The World by 7ala Abdullah

Look.

Don’t leave an inch unpondered.

Stare at it all; stare at your bumps and bruises. Stare at your flaws and imperfections; your scars and your voids. Stare at your worn-out hands; those hands you used to build and break – to hold and to push. Look at your cuts, look at how they bleed bright blue with indifference – and your back; all straight and proud and defying humanity.

Look at yourself, look at where the world filled syringes of poisonous hate and injected them into your skin. Look at your body; covered in needle-marks from where apathy, distrust, and jealousy were forced into your blood.

Here you stand; remnants of yourself.

You typical human, you peaked at 6 years old and ever since then, your life’s gone downhill. You were then taught that love has a name. You were told that there’s right and there’s wrong and there’s us and there’s them. You were taught about shame and you hid in dark corners to protect yourself from it.

You were fed war and racism; you drank religion and you spat out the parts of it you disliked. You were told it made you better; so you believed it and you looked down upon anything that was different. Anything that brought along any kind of change with it.

You never learned self-satisfaction; instead you were taught how to rob others of it. You suffered and cried for an award only you can give yourself. You wept when you faced the mirror; the possibility that you might have been beautiful was seemingly galaxies away.

You were like a gluttonous Eve with an appetite for apples; you picked the ripest ones despite the forewarnings you received. And they were delicious and fulfilling, but you fell from your heaven into pain each time.

And the thing about pain is that it falls hard on us like rain in a storm, covers us in damages for as long as it can and eventually; it dries off and we’re left with the aftermath. For you, the damage was to your soul; your spirit. You were killed by your own kind, told you’d never amount to anything – told that you were less of a human because of a chromosome and told you were more of a chosen one because of a belief.

You died a little every time you were robbed a human right in the name of holiness.

How did you get here? How did you end up this way?

Pain is no longer your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is that you’ve learned to enjoy the solace and the beauty of the pain thrust upon you. You no longer try to extirpate it from under your skin.

But get yourself off the ground. Let go of the hurt. Find satisfaction from within yourself. Make a change.