Cognitum

I want to know if there’s a difference between ignoring something that’s there and pretending there is something where there’s nothing.

I want to know why there’s no scar where they stabbed me but I wake up covered in blood.

I want to know how to trust after my last memory has withered without sunlight and I am a futureless shadow without a history.

I want to know how to hurt without shame, to lay my guilty conscience at the alter of good intentions and let it be whatever it is.

I want to know my flaws and own my greatness. I want the darkness behind my eyelids to be a safe place, for the ubiquitous silence to sing me to sleep, to love with the same recklessness that carried me through the hopeless days on the wings of the phrase, “nothing even matters”.

I want to prove my enemies right, and survive. I want to burn their images of me in the furnace in my chest and be the yet-unnamed thing that comes next in the chain of evolution.

I want to pay homage to the specters who saw me through, who bet years of their sentences on my potential and imagined me better than my ugliest sin; I want to use this feeling to redefine the verb “to know”.