Fading Away

8 A.M., the screams start. The induced greetings and intense smiling faces, greeting me to start the workday. I never know when the smiles are sincere, or if they ever are.

Screaming, loudly, means good communication. The way to tell someone anything is to yell at them. Raise your voice, and allow the thoughts you are told to think flow from your mouth.

Christmas music plays over the P.A. system during lunch. Nobody knows what it says, but it keeps playing. the insistence to celebrate the holiday that causes me a personal demise year after year seems overwhelming.

I want to scream, to stand up and just let it all out. The built up pressure, the intensity, the held back inhibited emotion, just scream.

Useless voiced screams. The questions would follow, what is wrong? Are you okay? Nothing would change. Conformity is the deity that conquers real change in society. To not conform is to be ostracized, to not be is to be normal. Rebellion is unheard of, something only people from the outside world I come from do. Free spirits are caged fast, trimmed, pruned, and prepped for social slaughter. Whether they want to or not, they give in.

You wonder if anyone ever looks at the sky, if they ever dream. If my constant sky and star gazing really do go unnoticed, if my forced smiles ever come off as insincere. I pray they do.

It must be the timing, it's the time of year I experience intense roller coaster emotions of pure elation followed by crippling depression. It seems the corporate Christmas monster has followed me even here. Yet, whereas I had my voice back home, my open criticisms, my right to be a bitter nancy and join with a few of my friends whose hearts also shudder at the sight of corporate Christmas, I have only silence here.

They may care, but they have no way of helping. There is so much that goes on in my mind, in our minds, that folks just aren't willing to address. Maybe it scares them, maybe they just don't know how. It's the time of year where everyone becomes a bunch of phony assholes. It's a good thing I'm now quite desensitized to the phoniness. The insincere, shallow offerings I get in attempts to save the so called peace, while minds go sacrificed, truth becomes more warped, and the only words anyone can ever utter is "I'm sorry." Those words have lost all meaning for me.

I was taught to never be sorry for things you deliberately do. I was taught to have conviction, to stick to what I really believe in, despite if sometimes I am going uphill in a downhill stampede. I have learned how to take it with poise, my unwillingness to give in to anything I don't fully believe in. Sometimes my voice escapes and I shock people with my honesty. Never equate a kind heart with being nice just for the sake of being nice. Flowers also die, we are all part of a cycle. To think otherwise is hubris, and that idea will come crashing down eventually.

I scream on the inside, because I live in the land of quiet. Quiet emotions, quiet feelings, quiet food, quiet scenery, quiet people. So quiet that I sometimes find it shocking that I haven't disappeared, that they haven't either, and that the quiet rustling of nationalistic newspapers continues ever so subtly.

Maybe that's why they scream at each other when greeting. A cry for help, a desire to connect. A way in which to say "we are in this together" and to cope and deal with a miserable existence. Fading lights, fading ways, fading existence. I'll be damned if I fade away and partake in this victimization game.