It’s queer; 

the way life destroys your expectations. 

It’s inexplicable; 

the way it pushes you to your knees, then mollifies and cajoles you as if you were a child, wheedling for you to rise up, rise up, rise UP again. 

It’s unfortunate; 

the way one sorry episode, one blurted name, is transmogrified into a permanent fixture that dances at the back of your skull, repeating that singular incident until it's the featured installment in your saga.

It’s undesirable;

the way you color, abashed, at every little titter that reaches your ears, blue blood never ceasing to crash pinkly through your veins and  paint you into a picture-perfect laughingstock. 

It’s impossible;

that you cannot seem to remember happier days, and yet you must keep moving, keep moving, keep treading on concrete feet and ghost-like, spectral limbs. Toward the end of the rainbow; those promised lush pastures, toward that cleansing milk and viscous, stickybun-sweet honey. 

It’s altruistic;

the way others desire to dole out charity, to embrace you so tightly that the aberrations can simply be squashed out, out, OUT of your characterization. 

It’s hopeless;

the way your heart pumps and pumps and stutters and pumps, forever failing your wish that it would just. Stop. 

It’s keening;

the cry that escapes your lips as you discover that your body doesn’t obey your wishes. Your mind can’t shut down like the others’. Its gears creak and grate against each other, whirling so rapidly you know they’re bound to create a maelstrom. 

They’re sobering;

the minutes in which you realize that your path was not paved by a kind benefactor. The moments in which you find the heaviest truth. That you must find a way to escape these chapters, written without your individuality in mind.  The snap you hear when the entire novel crumples around you-- white paper walls closing in without end.