I get it.

Your life’s together. And I’m still in school figuring out what I want to make of myself.

You have your family, and I have my crippling anxiety and depression-

Complimented with a bottle of Vlad to wash it all down.

Nowhere on this map is there a detour, and yet I’ve been off the main road for some time. I think I need a new map, one that shows me every twist, and turn.

“No time to go shopping for one”,

you all say,

“buying a new one is too much trouble.”

Well, your maps are all the same; flat, drawn upon, written in by someone who has bared this journey far before your creation.

I am the map maker, away to adventure I run.

I must acknowledge, first, the dissonance among us: why make only one map for us,

Those so apart we won’t even know each other’s name at the reunion cash bar?

In what way does my decision to make maps instead of read them concern you?

You stand there and judge me for who I am, without taking

into consideration what I’ve been through.The bane

of my creativity lurking behind my shoulder,

blocking and fogging all aspects of my livelihood: Why won’t you leave? When will you learn that your proximity to me is only pain and suffering for those around? My attention has gone nowhere, yet, look! here you are, trying time and time again to take it, preaching that you and me should be the same.

Same is as same does, our differences forcing us lightyears apart. Wipe away your deceiving inhibitions; you live only in fear.

My demons may be bigger and stronger than yours, but in no way do they drag me down. Leap

off the cliff every once and a while, just don’t actually jump off a cliff, I can’t be having that blood be on my hands. Even in death,

You shoot me down. No hiding from their ridicule, these unjust matters of the gentrification of a free mind:

“Lock him up!”

“Hemade him jump!"

“We can’t trust him, look at him!”

kill him. Kill him. Kill him! KILL HIM!
ENOUGH!

Those Sunday strolls with my mother

speak louder now than ever before. Her words slipping

through the grey matter, buttered and sliding about,

nothing to grab onto. Dry now, they grip harder than ever.

“Wherever you go, whatever you do, you need to work harder than everyone else to get what you want.”

The bitter butter that she lathered this line with took too long to burn off.

Reality stricken, my heart aches and cracks between the stitches. Unaware

of the knife’s course, no brace was made. “In no way can anything prepare you for this. This is not YOUR fault”

Not your exact words, but pretty damn close. Our societal blame game can be easily backed to patient zero, that piece of shit in the mirror!

He yelled, not me! He pushed you to the edge, not me! He chose this path, not me!

This man needs to be taken

18 miles out and put down for what he’s done. No longer can we let him push us around, tell us what to do, make our decisions himself.

This man is a threat, one which I can no longer look in the eye. Take him away and kill him...

Finally he’s gone. The burning map being all that is left of this man.