creaking into the space you left behind, or maybe its nothing at all and simply the ghost of what could have been.
Come now, unreliable narrator, put the ice between your teeth and learn to chew.
She recognizes me based on my knock. The door hurts the knuckles, the rattle of bone under skin against a green door.
Maybe she shouldn’t have been paying that close of attention, but she is. Maybe if the knock was more of a boom, less rapid, less known, then I could go back to a place where my voice didn’t ache, and silence was welcomed.
Strange, alien, other; maybe the knock can raddle the thoughts out of my head so she may pick them up and see them for herself. I collect them like a magpie, these thoughts, and build my nest of reality around them, with them. Maybe if she saw them she would know it wasn’t worth paying attention to, worth knowing a knock.
Maybe our worlds would not brush together.
But I know her as well. I know her by the shift in her seat, by color of her eyes, by the slope of her shoulders. I collect the glimpses I see of her world, the portraits I paint, and remember them so I may piece them together like pieces of a puzzle to see the world through her eyes. And maybe she’s the same, looking at me and watching, knowing me by my knock at her door alone.
What a wonder it is, to be known.
To speak emphatically, to speak without hesitation, to understand oneself and one’s intentions so clearly so that the words never stutter as they pass your lips is a blessing as it is a curse. Because the world was never so black and white and dogmatic.
You are a villain, you are a hero, you are a bystander to something great and the one who wrought it all the same. The realities blur and the unreliable narrator stutters out another word they say is emphatic, they learn to be emphatic, they must be to survive.
One day soon may you develop a stutter, where words don’t fit in your mouth and your mind runs with possibility.
There’s a space behind the eyes, you see it when you pass your gaze over another’s. It holds Dandelions, suborn and tall. Sometimes it holds them out like a child, sometimes it keeps them close to its chest, but everyone has them in the space behind their eyes. The flowers are sometimes many, sometimes few, but ultimately these flowers are theirs’ and theirs’ alone.
It’s not your place to lean forward, eyes crossing as you approach. It’s not your place to blow, however gently you may, and cast the seeds to the wind.
It’s not your wish to make, after all, but sometimes you do it anyway.
You know it hurts, maybe you as much as them, when you see the seeds drifting in the wind. You hope it was worth it, the wish, and maybe it was.
But really, was the risk ever yours to take.
To be an unreliable narrator is a bit like crunching ice between your teeth. You know it’s there, the sharp slide across your tongue, a crunch like bone between your molars. And then when it melts and your left with something smaller and duller, a numb mouth and hallow pain, you know it’s time to start again. To be undone by your own hands and come back with something new, ice clenched between your teeth.
To describe oneself, knowing you could never find the truth, is a bit like catching chickens. You say ‘I am strong,’ look into your own eyes as you gaze into a mirror and you know. You know many times you are weak, but the admission never leaves the back of your throat resting there as it rasps with your every word. You lunge for the chicken; it flutters between your hands and scurries to a corner. You say you are less when you know that, for you, there may never be more. The chicken looks up at you, its beady eyes gleaming as you shuffle forward hands outstretched. You do the same thing every day, walking the same well-worn path, wearing the same clothes, with the same look in your eyes. You drag a hand through your hair and breath through your nose as the chicken stares and stares and stares and you call it prey but really, maybe it’s you.
To judge the world, to look at it and sort it like you wish you could, is a bit like trying to leave the chicken behind, the ice between your teeth, the chicken’s eyes on your back, as you wander through the woods. You look around and you apply to it what you apply to yourself. The morals you have picked up like stones from the path. You ignore the reality, their reality, pushing against yours and force your view unto them but the only thing around you are trees.
You call it wise, a wise tree.
And maybe it is wise, but there is ice between your teeth and the chicken at your heels, the tree leans with the breath of the mountain and you are alone so does the wisdom matter?
Your mouth is numb, your teeth ache, the chicken pecks at the ground just out of reach and the tree, the tree says nothing.
You are alone.
The mountain lets out a breath it was holding and the tree topples, are you enough of a person for it to have made a sound?
That is for the chicken to judge.
