That Nagging Voice

I see how you love your house. In fact, you seethe when anybody calls it one. Isn't it a home with well-cleaned corners, books kept in order, every piece of furniture chosen by your imagination's call? You try all you can to un-see the dust every time it catches your eye... hair-raising is any possibility of vermin secretly lurking under drawers, covers, slots where the windows shut in tight. The prim zone, the clean zone, the picture perfect haven to be presented to anyone that arrives from the outside.Untarnished, brave, not a curtain out of place. 

Now replace all of what I said with yourself. Allow the hair to pitch in for the curtains, the eyes to proxy for the windows, the mouth to pose as the door that is forever welcoming, the mind to be the unflinching air perfumed by the purification device. Nothing amiss, nothing at all, so that not even the mirror can betray. 

But to hell with all the pretense, you wish sometimes. All those times when you want to withdraw from incessant fight, bawl like you could bring the roof down (even if it was only your own and with wretched sorrow you'd have to watch the world move on), blink in the dark when all of your known universe is asleep. 

Only you know what's eating you from inside. You swear you don't need a weather forecast, an online test or even that vanguard of a friend to tell you otherwise. You just know that the act must be put aside. That the gorgeous mask brimming with bright red, blue, yellow, has the other side. The side sticking to your skin, perennially reminding you something is just not right. 

Under a breath that's riddled with chaotic movement, you want to sigh, cry, be on the high of finally listening to that voice that won't cease, that won't deny, what you want banished and perhaps vanished. Under that breath, the excuses fly, thick and fast, stories of rigour, stories of allies, stories that won't need you to try any harder, longer, faster, stories that will forever hide. 

Hide your truth. Hide it in a box covered with fancy ribbons, swirls of handmade delight. Hide so well you will forget what you were really like. Before it set in, before it spread its long arms to grab your thighs, your eyes, your whole body, your entire mind covered with acceptance, surrender, cynicism or even a humour so wry. 

But that nagging voice, creator of all your existential crisis, is really saying, you can love your house. Through chipped walls, plumbing trials, furniture that perhaps looks too old. The way you can love yourself despite the gazillion mistakes that have put a blemish on your character. Love despite that other brazen voice, asking you to stop, shut up, curl in, sleep off. Love not because you must but because you can. 

Like a warrior, a child, a poet, a mad hatter, a butterfly and every other possible archetype to steady your sight. To stop chasing, to unhinge so that the pile slides. And you can start from scratch. From childlike flight. 

Unboxing begins with acceptance. 

This is your chance. 

Keep it alive.