My Own Self

The thick wall grows, impenetrable, from the stony ground. It is massive, of massive grey blocks, whose course surfaces, like sandpaper, rub off skin. You can’t look over the wall, or around it, it is too great.

But the wall didn’t start this way. We are not born with ramparts about our hearts. We are not born of masonry, of brisk, of stone and soil. These are but constructs of fragility, of a destiny unknown, of fear.

We brick ourselves in, as surely and as unwittingly as the virus consumes its host, eventually to its own demise.

Life consumes time. This, as temporal beings, is our reality. We scurry or we waddle, never to reach a destination but only to try. Elusive is the meaning. So with no master template from which to fashion our lives, we look to those around us. Just as our own genes are clone factories, we, in our macro scale, become factories forging ourselves into simulacrums of those who surround us.

And in our surety that our neighbour knows best, in our thirst for fashion, in our suppression of self, we let our fear of individuality, of the possibility of dreams fulfilled, of living as our own selves in all our humble majesty, brick out the world, forever separating us from life.