my mother had told me, since the day she realised i could do math with no one’s help, that- sweetheart, you are destined for great things. she would give me encouragement in the form of insults and taunts- once she called me a failure for not getting a perfect score on a test. that was the day i resented her.
my friends never talked about themselves, so it was on me to fill the holes in the conversations- asking about their family, their studies, their life, if they were seeing anyone. i did not have a life- my mother had not allowed me. so i asked about theirs. and i lived my life through theirs. so to complete my story, this narrative curse i was stuck with since i was a kid, of hatred of everything left unsaid, that i probed. i needed it like a human needs air. how else was i to compose The Greatest Story Ever- My Life?
i never realised they did not care for it, and they did not care to ask me of my life; as far as i knew, they were unaware of my creative project. they answered. they gave me some paragraphs of joy, some of sadness, some of bitterness. of course, i had to feel it. how else was i going to live my work? it was the most important thing. never giving up on my passion.
so i related. i took part in their feelings, and i made it my own. a mirage from a curtain pulled apart for the audience to have their fill. i put in elements of my life in their own. and i say life, but it was not one. it was one liners i remembered, like those statements and phrases we remember from our favourite shows and books that become famous quotes. i injected them, curated them into The Greatest Story Ever.
as a writer writes their play, and as i went about my life, we never see the words staring back at us in contempt, of the content they were arranged in to put into place on the paper. cruel things. hurtful things. we dont see how each word takes the feeling it is written to be, and makes it its own.
i did not see my friends staring back at me contempt- after all, i was busy writing The Greatest Story Ever. i did not, therefore, see when they broke free from the page, letters haphazard, calling my life’s work meaningless, rendering all i knew of my passion and my work as empty, dead paper staring back at me.
envy comes as a pimple, a small inconvenience. you ignore it, hoping it goes away as the time goes on and the seasons change and the years pass by. but it festers. you dont pay attention, you have work to do. and then one day, as you sit across the mirror, looking at yourself, truly, for the first time since a long time ago, and you see now it is a boil. an oozing, ugly, horrible boil.
the thing about a boil is no one pretty wants to be near it. they think it is not something that seriously affects anything, but they dont ever want to be the one to hug or kiss or be with you. because of the boil. because the boil is always there.
however, the worst part is, the one who gave me the boil, is perfect. everyone wants them, everyone loves them. everyones wants to be them. i want to be them. but what everyone does not know is that they have the ability to give that boil, because that is all they are made out of.
repressed, wrinkly, scraped off boils. but those scars remain, drawn in manners to resemble their beauty. and you think you want to be near them, until one day, they decide that you are just too pretty for them. or they decide that i am forgetting my skin.
i used to want to scrape off my boil too. to be pretty. to have people. but i did not like the scars as i saw myself in the mirror- the writer of The Greatest Story Ever. no, this is not the face of that masterpiece. this is the face of those words- those contemptful words all in combinations of ugly things.
i want to keep my boil. i want to acknowledge it. i want people to know- the author knew of mistakes, knew of life, knew of realisation. they started again, their passion never dimmed, but now the pen in their hand writes the thoughts of its master, guided by the passion of its maker. a story of words of their making, never cruel or hurtful.
but the writer thinks. they had chosen to scrape of their boils. one of those boils was mine. i did not hold up the scalpel, but i did nothing to stop as it grew. and while i kept mine, it was not wrong of them to not keep theirs.
but what i think, as i write My Life, as i keep at my passion and my words, is that everyone has the ability to control their play. to write their words how they feel it fit. the pen does not recognise an imposter- it only fits its master. and while they contributed to My Life, i contributed to theirs. Maybe in the same way they did, or maybe something different.
it is okay to feel ugly looking at the pretty people. it is okay to feel envy looking at the people who kept the boil, knowing you could never do that, or vowing to do that moving forward- whichever way the pen decides to flow on their paper.
what matters is my own. to feel pretty as i go in this world, and find people like myself. i do not want a redo. i do not want those words to come back to my page. i am happy i knew them, and i wish them well. and i want it to be okay to understand the plays of others.
for we are all puppeteers of our pens, writing this play we all call Our Lives.
