I don’t have hobbies, I have loathings. Pieces of myself I chew on when no one’s looking. Ideas, failures, habits, all bitter, all nursed against the pressure of my tongue. I don’t kill them, I can’t. I tried. Tried nailing them to a cross, burning them to dust, even managed to leave one under a rock a time or two. Didn’t work. Didn’t matter, they weren’t going anywhere.

Only place they did stick was on paper. I learned that from a young age. Take a thought, scrawl it onto the white face of a piece of paper, suddenly it isn’t so heavy. Problem is you do that, you’re being honest. When you’re honest people don’t really know how to react. They don’t understand. And those that don’t have a fucking clue what is actually going on start making up reasons. Turgid, empty things that generally end with you sitting in a padded room counting free-floating debris in the corners of your eye, quietly chewing on a brand new piece of loathing.

All’s fair though. It’s what I get for being stupid. Now, I dress it up. Give the thought a body, pin it between hedges in some pastoral gateway, call it a story. Call it a tale, a fable, and anything else as long as it’s them saying it, not me. Little different, little more difficult, but it weighs about the same. So that’s it. It’s why I keep doing it. Keeping blowing along, hoping that one day my hands will keep up with my head and one day I’ll be able to stand up clean. Sure it’s impossible, but that’s the point of dreams. You could shoot for the stars, sure, plenty of them for that. Someday maybe, right now I’d settle for not having to carry my demons around in a canvas sack.