How (not) to be a Boy

There’s an image in my head, he’s fragmented and held together with masking tape. A Frankenstein of images and memories to uphold the belief that he exists. 

Shine a spotlight right here, and he is exactly right, but don’t shine it on those parts over there, please.

A life lived in many chapters. There are tethered zones to explain who I am. Each piece of the picture is stuck to these tethers.

Let me let go, he is not perfect, no matter how much I try to convince myself he is. He is not real, he is a balancing act.

An illusion made of light, shadow, and clipped images. 

I tell myself it’s easier this way because I like to look at him. To work so hard on something, it makes me proud. He is the largest and longest creative project I have ever embarked on. 

But the adhesive on the tape begins to loosen. A breeze blows a piece down and sometimes I don’t have the energy to stick it back up again, even if I do, it doesn’t look right anymore, it has become altered. 

The pieces are delicate, they’re all layered so densely you cannot tell they’re suspended on these ethereal tethers. All built over something long hidden. 

Please don’t touch, don’t move anything, it’s too flimsy. Those parts don’t make sense, they don’t fit with him at all, I’m telling you please. Just stand back, stand exactly here and you’ll see what I want you to see. 

And I can’t hold it all together sometimes. Sometimes everything starts to fall down and overall it’s just misshapen. 

Black tar spills through the gaps left by the fallen memories, I start to scream but it fills my lungs. This is wrong, it’s not right, this will destroy all the work I’ve done, I don’t want to forget him, I don’t want him to die. He deserves a chance too. 

And these thoughts, this thinking, it ends in nothing. These words do not breathe, I breathe, these memories don’t live anymore but I do. This is nothing more than a justification to suffocate myself. 

I want to say I don’t care anymore, that I exist underneath this all, and will forever. But there is no waking up tomorrow to everything being different, there is still all the life in between.

So burn it down, reduce it to ashes, let those clippings catch fire and turn to embers that float high into the sky. What use is there in archiving, recording, and studying him when I can simply destroy it all and choose to forget.

I can burn it all down and live each day believing, knowing, hoping that one day I will wake up to find that something new has grown in the soil that the ash fertilised.