I submitted a few poems to a few poetry magazines. I'm hoping for good news, but somehow I know life isn't that easy.
Well, not somehow. I just know that life isn't that easy.
If it was, nobody would commit suicide. Nobody would be unhappy. They all would put in the amount of focus I put in my poetry-an hour for an idea and just a minute for the actual words- and would succeed, and have a happily ever after.
But that isn't the case. I am not going to succeed, not when I am still young and inexperienced and in front of everything I write about myself, I include the words new and emerging. Tara, a new and emerging writer.
I feel fake. I am not emerging. I have never been dunked under water-the kind of image the word emerging puts in my mind-, or under a shroud of invisibility everyone assumes they have. I have always been there, just off to the side where no one could see. But they could see, if they showed a little effort.
And that is where I fail as a human being. I must not assume anyone and everyone would show a little effort. Nobody shows effort for a stranger half a world away. The ones that do would be the crazy ones, the ones that hope someone would show effort about them as well.
Normal people-though that is very much generalizing- show effort for their own lives. Their own family. Their own friends, pets, associates and words. They always make an effort to brighten the ideas that they have or share with others, and hide the thoughts of someone different.
Success must be capturing the thoughts of everyone. A word, a sentence the whole world would agree and love. I must write something that is relatable, that seems good, that is perfect in the sense of how many souls I enrapture.
And I cannot do that.
I cannot.
I am not a nice person. I am not a beautiful stranger, that can whirl the world inside my sentences and show them what they are all missing.
They are lucky, that they don't have all these words rotting away in their chests. I sometimes wish I didn't have them as well, so I wouldn't cry about the things I never had in the first place. My words demand my attention so loudly that they drown me and drag me back into my mind, stopping me from emerging out of my thoughts.
Oh. I do emerge. That is...nice to know.
But the one truth remains the same, how I am not emerging to the world. I am emerging outside my own head, never the world. The world could see me, even if I was captured in my own thoughts. I could paint the world with my words until the sky turned black and the ground turned blue, and they would not show the effort.
Effort is something I cannot beg of you. Not when I do not do the same thing as well.
Selfishness is one of humanity's original sins, but it is not original. Every animals shows selfishness. Being selfish does not even have to do with one's self. If you love someone, all acts of selfishness could be directed at that person. You could be selfish for your loved ones, your friends and family.
But you cannot be selfish about the whole world.
The world does not pay you back for what it has taken from you. It does not give you back your innocence, your purity, your time. Instead, it gives you something you cannot exchange in words. What the world-and whoever god you believe in- gives you back is ineffable.
And that I believe, is the reason so many people believe with infallible logic that life is unfair. They can name every single thing the world has taken from them with bitter words-my child, my time, my money. They cannot do the same with what they are given, because they do not grasp the fundamental something that the world provides them with. And when people cannot understand something, they turn to raw emotions, and anger and sorrow fill the hearts of these people who think that life is unfair.
And yes, life is unfair. Maybe that something the world gives us is too big and too meaningful so that the small unfairness of life can be seen as ridiculous when compared, but again, we do not see what the world has given us. So it's natural for us to believe life is unfair.
Some people have an artful way with words, and some people have a creative idea that gives them a better starting line. Some people are horrible with the words inside their mind, and when those people write a jumble of sentences waste paper. Yes. It's unfair.
But I hope that every time I lament that life is unfair and that I suck at writing, I will lament in different and original ways. In ingenious ways of speech, and clever little forms of sentences. And I hope that all this lamenting will gather and make me a better writer, a one that knows every way their characters lament and complain and be happy.
I hope my writings appeal to some people like me, teenagers sitting at home and feeling sad and alone and people that cannot stop thinking about things that are unfair. I want them to recite my words in their minds, alone or together, in happy or sad times.
And I want my words to stay with my loved ones, in a way I myself cannot be.
Forever.