After Certain Events

  1. MASK
    1. No one seems to care. Fixating on certain thoughts, such as how you managed to create a tradition out of wanting to be desired, can lead your body to strange places. I will let anyone damage me. A neighbor walks me home. He is kind because he is obliged to be. Yes, I keep underwhelming those around me, however, I still expect to fall into the arms of strangers.
    2. Why did I have to waste my adolescence? What more can a ruthless God escape blame for?
    3. Should I have known, then, that by these acts of inquiry, I was further isolating myself from the world, that I had engaged in enough deliberate ignorance to turn love into an experiment that was restricted by social norms and, therefore, insufficient?
  2. DISPOSITION
    1. The problem with American Romanticism is that rejecting the precepts of rationality can amplify our natural inclination to seek oblivion, and, by extension, weaken the chains that tether us to a uniform reality.
    2. This information is irrelevant until you spend the day cleaning mirrors you (unfortunately) own, and then, as if to further compound your solitude, mistake your reflection for an old friend. There is a sudden emptiness. Most people are forgotten as soon as they leave a room.
    3. Romanticism is a misnomer. Their emphasis on emotional honesty can be reframed as the addiction we develop to the volatile personalities belonging to the men who sit across from us, and, sooner or later, the annihilation of our perception of love. Emerson, the Romantic, said men are what their mothers make them. On the scale of elementary particles, a definition that follows is that men consist of atoms, which depend on quarks and leptons; or rather more, men are how much space they assume. The use of “men” is a misnomer. Mothers are mostly held accountable for how their daughters are perceived. My mother taught me how to take up space. This is also a misnomer. She, in fact, taught me how to wear a mask. Since then, almost everything has changed about the world. We used to pick flowers on an ageless planet.
    4. Now I am unrecognizeable.
  3. DISCIPLINE
    1. We are not offered an escape from a world that was not made for us. The human condition is, in abstract, any reaction to the inferiority we resign to. If I refuse to explain why, at the end of the day, there remains a need to rehearse a particular disposition, then, I can maintain the image of smug indifference I’ve fabricated for you all.
    2. Prior to learning their names, I want to tell my secrets to every stranger I come by. Each time I survive, I think ‘please, let me be a different person in the morning.’ I do not know who I was before today, but, I do know the difference that could have been made.
  4. INCIDENT
    1. I am drawn to women whose lives are discipline, men whose lives are following orders. Anyway, I have not loved someone I haven’t feared more. These partial understandings are starting to feel like I will never find a distraction from my bitterness.
  5. POSESSION
    1. Heaven is said to possess an exact copy of the Quran. Translations are considered to be an interpretation due to their supposed inaccuracy.The truth is everyone, even God, refuses to understand you.
  6. BLAME
    1. Pursued by a tiger, he woke up to find he’d been eaten. I was, at last, in possession of weeping Paradise. The power struggle between two individuals is often mistaken as the sweetness that accompanies periods of reckless abandon. A man’s desire to continue their own substance can turn violent.
    2. Due to the prevalence of color blindness among animals, tigers are invisible to their prey until they are ready to kill. It was too late by the time I noticed. No one warned me. If we apply Darwin’s theory of natural selection to either context, then, it is obvious that I am to blame, and consequently, I will always be to blame moving forward.
    3. As a reminder: men weep and women sweat.
  7. MINIMIZE
    1. Predators are only interested in their outcomes. I will never eat the flesh of a dead animal. You should consider the cruelty. Women live their lives as worms on a hook. They don’t know what else to do. I used to be outraged. It is hard to know when you’ve triggered an instinctive behavior. If your parents were too harsh on you, you may unconsciously submit to danger.
  8. PARDON
    1. It is important not to minimize what we all fear.

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