Crossroads

"I'm just like you..." I speak, voice gentle, hushed within the old barn as I sit amidst the scattered hay. One finger brushes against the rump of a horse unknown, bristling the wiry fur where skin meets tail. But the mare does not see me that way, the mare does not view me in the same vain I view her, through the same fractured lens of which I have learned to view the very world around me.

No, instead she skitters, moving away from a touch so welcome as I sit to myself, left alone to ponder all of the wonders that make up my own existence. The human experience is the animal experience - how I feel inside is who I am. It's difficult, looking back, to separate instinct from reality when knee-deep within a stinking marsh. Give up your flesh to appease the greater good and man will deem you selfish for keeping your bones.

I am a man, tried and true, One man making his way in this world where my supposed kin have viewed me as anything but. It's difficult to connect with oneself, when one doesn't even feel remotely human, like some kind of caged animal, forced into domestication for the greater good of the economy, yet another invention thought up by a man on his throne somewhere in the ancient past.

But animals trade, do they not? Our closest relative: apes, transferring items of value in order to gain such in turn. But we, man, so self-destructive wreaking havoc wherever we go, come along only to introduced them to ideas and concepts beyond what the simple mind can comprehend. Instead of love and warmth for our distant relatives, we offer cold hard cash for mere amusement. And they bite at the hand that feeds them just as we do: another species destined to meet its demise.

We have domesticated ourselves. Man, a primate evolved from a line of apes that branches and coils in all different forms. For every possibility there ever was, I was cursed with the higher intelligence attributed to self-awareness, and so all I do is sit, I can do nothing but sit. Shuffle a deck of cards infinitely and at some point the deck shall return to its original formation. All we can hold tangible is our own existence, so why then must I be born into this godforsaken place in which the rich and wealthy step on us rats. Why have I been brought into such a place where different equals lesser, and those that are 'special' are denied the interaction that makes us human?

If not into the mind and body of an animal with a greater herd instinct than our own, into a place I can truly feel I belong, then allow the earth to reclaim me, allow Mother Nature to wrap me within her gentle embrace and whisper sweet nothings to me while the very life drains from this already lifeless form. Take this body, for I never wanted it anyway. Take this body, and take this mind, for the only good it ever did was enable me to comprehend the very hellscape we live in today.