“I don’t now how I feel,
I am so unsure
I’m ruled by emotions
But I feel nothing at all.
We need a solution
We need a time loop
Your inaction is brutal
Your reluctance so cruel.”
Sheva was still considered a child according to the laws of her nation but she knew more than any grown up what was happening to her and why.
She wasn’t supposed to know what she hadn’t been declared to know by the Principals. Here she was, outed by someone she only wished to confide in, someone she only wished to share her revelations with.
She was exactly like a constitutional and democratic visionary in the center of an unforgiving and tyrannical autocracy; a protestant reformer in the times of bloody freakin’ Mary. Not as lucky as William Shakespeare. Not as influential as Luther. Not as wise as Locke. What she thought every day in her heart was treason against her leadership; against the world she was born in to conform to.
She would be automatically and immediately disqualified from attaining the thing everyone assumed would be hers, more than it even seemed it would be for others. Sometimes deep down she didn’t want that thing so bad, but she felt a shame because of that; a very deep shame for not wanting what everyone thought she was blessed to have.
She wasn’t going to go to heaven. She wasn’t going to become an adult. She would forever be a child in Neverland. She would never take her rightful place in society. A vagabond without social standing would be the description in her life bio each time someone passively wondered; the proverbial from grace to grass story for yet another middle class aristocrat; yet in all the years of Kindred something this scandalous had never existed. She was paradoxically a Little Grown Up Child.
Her infamy was spreading like a wildfire already across the three nations. She was known as the “Naif” or therefore “Little Grown Up Child”, an abomination and abhorrence by every societal definition and expectation, but still beautiful, curious and curiouser because of this, even the more to all. She shouldn’t have been something that existed. She was a perversion. She was a wonder. She was special. She was cursed. All in the same phrases and breaths. She knew she was going to be snuffed out in such swift action by the world, its systems of institution as she knew them in their entirety. She had been trained all her life to mechanize them as an elderly.
She wanted to survive. She hoped she would survive and yet she knew she was going to survive; because she had not choice but to survive, even if she didn’t. She was a survivor. She hadn’t gotten through all she had to end it all at this point and in this way.
The thoughts in her mind had begun by themselves. It was like these voices just started speaking inside her one day. She never asked them to, she never wanted them to, but they did. They spoke as though they knew her. They spoke as if they were her; like they had gone before her to the multiverses of her paradigms and decided this was what was to be discussed.
The thoughts in her mind would creep in when she was tired; tired of the routine and monotony, the meaninglessness and expectation. It was the fake life of shaking hands and kissing babies. An Elderly after all. She fought not to be tired, and she never was because she would never admit it to herself. Not until the smoke started seeping out of her and choking; there was definitely a fire inside of her. Instead of power and possibility, to others it was a definitive sign of chaos and entropy. She was unstable and a liability; now with her infamy- the most notorious danger since the war. She reeked of Druid open mindedness. No country would like it. She was the thing that would unravel years of structure and organization and peace, especially that last one. Yet everyone was acting like the war never ended. It was ongoing deep in their hearts. Sheva knew it because she was born into the tension. It never ended. It just went on and on. Struggle. Oppression. Fear- a forming pattern of nothing else but the color of war; her sadistic and miserable version of rose colored glasses-huh.
It was way too late to call what was inside her a flame. It was burning furnaces of conviction that no one could take away from her. The problem was she had received warning from herself either. The fire alarm didn’t go off as it usually did. Maybe if it had, she had she would have handled it better. She wouldn’t have told learn. But because she did, here she was in the thick of things she could have never comprehensibly imagined, for she started smelling the smoke too late to realize that others were choking from it too.
As a man thinketh, so is he.
Her thoughts expressed themselves independently and caused many to wonder. They were skeptical at first until those thoughts were eventually affirmed to the masses in their true natural state. That’s when the leashes were put aside. It was mad dog country. She was dangerous; and because she was an elderly, no exceptions would be made, even if she was indeed still a child.
She had been reading more extensively in search of minds like hers. The questions that plagued her mind needed a rational reconciliation to the contradictions she saw; she needed alleviation from the chasms tearing her apart inside; her wringing mind needed soothing and reasurance in its purpose. She found them in Druid teaching, in the Druid philosophies she read, her eyes being opened to more than she imagined thye could be. But there’s a practicality they missed. There was community in African culture, but there was a rationality they missed as well. To be from Kindred was to live up to expectation and no other thing. Couldn’t there be a balance? Didn’t a balance exist? Couldn’t she be druid, African and a child all at once?
It was because of so many things but especially because of her. It was her fault she expected good in the world but found none, for what was good about this world that wasn’t marred by some sort of evil? It was her fault she had taken all that she was surrounded with as the pattern and print of each and every other person and society, yes it wasn’t so; for what does each and every person and society crave but individuation and distinction? And how can such individuation and distinction by imperfect and fallible creatures be nothing but dangerous, destructive and self appeasing? It could never be so. Such credulity. Such naivete. No. Never again.
augandanartist.com 