Mourning Idealism: Prose Poetry

Nothing prepares you for the ache of mourning. I am mourning my idealism today, trying to hold onto the ideals in a quicksand hug while reality grapples me like an inseparable birthmark. The trajectory of growing up is learning how to make a coral museum of grief inside the wormholes of your heart. Unable to build a Lego bridge where your idealism kisses your reality, unable to write yourself a soft epilogue.

I am swinging like a trapeze artist playing Cupid for my idealism and reality. Reality is drunk on swirls of grey witch portions in the yin-yang goblin of the globe. Idealism is a carrom coin pushed outside the board. I wake up screaming in chaos, tying bracelets of protest poetry but the necklace of survival instinct chokes my throat. I paint watercolors of feminism on my canvas but the tentacles of fear burn my stride as the night gets sinister. The slaughtered symptoms of womanhood downsize my existence into the blood pools of fear, coloring pillows with the alchemy of my tears.

So, tell me, how do you forgive yourself, on days when you are not the idea of you? How do you reach deep into your mind to pull the threads of your dreams and knit them together into reality? The fragility of life discomforts me. I hate myself a little more on days when I stand my identity up for a date with practicality, an unnerving Jenga of survival tactics.

I am mourning my idealism today, leaving red carnations on the grave. The grave summons an Ouija board of a girl with sunbeams and moonbeams dancing in her eyes, a ballerina of heterochromia hope. Eyelash wishes of ice-cream scoops of love and wishful whispers of “changing the world.” Sometimes you write what you see so children can sleep, sometimes you don’t write what you see so children can sleep. What excuse do you write in a letter to your childhood dreams?

Losing my idealism feels like a summer beachside sunburn, everything hurts to touch, blisters of guilt decorated across my skin. They relabeled the vials of my passions into poisons so I could do violence to my own heart. I bundled up my conscience into woolen blankets of escapism.

I know self-denial is self-harm but how do you fight a war with blood in your eyes?

Nothing prepares you for the ache of healing. I will magic my idealism alive tomorrow. Nobody teaches children how to learn to love themselves in the trajectory of growing up. We deserve a soft epilogue, but we also deserve a soft in-between. In an apocalypse world, my idealism will kiss reality on a post-war bridge. If life can go on in our aftermaths, it will go on in the world before it.

I am mourning my idealism today.

//”Mourning Idealism”// Enigma

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Picture Credits: Enigma (Inktober 2020 Art Day 20 Coral)

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