A Friend

All that I wanted today was to be let out. 

     I am so tired of these cages.  Life was never supposed to be an enclosure, keeping you from all the things that are within your reach except for the steel bars and layers of windowless walls and miles of barbwire.  Life was not always like this, but that is what it has become. 

     A nightmare of the realest sense.  There are monsters and fears and limitations that can overpower and frighten a person of any age, but here, everything is so much scarier. 

     I think we all reach a point in our lives when we stop looking for monsters under our beds, noticing they have moved, or perhaps, disappeared.  For some people, the monsters never show up again.  And for others, the monsters live inside them. 

     Sometimes the monsters are us.  We are our own bullies, our own personal hell on earth. 

     And it's difficult to escape something that is attached to both your body and your mind.  So we try to kill the us on the outside, kill the thing on the inside. 

     Suicide is an option, as death always is.  People cringe when they hear the word because they don't realize that death is a friend.  Death is like the moon; it never leaves.  The sun sees us at our brightest moments, and then tires of us, and leaves us alone without looking back. 

     The moon is different, a loyal friend.  The moon realizes how different we are in the dark.  Death is like the moon in the way that is never forsakes us.  With open arms, it follows us around like a shadow, waiting patiently for the moment when we realize the world is no longer a safe place. 

      Other times, death is too easy, too generous, too charitable.  Sometimes we deserve a messy death, a cruel existence.  We failed to become ourselves and so we must suffer the consequence of being a ghost with a beating heart.  In our time on the earth, we did not spare the world of our face, and karma wants vengeance. 

     Along the way, we have grown tired of being perfect.  Or, rather, seeming perfect.  We were never any good to begin with.  And although we should have been stronger, should have tried harder, should have been a person instead of a shell of a person, we all just want a friend. 

     And that's what starving is: a friend.  For the rest of your life, you will never find another person who is so wholly concerned with you and only you.  Starving tears at our body and pollutes our mind, but a friend is a friend.