“No! I don’t want to play anymore”

The sentence arrives before I do, I find myself in an unfamiliar setting. The high frequencies of children’s banter inflict an increasing amount of consciousness upon me until I begin to recognize my surroundings.

One of them shouts “You act like I'm not even here!”, which feels less like an accusation and more like a diagnosis. They are arguing about something,but I don’t know what.

Sensory awareness creeps up on me too quickly: the grass beneath me is tickling my legs and the strands feel like surgical blades on my skin. I’ll find another place to continue my rest, away from public parks, children and prying eyes.

Yesterday, I got into an argument with myself. Shame knocked at my door and invited herself in to share a cup of tea together. We started bickering. Her accusatory stare conveyed what she didn’t want to say out loud. She implies I constantly betray myself. Oftentimes, she rearranges my words until they sound nothing like me. I find Shame to be a rather simple minded woman who cannot wrap her head around nuances; she has archival tendencies to oversimplify subtleties so she can properly catalogue behaviour. I explained to her that sometimes, I need to put my personhood on hold to make myself more palatable to other people; some rooms require a smaller version of me:

“It’s the social contract. It’s a matter of adapting yourself to the situation.”

We bickered with the intimacy of twins, exchanged a couple insults and fell silent after a few minutes. She lingered at the table after our quarrel, scanning the furniture as if it might reveal something about me.

Like a traveler thirsty for a nap, I start to rush towards what loosely seems to be an abundant oasis of sleep. At a distance, under this leggy tree, it seems quiet enough and this time around the grass evokes long fur.

I look up to stare at the leaves dancing in the wind, but I can't quite fall asleep. It feels like one of those days where your body wants rest but your mind rushes through unnecessary thoughts. I see the leaves dancing in quite the calculated manner; I’m sensing awareness in their disciplined choreography. Air is rearranging itself in a way that feels intimate, leaving me with the reasonable suspicion nature might be attempting communication. The canopy gathers itself into a face and I almost instantly recognize the scary woman that is Mother Nature. The light threads through her eyes in intense blinding beams; her presence is quite overwhelming. Expectedly, she doesn’t care to greet me. I can’t even tell if she wants me to acknowledge her presence! I’m hesitant to converse with her;Mother Nature is very sensitive and I’m worried about upsetting her, or even causing an outburst. I suspect she prefers observation, so I’ll let her look.

I wake up in my cold bed feeling like a compromise. Every morning, I soak my bread in runny egg yolks, eating out of fancy fine porcelain crockery, ornamented by this gold-plated aluminum rim, which makes it unsuited for microwaving. I often eat cold food, for the sake of aesthetics. Without fail, I will always pick a quaint hassle over convenience. There is an egotistical sense of superiority I get out of doing things the hard way, which makes me think my bearings are not entirely superficial. But today, I'll eat out of an ugly plate, the ugliest one I can find. My life has felt like too much of a fantasy lately. Once upon a time I would have enjoyed this detachment. Over time, that sort of thing only gets worse, I can't tell if I've lost control or if I've become overly repressed. Things that are not pleasant to the eyes ground me into reality. No curation, no conscious choice to model my reality the way I want it to be, I have no choice but to take it as it is. Yesterday I should have talked to Mother Nature, I should have asked her to make her earthly creations unbearably unattractive. For now, I should just focus on the sad food that awaits me.

Breakfast was stale, like I wanted it to be. All my plates were quite pleasant, so I ate my egg straight off the table. It did succeed in grounding me. It did not succeed in fulfilling my wishes for an ugly day. I tried looking for the tiniest bits of misfortune: perhaps a spelling mistake on a road sign, perhaps my bus arriving late, maybe spilling coffee on my cream shirt or bruising my knee. I saw a moldy apple on the sidewalk, but even the decay was symmetrical. I suppose I can't bully the world into honesty.

My earliest memory of control is a star I wished upon. I asked the night to feed me lies, but instead it gave me a mirror. Looking into it, I expected my reflection, but a portrait was staring back at me. I saw a blue-blooded lady satiated with pretense; She had eaten all my fibs! And yet, her greedy heart still craved falsification.

For much of my life, she imposed her ideals onto me; She has a real appetite for order. Miss Royalty forcefully curated the landscape of my life to her own taste, painting each unpigmented event with a thick coat of red paint. Even when looking into the distance, my future was tinted red herring. To this day, I often feel full beyond comfort. The star fed me Thy Majesty’s fresh baked fabrications which sat heavily at the bottom of my stomach, they weren’t as tasty as I had hoped.

Today I found myself craving Mother Nature’s decisiveness. I hop in the shower on the prowl. I look into the water droplets in hopes of seeing her face again, but I can only make out glimpses of my own distorted reflection.

In my garden, the flower stems stand up like a spine, the petals curve like eyelashes, the soil smells of sweat; yet I can’t recognize her anywhere. I start digging into the ground, through dirt and pebbles small as teeth, but no traces of Mother Nature to be found. I wonder if her presence only makes itself known when unexpected? I’ll just pretend not to care.

I borrow the authority of nature to explain what I don't comprehend. Objectivity speaks for nature, it’s science, it’s inherent, it's just the way things are. Subjectivity looks better when draped in ornate fabrics of objectivity that are ostentatious enough to distract from its unintelligible silouhette. This morning, I think I woke up feeling like a misunderstanding. It was hard to embody carelessness when all I wanted was answers. Perhaps I'm mistaking my personhood for an enigma. I always think of Mother Nature when I need to feel level-headed.  Somehow, I see myself in her.

On a leafy spot near my flowers, I lay down to wait, or rather, I pretend to callously rest. I can try to shift my focus on myself. What do I feel? My knees feel dry like the desert, itchy and rough. As I scratch them, the claws digging up my skin are irritating me. I begin to drift, my mind floods with blooming thoughts of refusing to think. I look up as I brush the hair foliage out of my eyes, and there she is! Alas, it worked!

She’s been appearing sporadically throughout most of my years. The first time I noticed her was a while ago, on a decisive afternoon. I remember the tree bark’s wrinkles waving around to signal a presence without ever committing to reveal Mother’s visage. The wood texture’s motions intensified at the foot of the trunk, near a cluster of fungus blooming out of the tree’s skin. She was prompting me to notice the caterpillar draped over the mushrooms, he had an air of bureaucratic indifference on his face.

That caterpillar had the nosiness of a toddler but posed questions as though filing paperwork. The truth is, I had answers for none of his inquiries. The questions were deeply personal, too broad and too complex for lucid rhetoric. I tried answering him through my red-lacquered logic, rehearsing myself into something comprehensible. He however constantly refuted my narration, demanding a response not reliant on scenery. It was irritating.

“You don’t possess the omniscience it takes to contradict me on this!”

He reminds me of shame. I feel like both never really try to understand me, they just look for blemishes in my character.

This time, she’s borrowed the clouds to drape her silhouette. Her presence is still quite as frightening as it usually is, Mother Nature never beats around the bush. I don’t find that negative in any way; her inevitability feels stable. She’s never demanded explanations from me, which is relieving for a change. In her presence I feel like I can operate on a basis of axioms where I don't have to understand the architecture of my own becoming. I just am, everything just is… how simple is that!

The sun is setting. She’s scattered across wispy cirrus clouds, I can make up an ear here and a finger there, none of it is really harmonious. I’ve been laying here for so long I can't even tell if I am observing her or being observed by her. It feels like one of those days when thoughts transition like seasons. I look down at the girl looking up at me.