The Transplant

From the part of the world where wind sounds like death, where cold carves on his bones a sad sonnet, where his heart fails to keep a rhythm the same way he fails to figure out who he is. From the part of the world where he sees the eyes of old men filled with misery every time he takes a bus, where he fails to remember childhood memories and even doubt that he had one, where he overthinks about solipsism instead of thermodynamics, where a fraction of his soul vanishes day after another, with every tear, with every laughter; from there he always wonders how he ended up here, in this place, with this mind, with this body, with these scars and their ache.

From the part of the world where dreams, rare as they are, die at the fronts of coffee shops and narrow sidewalks, where living in heartache is the default way of living and where learned helplessness isn’t learned anymore, it’s inherited. […] From the part of the world where the first fundamental rule while raising a child is to teach them that everything that is not them wants to harm them, to live in passive fear and to know that things do not normally work out, that if things work out it’s a lucky anomaly. From the part of the world where tears of agony bruise peoples’ cheeks every second of every day, he stands confused, he tries to fight back tears, the feeling of his eyes twitching and frogs jumping up and down his throat hits him hard, it’s too brutal. He heavily breathes, his heart pounds and punches the inside of his chest. He aches.

Photograph: “Ache” | Grace Kathryn -flikr