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07 February 2010 @ 02:45 pm

I was sitting outside when I realized that life is one big clusterfuck of a cause and effect.

Some unfortunate soul has sex and accidentally gets pregnant - you are born. The people you surround yourself with, your so-called 'friends' mold your character, like they are a giant cast and you're the clay fresh from the soil. Eventually, you get a job and become another one of society's flawless replications, another robot standing at attention.

The choices you make, the things you say, they come back to you in a vicious circle, like the backlash of shooting a gun. In the end, the bullet strikes, and the deer falls with its fur glistening in blood (what a perfect aim you must have, huh?).

You have a toxic conversation with someone - you say something , they say something back, you retort, they scoff, you walk away, you hate them and they hate you - years later, that conversation has transformed your opinions, the way you see people. And sometimes you see a stranger who looks just like that person and you think, 'God, that person was an ass,' but somewhere far away, they are buried six feet beneath the ground.

Someone fucks you over, you close yourself off like the yellow tape at the scene of the crime and avoid all contact with everyone like you're a leper - a cantagion - and everyone else is the innocent - the susceptible.

You look out the window, you see the daylight - beneath it you see the shit, the snow, the pavement, the gray sky reflected in the puddles of water, the drug dealers whoring the street corner with their slimy, yellow smiles and hazy brown eyes - and you wonder 'Why do I live here again?' Then, you sit alone in the back of a building and you freeze; shivering, you think to yourself 'I fucking hate winter' and, when your older, you move somewhere warm, like Florida - after a couple more years, you miss the snow as if it were your best friend, you miss how the flurries would pepper your hair, how the air materialized from your lips like smoke and you decide to move back.

You father abuses you, smacks your head against the nails of a roof like your face is a hammer made of flesh; the scars fade after he dies, but you become just like him - an emotionally-steeled, fucked up alcoholic who can't stand the sight of his own children. Because of this, your kids grow up, determined to be the most caring individuals - the most caring parents - in the world.

You smoke, you get cancer, you die and your dead body - your appendages, black like lava rock from a lack of blood circulation, and your eyes, open and glazed like a dead fish, your mouth, empty and gaping and dry - lays in the living room like a morbid still life on display. Your niece, the one you haven't seen in years, sees your corpse by accident, your empty eggshell of a body, and she freezes like ice, swallows her gag reflex and thinks to herself, 'That's death? God, I don't want to die.' And from that day on, she fears the inevitable -- until one day, she takes too many sleeping pills and death, with its uncompassionate eyes, stares her in the face, lips mouthing an unfeeling, “Hi.”

You get in a motorcycle accident and a decade later, your leg gets amputated because your bones are fucked up from the impact and the phantom pain haunts your sleep like a ghost waiting at the foot of your bed.

You go to school, you become well-versed in your trade and, as a result, you lose your passion for the thing you love the most.

You love, you lose. You dare to love again, you lose again; after that, you never love again.

You go into the army, your personality morphs into that of a giant, emotionless statue and you crush your family to pieces like the way you get pissed off and throw a vase at the wall and think, 'It was ugly anyway, so what does it matter?' What does it matter of your parents cry on Christmas day because you. Weren't. There? What does it matter if your mom and dad's first grandchild is born from because of not one, but two mistakes? What does it matter if your sister's treasured memories of running down the street with you have been replaced with your dark silhouette hoisting a television in tumultuous fury, poised to throw it at her?

A butterfly flaps its wings - years later, a tornado whips through a town, leaving destruction in its wake; lives, homes and photographs - all lost in a sea of screaming wind. Catastrophe, all because of the soundless flutter of dusty monarch wings.

I look at the causes and effects in my life, the causes and effects in lives of my family members, and I can see that life isn't always a soothing summer rain and then a rainbow. It's usually everything but, I suppose.

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