Run As Fast As You Can

There is coffee and there is wine and in between it’s a lot of silliness we are forced into from birth, awaiting a death we can neither predict nor defend ourselves against even though we think we are invincible. I take my coffee strong and my wine dry and what happens in between is anybody’s guess. Mostly I blend in and collect a paycheck. I am punctual, reliable, quick, attentive, pleasant, compatible, and have an entire week’s wardrobe of black on black on black. There is the occasional red, but keeping things to perfectly fitted black suits everyone fine. After hair and makeup, I am dressed in one minute flat and out the door, and nothing blends in more perfectly in corporate America (and funerals, rather unironically) than black. Why am I telling you any of this? I’m not sure. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. I would normally prefer to share something more beautiful, erotic. This daily stuff is boring enough to slog through let alone share it with innocent people who just want to be entertained, but perhaps look closer. I’m any woman you meet on any given day in regular clothes with a regular job doing regular things to keep up in a world that would rather I didn’t, or couldn’t. I am also only a fraction of who I am underneath that glossy veneer all day long. My heart is the heart of a dreamer, someone who wants to escape all this and dive into a life full of art, writing, study, beauty, adventure. Passion. How we are told to follow it, to worship at its flighty feet. Most of that message is nonsense, of course, for passion in our dimly lit society translates to capitalism, to making a quick dollar by mass producing various methods of forcing other people to conform. Does everyone have the urge to indulge their true passions or just the rare ones who yearn for it constantly hoping each day for even just a little taste? The faces I see pass by unfazed by the things which torture my insides. Their eyes are frantic and boozy over things that don’t matter in the least. They do not see past the end of their nose and they see no reason why they should need to. I used to talk about this with people but I don’t recommend it. You know everyone will have an answer they cannot wait to deploy upon you to shut you up or drown you out. They will tell you exactly how it is and what to do without so much as batting an eyelash. There are those who will tell you not to dare and there are those who will tell you to just throw it all away in pursuit of something dramatic and there are those who will simply stare at you as though nothing has been said at all and none of these people will be right nor will they care what becomes of you in the end. But somewhere deep down inside that restless soul of yours you know as well as I do that even though you blend in, you are not the same. Even though you look polished, you’re a mess. Even though you are afraid, you want very badly to run very, very far away.