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If Borders Could Stop A Sadness

Our fascination with lines sprung from a need to avoid our dotted existence. The biggest secrets are the lessons that are always practised in the opposite way; for how could you fill in the gaps when you're always conditioned to romanticise them. We carry bags whenever we leave because it's impossible to know what we would shed and not all places are as kind as home. But I feel like I'm forgetting something, beyond those two pairs of clothes, outdated cologne and a new toothbrush. I consciously wait for myself to say that some distant future holds promise, that what I don't remember shan't be held against me; but I never owned my thoughts and therefore I couldn't carry them away.

There's nothing worse when someone's hope clashes with your lacking. In the lazy eavesdropping of a spring afternoon, their embraces are always so full of love, yet their hope only induces a weeping in you, soiling their shoulders. The sense of belonging is long gone, gradually worn away with the friction of the wind, which only steals pieces of you to prevent your escape.

We do not say fanciful words when moments require it nor do we even acknowledge the uncertainty of a parting. That's what makes some of us stubborn optimists and others outcast cynics, which regardless causes ironic segregation. Another villain is time, it's the comfort when a watch sits on your palm rather than your wrist, being constantly wiped. The decay would be visible if evenings were viewed from the smallest windows possible, covered with the shiniest of glasses.

There's a strange sadness with not knowing anyone around you, like some stray bird that decided to follow an unknown flock to the tropics without knowing if its talons could break coconut shells. I write back to the feathers I leave everywhere, most now adrift in the hearts and minds of countless people who merely nod at the sight of me. My head against the smooth descent of a car, when I know the destination is far but I do not know if answers shall come today or in a fortnight or when I blasphemously close my eyes. These tall buildings scare me, and I climb until street lights have to bend to see my face and even then struggle to find my eyes.

I'm not saying care is something that I lack, neither is company a scarce resource in all of this. But to an impostor, his reality is never something that feels true to him, and in that he loses all conviction in it. This is a direct conclusion of the laws that govern us, that my disguise is just a motion picture behind the cataracts of my eye, that what I present is with the knowledge that what I see doesn't feel real. And so that split second when you enter a dark road and the road refuses to show you a way, you suddenly lose this play in front of you, that if reapers struck sudden, you would've guessed it coming.

All that I say only holds at places, not the borders between them because they'd decide what I'm leaving behind. Am I abdicating a mother's worry, a lover's longing, a son's responsibility? I do not know, I can only conjecture to some point if vagabonds keep running because of this or if hitchhikers strand themselves in the hope that someone familiar gets them home. Abandonment feels better than defeat, but is awfully coward. We mark lines that we cross, but they're oblivious to our intentions of crossing such that a deserter and a valiant receive the same pity. 

  

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