By Akshaya Ambati
I wake up every morning,
One foot hanging in my dreams, the other in reality.
Like a tightrope walker balancing between two worlds.
Forcefully, I set both onto a single realm of doom,
Where every thought inside my mortal mind clashes like thunderous waves against a fragile shore.
How hard is it to set my mind and heart on one?
Do I need to give away a certain present for a future full of probabilities?
I sit in classes, staring at faded ink on a whiteboard,
But my mind wanders to a childhood memory,
Running barefoot through fields, feeling the earth beneath my feet,
The taste of freedom and the scent of wildflowers,
A stark contrast to the stale air of classrooms and dusty corridors.
Why walk in those lifeless halls
when there are puddles under the moon?
WHY? Why must life be lived in a defined way when purpose itself isn’t definable?
With no answers in sight, I question reality sitting on finely smoothed wood,
Life is never that smooth, what's this table going to do?!
Is any of it real at all?
Are my hands tangible?
Is the water I sip genuine?
Is any of it, anything in this existence authentic at all?
Reality feels distant, a million miles away,
While my dreams provide more closure, pulling me near
My dark blue strapped watch and a fine blade take turns on my wrist,
Sometimes beads of sweat, other times crimson red,
Pain, perhaps, lends a sense of reality,
Yet it aches as the skin slowly yields, releasing a rusty scent.
A counselor is telling me it isn’t right
I know it isn’t, but how? How do I bring fragments of myself from disparate worlds?
How do I tell myself that I matter? That I am after all just an alien too
The voice in my head is always louder, everything else mirage
The screams and voices of me sobbing haunt me in slumberland.
Most of all, crying in front of my birthgivers.
I wake up, thankful it was only just another dream.
Counting days and numbers when I could be counting stars instead.
Infinite pages of knowledge are confined in rooms, yet no one ever knows how to live.
How exactly are we supposed to live?
Is it suppressing emotions for a world that chases after practically nothing worth finding joy in?
Given a voice so unique and loud for each, we silence ourselves until suffocation clouds our minds,
And just like all, we become them—living a monotonous life, wandering aimlessly.
It’s funny how all these thoughts feel so valid yet contradicting.
One second I am striving to survive, to get through each day somehow, and it’s hard,
On the other hand, it feels like that’s all I am ever doing.
So many tears, SO MANY TEARS stored within,
Every single drop stabbing me from the inside,
A few old ones even begged me to let them out.
Would anyone even care though?
Why is it that I care if anyone else would?
They are MY TEARS, all mine, I have the right to let them out,
To set them free, I am allowed to make full use of the voice I was given,
To say the words I was taught yet never given a chance to use.
The leaves that contain so many lines, perhaps a million timelines,
The thick bark around trees, or perhaps just an armor to protect its heart,
Flowers are so fragile and vulnerable yet undeniably beautiful,
And all of this I am having to look through a room with a window whilst being forced to write essays about my passion when I could be living it rather.
Life feels like a living irony.
Souls around me, including mine, are slowly being drained.
We create our problems and spend our lives solving them, only to complicate things further.
I could be running on a beach right now with the love of my life,
But I have yet to find them—will I ever get the chance?
Does it not excite you? The infinite possibilities of existence—
Multiverses, galaxies, stars, planets, moons,
And superpowers that might reside within us all?
Powers like emotions, empathy, words, and signs—aren't they all extraordinary?
Yet here we are, fretting over tomorrow’s breakfast choices,
Instead of embracing and using these powers, we try to control them.