Persona | Teen Ink

Persona

August 8, 2009
By checkeredpaint BRONZE, Santa Ana, California
checkeredpaint BRONZE, Santa Ana, California
4 articles 0 photos 0 comments

When the world loses color before your very eyes, metaphorically of course, you have no idea what to do, literally. The only colors left are red and grey and black, with smidges of white, but to be fair, the last three aren’t even colors. They’re shades, and three years of art are more than enough to teach you that.

Long-winded sentences aside, you fall, suddenly and nearly instantly depressed by some trigger you can’t even understand, and you’re left just another part of that messed up population of the world known as teenagers.

Then again, you were a part of them, and you can’t become something you already were. So you go from laughter to reticence, from desiring human interaction to desiring nothing more than complete solitude in a matter of seconds, and no one, not even you can understand how or why. You only know this is messed up, and you don’t like it at all. But what can you do but force that grin on your face, even though both you and everyone else in the world can tell it’s fake, can tell there’s no way you’re enjoying this, even as you laugh lightly and say the same things you normally would have. Anyone close enough to you can tell: you’re more curt, more susceptible to blatant ignoring instead of responding; and that’s better for all parties involved, really. It’s better when you’re being silent as opposed to when you’re yelling and screaming, shooting sarcastic, biting remarks left and right in a still conscious attempt not to rip your skin open in a fit of pure rage.

You don’t know how you fall back out of these moods – rather, you just do: you just fall in, and you just fall out. There’s no explanation, and even if there was, you aren’t sure if you really want to know. It’s easier to just accept things as they are, no questions asked, anyway.

So it’s fine to you if you have to bite back everything you really want to say for something you don’t and can’t mean at the moment. If this is how it has to be, then it’s fine. It is.

Except how it really, totally isn’t – never has been, never can be, not now, not in the past, not ever.

But if things are going to happen anyway, whether or not you struggle and fight, you figure you might as well resign yourself to the consequences of your past, your actions, your personality. They’re your responsibility to keep in check after all, and it’s not like you expect or even want anyone else to ‘help’ you with deal with yourself. They don’t need to deal with your unnecessary s*** when they’ve got their own to deal with, and you wouldn’t ask them anyway.

In a way, you’re running away – as far and as fast for as long as you can, even with the prescience that you’ll break in the end anyway.

But in a way, you’re fighting – as hard as you can and with all the strength you can somehow muster up on your own. But then you think, “What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”*

But of course, as you always have, you disregard that – despite it being your own mind that brought it up to you in the first place, you know you’re only ignoring it because you can’t figure out how you could possible argue against such sound logic.

As you always have, of course.

You’re stuck in the same loop of thought; the train never stops or rests, and why would it? It’s just a machine, after all, with no feelings or emotions, no nerves or nervous system to break it down merely because of just some external interruption.

At this point, you even laugh a little. You wish you could be a machine. Life would be so much easier that way – because it wouldn’t be life anymore. You understand why people die every day: it’s far, far easier to die than it is to live.

You’re not dishonoring or demeaning their deaths, though. The act of living at all requires more courage than you think anyone can possibly comprehend – even God. He doesn’t live, after all. He just sends others to live for Him. And it’s not even like you believe in Him. The whole concept of faith eludes you. Believing without any sort of proof? What kind of misguided farce is that?

You have so little ‘faith’ in the future of this world that you can hardly believe the fact that you’re usually an optimist – a cynical one in more ways than you’d like to admit, but an optimist nonetheless.

But you’re tired now – tired of thinking like this, tired of thinking at all. So you close your eyes. The world won’t change so quickly, and you don’t believe people can ever really change. But maybe, at the very least, your mood will by the time you get up.

You can at least believe in that much.

The author's comments:
* From Solidarity Forever by Ralph Chaplin

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