Box

Sometimes, I feel like nothing. My perception of the world nose-dives, the picture in my mind's eye burns and I'm left as ashes, worthless, useless, a relic of the past stuck in the future.

I don't know if it's a problem with being an adolescent or my mind on stress, but it doesn't matter right now. All that matters is that I know how to stop it from getting any worse.

I grab a book. I boot up a game. I start to type. I sit down and look outside. Breaking the cage I place around myself not through force, but by pretending I'm outside it, by becoming someone or something else, immersing myself in another world.

I become the detective, eschewing witnesses and pulling apart a case, piece by piece.

I become the commander, the enemy pressing on my lines, the trenches broken, the combat overwhelming but the situation normal.

I become the stereotypical teenager. I have all the faults I wish I had, the perfections I could only wish to achieve, the normality that I strive for every day.

I become the world, nothing, and yet everything, doomed to be destroyed yet turning in time.

It's like being the child in their box, where anything and everything can happen, your eyes don't have to see it, your friends don't have to know about. You make it all up out of a certain insecurity, a subconcious desire to be more, or less, than you already are; to be, at least, what you aren't.

Then something will tear and claw at you until you come out. Homework to be done. Girls to talk to. Expectations to be met, to be let down, to be repeated ad noseum until you finally meet them, no matter the cost on your mind. Your eyes begin to twitch, they need to see more than you're forced to. Your neck cranes and wrenches uncontrollably to break free from the shackles that hold you in your culture's collective gaze.

Your body begins to rot not from the diseases of the world, but from the sterilization of society.

But at the end of the day, barrelling through the door, collapsing on the bed, sagging into the sheets, you remember.

You'll always have your box.