Life
"The only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the night." Jack Kerouac.
Friends are over-rated, so are enemies. Fame is over-rated just like religion. War is over-rated as is peace. Happiness is over-rated just like sadness. Time is over-rated and so is life. Life is over-rated.
Death is under-rated. It instills fear in humanity and we refuse to think about it or accept it. We all live in fear of dying. No-one knows what lies beyond your last breath nor do they know if we will re-appear in another century, world or body. Some may not appear again.
She never understood people's fascination with the dead or the alive. She lived for herself and embraced life and death.
She never rushed into something deciding to let her life take its own course. For her being herself and accepting that she will die was the only way she could cope with life and its struggles.
Her life rarely changed. Nothing exciting or devastating happened. She would wake up in the morning and repeat the mundane routine that she had carried out the previous morning. Her school life was just as boring as her life. Never changing. But she planned to make a change.
Literature was her escape. She found herself immersed in the wondrous worlds that her favorite authors erected.
Words on a page became a motion picture flashing behind her eyes and the words all of a sudden meant more than their meaning. She spectated the characters' lives as an onlooker and raced to help them when they found themselves in immediate danger. Her friends – if you could call them that – thought she was delirious or that she had gone completely psycho.
Her brain worked in incredible ways; she found happiness and peace in the simplest forms and the simplest things enchanted her.
The birds above her head were one of those simple but endearing creations. How they could defy gravity and attack their prey with such elegance intrigued her. How they could soar across the planes of the earth looking so detached from reality and look down us humans and our wicked ways. They looked safe and content.
Her fascination seemed childish to an onlooker. They cast her worried glances as she cast her eyes upwards and let her moth hang loose in awe of the two winged creatures floating above her head.
People are too caught up in reality. She thought. They find it hard to appreciate the universes' natural art forms. This irritated her. There were so many beautiful things to see out there.
Her peers closed and constricted minds were no match for her expansive mind that was open to the simple things and found it easy to lose its self in hassle of day-to-day life.
No matter what anybody told her she knew that the whole 'sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me' lark was just a piece of nonsense made up to make children feel better about themselves. Words cut deeper that any blade, inflicted more pain than any bullet and they were being fired at her. She narrowly dodged the bullets, but the noise would make her scream and no-one would come to save her. Every day she faced with the firing squad. With each passing day another person turned on her or tripped her up in the corridor or made a snide remark about the way she dressed or her intelligence. She couldn't escape from reality.
Her life seemed perfect from the outside; she had plenty food, a roof over head and two loving parents, but even they did not notice her mental pain.
Sometimes she wondered if the people around her were good people just doing bad things never stopping to second guess their actions. It was a way of life now a days. Do what everyone else does to fit in. Do what other people say just to be make them happy. Give up your friends, the people who understand and trust you so you can be popular but that doesn't seem worth the hassle; to lose everything you once had just to sit with a group of kids that don't even care about you. They just use you as a pawn in their game which you happily play.
That's not what life is. Life is about making mistakes and learning from them, following your dreams no matter what your peers say, being yourself because being fake means you can't live your life and what's the point in wasting a life pretending to be someone you're not because when you final 'curtain call' comes you'll regret throwing away your life to become a ghost of the person you once were and no-one will remember you for who you are. They'll only remember the mask.
We are all labeled. You may be the geek that can solve mathematical equations in seconds or the prince charming that speaks words of romance in Italian but we shouldn't live up to these labels we should fight them and prove society wrong. We all may be the same on the inside, but on the outside we are different and we should be proud of that. Proud of what we have made of ourselves.
She doesn't regret not doing what she could to make her life easy instead she took the bull by the horns and coped because she always had hope for self and sometimes that's all a person needs; a glimmer of hope that they can hold onto. She had hope for her future and even though many people didn't see any potential in her she hoped that one day she could prove them wrong show them that she's more than the girl with the brains and the girl that lives in a world inside of her head, but is very much herself because she believes that she can be someone someday.
She may be mad and she may not say commonplace things but there is a flame within herself which burns brighter than any star.
This is her story.
Rachael Janson.