Finished in August 2017

Realization

I’m in a daze. It’s an odd sensation. There’s the world around me, noisy and moving with people doing their own things and minding their own business. Typical and unordinary.
And then there’s me, staggering around in a state of mind that’s something between asleep and awake. Everything is blurred and unfocused, like a hallucination that’s been warped and had bits cut out of it. I’m cut off from everyone and everything, isolated even though I’m standing on the same ground as others. My mind is like an island surrounded by a raging ocean, cut off from civilisation, unable to swim the currents and waves.
I’ve been like this ever since I realised the blatant obviousness of the truth. A truth that was hidden from me for years, all my life. From the very moment I came into this world in fact. I have been lied to, fabricated “truths” force-fed to me without me realising. I was blind, my vision obscured by a cloud of manipulation, it’s billowing tendrils the strings that lift and drop me, like a wooden puppet. Like a toy.
Now the cloud has lifted from my eyes, the strings have frayed and snapped. I am free. I am not blind. I am immune to their lies. I’m still in shock, though.
Only hours before, my mind managed to pick through the memories of my life. All the events, all the things I’d done, all the things others had done. I searched through my collection of memories, like a archeologist searching a cave, picking up all those mysteries, all those little inconsistencies, those odd hiccups in my experiences. And like a detective looking for clues in a murder, I uncovered the truth in those veils of memories - each of them as fake as plastic.
The emotions I’m feeling is indescribable. I’m confused, stunned….. Why!? Why would this happen? Why would our whole lives be riddled with lies from those that brought us up? When did it start? Why did it start? My mind is going around in circles. Coming back to the same questions over and over.
Why did I have to uncover this scarring, overwhelming truth? If I had ignored all the traces of clues left behind, would I have still come across this? Would it have been better if I’d not realised it? I would have been ignorant to this plan years in the making. Already I wish I could turn back the clock, cover up the clues I found, hide the truth from me! Become innocent-minded again.
And then, among the veils of shock and confusion, a speck of anger starts to grow. Like blood, red and spreading outwards, a toxic flower. Slowly, the anger is no longer anger: it’s fury. Then madness. Then seething uncontrollable rage. Like a breaking wave, it crashes inside me, and roars and spreads. I am consumed in it. My body is extraordinarily tense, every muscle responding to my emotions. My hands are trembling, fingers quivering, arms and shoulders hunched.
I want to scream. Just open my mouth and roar to the sky, an enraged curse towards the heavens. I want to punch something, or someone. Curl up into a ball and stay there for eternity.
And then I realise something.
Quite suddenly, I freeze and start to think. It’s a scary thought, but it’s also exciting. And it gives me ideas.
I am the only teenager or kid that realises this, and knows their plan!
I stand where I am as the magnitude of this revelation sets in. My mind begins to race again, but this time my head is full of solutions, schemes and plots. Now I’ve flipped the coin on its head. I am now the planner and will hopefully be the deceiver, if these ideas I’m getting actually end up working.
First things first. No human being probably under the age of 19 knows about this - aside from me. No human under 19 being has probably suspected, or guessed that a plot of this nature had been conceived. But what if they knew? What if I told them? They probably wouldn’t believe me, but if that’s so, I’ll show the evidence. And that’ll surely convince them, as it convinced me!
I start walking again, my mind boiling over with thoughts. And the bitter anger comes back. I channel that anger into the plans I’m beginning to form. It’ll come in handy for sure. It’s time I revealed to my fellow generation members how cleverly we’ve been deceived and manipulated.

And from then on, we’ll just have to work out where to go from there.