WORLD-WALKER
People used to say my curiosity was one of the more endearing factors of my character. In the beginning, this pleased me. I liked the image this evoked: a knowledge-hungry teenage girl whose desire was never sated and who wished to hold the secrets of everything that ever existed. Who needed more than what she was being given.
Now, this quality is rotten to me, a carcass that holds only the offal of what it once was. I have stepped too far. An uncrossable boundary has been crossed, my conscience crashing together as I toe the line of two worlds. One in which I am a person, a 17-year-old who hates the texture of tofu and whose right knee occasionally twinges and who is never on time for any social gathering.
Sometimes and without warning, this girl that is me trips, my mask falters, slipping like a needle through fabric, the pinprick point coming up on the other side of the cloth. I remember the universe. I remember my place. I remember that there is a sprawling void of the same matter, incomprehensible to our rudimentary brains, that encompasses our world and every single one to ever emerge. I remember I am a small, inconsequential being made of microscopic organisms that feast on my innards and fester inside me, and suddenly, I am no longer a girl. I am nothing but hollow, empty space.
One single moment in the cosmos has defined our entire existence, and one single action at any given moment could rip it away. We are a blip on the map; the perfect irony that such selfish, vain creatures are so easily overlooked by the chasm of space. It is moments like these where my life stumbles, sliding sideways, and I fall through into blankness. I try to lull myself into a false sense of comfort, that my decisions and actions are meaningless in the retrospect of cosmic totality, and therefore, I can and should do whatever I want. All attempts to convince myself prove trivial. I cannot shake this impermanence, the delible nature of me. We spend so long fretting over the body’s delicacy that we forget how perishable we truly are.
Many people willingly ignore this knowledge, burying it deep within them, below their vital organs, squished between a kidney and entangled in their intestines, in order to save their sanity and return to their regular lives, surviving the inevitable mental derailment that comes with this realisation. I get angry at these people. I am an angry person. Maybe it’s because I bear the weight of my comprehensions, hunched and deformed. I am exhausted. How can they continue as if everything is fine? How can they not live with this debilitating, seizing fear of the unknown and unpredictable? How can they not demand more from what they’ve been told? Mouths open and cavernous, frothing, rabid, ready to rip skin from flesh for a morsel of knowing.
My hypothesis is that we were not, not supposed to reach this level of cognitive awareness. We have surpassed our set lines drawn in the dirt. Surely, they were provided with reason, our well-being at the forefront of these warnings. I have no choice but to conclude that I am but a cautionary tale of the dangers of our curiosity. My breakages of self are glitches in the system, the implemented red lights. TURN BACK NOW. DON'T BE LIKE THIS GIRL. THIS RULE BREAKER. WATCH AGAIN AS SHE TEARS HER ATOMS APART AND DRAGS THEM BACK TOGETHER. WATCH AS SHE PINCHES AND GROPES AT HER SEAMS. WATCH AS SHE FLUCTUATES BETWEEN. WATCH AS SHE EMERGES EVERY TIME. DIFFERENT. WRONG. CHANGED. WORLD-WALKER. ANOMALY.
Eadie, 17, Australia
“A girl with insomnia who’s working through her mental disarray with a pen.”