Adina Viele
The days appear to go by much slower now. They never used to be this prolonged, though. In fact, I used to believe that time passed far too quickly for my taste. The faded, yellow glow of the street lights that lined the sidewalks of my neighborhood were somehow symbolic of my adolescent perception of time—their sudden flicker of illumination meant that my night was over.
When I was a kid, I was fast—just like time. My mind was light. It had yet to be weighed down by all of the burdens that inhabit it today, causing an altered perception of reality.
I used to be weightless.
The burdens, however, have certainly piled up over the years. Originally, my pile was small and virtually non-existent. I would go about my day with a smile, blissfully unaware of just how much my personal, anti-gravity simulator was to thank for.
The innocence that accompanied me at the beginning of my childhood was incredibly powerful. So powerful that it fueled my “simulator” and kept it up and running for upwards of nine years. This may not seem like a long time, but looking back on it now, I see it as a sort of personal accomplishment.
Fueling the simulator was easy—“Just be a kid,” my dad would always say. So, aiming to please, I would try—to simply “be a kid,” that is. But as my number of revolutions made around the sun increased, so did the difficulty of this “simple” task.
It doesn’t matter what the cause was—it’s irrelevant at this point. However, what does matter is that it did happen, and it’s something that I have to live with. Whatever that something is.
That something made me feel heavy.
It took away my childhood innocence—my weightlessness was gone. My anti-gravity simulator, no longer operable. After all, it isn’t fueled off the miasmas of a polluted mind.
The polluted mind fuels a different kind of simulator—one opposite of its sister and immune to her kindness. Where the innocent mind—the pure mind—feels an innate sense of freedom, the polluted is chained and longs only for the return of its purity. The chains that hold a child down are bred from fear and nourished with anxiety. They seek only to further twist and manipulate the already infected thoughts, patiently awaiting the time when the child eventually drowns in it—the pressure, the weight becomes too much for one’s soul to bare. The child is swallowed whole.
The child swallows something whole.
I swallowed the burden whole.
I swallowed the burden whole, and that burden made me feel heavy. Purged of all my weightlessness, I was ejected from my simulation—and at the age of nine I was therefore deemed “heavy.”
As the revolutions continued and the number steadily increased, I became more aware of the way I walked around this world—growing ever so conscious of the weight of my step and the impact that could be left by incorrect footing or a misinterpretation. Constantly contradicting, this continual crusade, contrary to myself, conducted me to literally tip-toe around my own home. I couldn’t figure out whether I had all the power in the world or none at all. Could I control myself enough to prove that I was, indeed, powerful?
But, powerful for what?
Powerful,
for myself.
Powerful as I thought I may have been, it was apparent that I was heavy with burden. The second simulator had started working overtime—clouding my thoughts, forging the most discordant mentalities from anything but self-love. Somehow, in the midst of all the chaos, I had found my power, and I had taken back control. Suddenly, I had a purpose again—something to focus on completely and release me of my burdens.
Suddenly, I felt weightless.
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