Destiny

My first memory was the cold steel running along my sides with this gooey stuff sliding all over, along the surface of me until every inch was covered. The goop oozed into every pore until it had seeped deep inside of me to where there was no chance at cleaning it out, even if I was able to try. “Hey! HEY! What’s goin’ on? The hell are you doing?!” I yelled. I thought it was strange that only one side of me was covered, before they moved on to the other half. This time the goop felt completely different. It wasn’t as sticky, but it was thick, suffocating in texture until I felt my pores would asphyxiate underneath it. The contrast of the two sides of me was amazing. One side was thick like plaster, but the other side was oozing and sticky like dough that was too wet or not mixed right. The combination of the two sensations made me feel incredibly awkward, like each half of me was something completely different than the other. Before I could react, I was floating in the air, and the two sides were coming closer at an increasing amount of speed until they were slammed together. When I regained my wits, the first thing I noticed was the extremely painful headache I had, but then the two sensations were combined into this mesh of thickly suffocating goop that was oozing around inside of me. I looked up and noticed my parents standing around me. I could read the concern etched all over them, like parents often do when they just witnessed one of their children get hurt, even before they clearly came into view and the double vision passed. They were talking, but it took a bit before what they were saying completely registered. “…you’re destiny, son. It’s what you were born to do! You’ll be doing such a good deed in this, and we’re so very proud of you. Now, you must prepare, because this journey will be hard,” Mom said. I needed to prepare? As that question crossed my mind, what they had said earlier finally registered. My destiny was to give my life for the greater good of a child I had never met? What? What child? What IS a child, anyway? That sounded like a pretty horrible life to me. I mean, who wants to go out in a blaze of glory to help someone else, probably not receive any recognition for it, but it was still part of a worthy cause. Right, like that is believable. It all sounded like I was being fed a line, and a pretty terrible one at that. I had to find a way out of this life. My destiny, as they called it, haunted me like nothing else. It followed me everywhere I went. Everyone that passed by me knew what my purpose in life was, and I hated every second of it. Every time I talked to someone they went on and on about how lucky I was to have this life: the savior of a hungry child. Not only that, but I was lucky enough to be able to ride in a lunchbox! Yeah, more like a locked container of doom and despair offering nothing more than death when it arrived at its destination. I’m pretty sure this is where I should cue the guillotine drums. I started playing the part of a rebellious teenager. I refused to do anything my parents said, doing what I could to hopefully make them disown me, which I was convinced would release me from the bond of my calling in life. Simply put, I was the worst offspring in all of history. If something was deemed bad or wrong, I did it. I chose a few bad apples as my friends to run around with. The stink we made was horrendous! We got into all the bad stuff, partied all hours of the day and night, skipped out on school, and there was once I was found in a compromising position with my girlfriend. She was a bit cheesy anyway, and I ended up dumping her shortly after that. I felt the cool steel of the knife again. This time, it was much different. I felt the sharp edge of it cutting deep into me. It sliced down from one edge of me to the other. I screamed out in pain as the knife was dragged over the top of me. As it reached the end and pulled away, I felt I could breathe again, and tried to retain my sanity. Before I could I felt the knife slicing me the other way. I was cut into four pieces! The searing pain left from these cuts was worse than anything I could imagine. I started praying, begging, and pleading for forgiveness for my transgressions deeming them as nothing more than rebellious teenage behavior and far from requiring this kind of punishment. I felt wronged, violated in the worst ways possible, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t even put myself together. As I was trying to recover from this atrocity, I was shoved into a little plastic bag and set in a cold dark room. My parents hadn’t lied; this life was hard, indeed. The abuse I received just because of my destiny made me hate it even more. I abhorred it so much. I refused to believe this was the end of it all, and that even though I was in the container of doom and despair, there just had to be something more I could do. There was no way the end was this close, or that I wasn’t about to go out without a fight. I tried desperately to think of something that I could do to make this child, whatever that was, to not want me anymore. I talked with the others in the container. I tried convincing them, appealing to their basic instincts that we were worth so much more than this. If we joined together and refused to accept our fate, there was no way we could lose. I mean, there were four of us, more if you counted each individual carrot stick and cookie, and only one child. I had it all plotted out. We would wait until this child opened the lid to this container, then, without giving him a chance to see what was going on, we would start launching the carrot sticks like spears at him. After that, we would all run in different directions so that he couldn’t possibly catch all of us, and at that point it was every man for himself. The plan was fool-proof! We couldn’t—wouldn’t fail! There was simply no way we could. The apple, being the smartass he was, was rude enough to point out the fact that none of us had feet, and that would make it rather difficult to run. Not to mention the fact that there wasn’t an arm between the lot of us, so how would we possibly throw the carrot sticks like spears. Then the carrot sticks piped in with how much they really didn’t want to be thrown, and that they were convinced that sounded pretty painful anyway. The cookies were just bouncing around hyper on some kind of sugar high that couldn’t be contained, so they were useless for much of anything anyway. There goes that plan, smashed to bits by a bunch of pessimists who don’t realize the severity of the situation. We were all going to die a horrible gruesome death at the hands, or more precisely the mouth of this child, and I was the only one that cared. I resigned myself to my fate before one more idea hit. I had seen in the fridge these funny looking guys. They said they were there as a prank, that no one liked the way they tasted anyway, so they weren’t too worried about the whole being eaten thing. What did they call themselves again? They had little tiny eyes and were nothing more than heads with no bodies. Oh yeah! That’s what they were—dried fish heads! They were these absolutely disgusting looking things that were a delicacy in some country or another. There was no way these guys could ever taste good under any sane circumstance! All I had to do was will myself to taste like them, or at least look like them. Then, I would be safe and no kid would ever want to eat me. I knew my time was running out. I could just feel a cloud of depression and seriousness hanging over me, shrouding any sense of a regular long life I felt I should have had. If there was a way I could change into a dried fish head, I had to figure it out, and now. I closed my eyes and thought nasty dried fish head thoughts. I pushed everything else out of my head and concentrated on just this one thought. It had to work. I opened my eyes and looked around. I didn’t feel any different, but maybe it still worked. “Did it work? What do I look like now? Here smell me. What do I smell like?” I asked the apple, who was closest. “Ya look like an idiot, and I’m NOT gonna smell you. Just accept what you are and let the rest of us have some peace already!” he replied. With that idea not working, I decided on a new one. I would convince the carrot sticks to spear me. That way I wouldn’t look appetizing at all and wouldn’t be eaten. So I made my way to the carrot sticks. “Hey, you guys would be willing to help out a poor sandwich, right? I mean, I’m not bad enough to deserve to be eaten,” I said. “How?” they asked. “Well, I was just thinkin’ if you were to spear me, I wouldn’t look good or edible anymore,” I replied. “HA HA HA! Apple’s right, you’re an idiot! If we spear you, it will hurt like when you were cut, and you’ll wish you were dead!” they laughed. I looked over at the cookies and tried to judge if they would be any help at all. They were playing hide-and-seek, but no one was hiding. So it was more one would close their eyes and count, then turn around and shout, “I found you and you and you!” I was pretty sure they were retarded or dropped too many times or something. There was no way they could help me. I was left with one other option: the thermos full of milk. I needed to find some way to present my case to the milk that would be convincing. The milk typically had a very sweet personality, like it was everyone’s mother. Maybe I should have started here all along. “Hey milk, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but can I ask you something? Just a small favor, really,” I asked. “Sure, Deary. How can I help you?” Milk replied. “Well, I really don’t want to be eaten and I have been trying to find a way to make myself unappetizing so that this child won’t want to eat me anymore. Do you think you could possibly spill some milk on me so I get soggy and he won’t eat me?” I ask as sweet and innocently as I can. “Now, how do you think that would make everyone else feel, if you get out of being eaten and all? Not to mention, no one else wants to get wet with milk. And the child is so looking forward to you. You are a peanut butter and jelly sandwich! That’s always been his favorite. I think you should just go along with it, and do your job. It will all be okay,” she replied. Well, crap. Not only did I now not have a way out of being eaten, but I also felt bad for trying to thwart the child’s favorite part of lunch. He was counting on me after all. But wait, I still don’t want to be eaten! The lunch box jostled and we all bounced around a bit before the lid started to open and I braced myself for the worst. As the lid opened all the way, the anticipation was too much for the cookies, and their cream filling dripped out a bit from the sheer terror the anticipation caused. I saw a small face peer in, but he looked so sweet and innocent. It was hard to believe that this young person was a hungry monster that would eat us all up. Maybe, just maybe, Milk was right. He did look pretty close to starving, or at least what I thought starving looked like. I was just starting to warm up to the idea that maybe being eaten wasn’t the end of the world after all. But then a hand reached in, grabbing a cookie and pulling it out of the lunch box. “He picked me! He picked me!” the cookie shouted excitedly. Shock overtook every one of my senses as the scene unfolded in front of me. The cookie’s screams were cut off suddenly as the boy took a bite and started chewing. How awful! I was right all along! I knew I had to get out of this situation from the beginning, and that just confirmed my initial thought. The boy’s hand reached in again after another cookie. He grabbed them all, but they didn’t go to his mouth. Instead they went somewhere next to the lunch box. After that, the carrot sticks went to the same place, then the milk. The hand came in again, this time reaching for me. I cringed when the boy grabbed me, feeling his fingers squish into me with a rather uncomfortable amount of force, and I was set down outside of the lunchbox. I knew this would be my one and only chance to get out of there if I was going, so I started to wiggle around in such a way that would get me away from the massacre. I stopped to assess the situation and find the best path to take out of there when I noticed for the first time what was going on around me. There were these little, sweet looking short people everywhere, but they were far from sweet. All around me, as far as I could see, what I could only assume were children swarmed into this room and were shoving sandwiches and apples and all varieties of what I had seen, come to know as friends and acquaintances in the short time I was with my parents, being shoved into the mouths of the children that looked so sweet and innocent like the one that had taken me out of the lunchbox. I was right all along! Horrified and now deathly afraid, I knew I had to get out of there as fast as I could. There was no time to lose as I knew my time was coming a lot quicker than I was comfortable with. I wiggled and squirmed and scuttled along the table as fast and as hard as I possibly could. There was no way at all I was going to stick around for this. I discovered very quickly that Apple was right. Running was very slow going when you had no legs. I caught glimpses of carrot stick after carrot stick being bitten in half by the child that had gotten me out of the lunchbox. Each bite caused me to only try harder to get a way faster. I heard a cacophony of noise around me. The combination of laughter, very animated talking, and cries and screams was so overpowering, to my hearing that I was convinced I would never hear again if I made it out alive. I thought it a small price to pay if it meant I had, in fact, made it out alive. I looked back to see the progress I had made. The apple appeared smaller, and I could only take that as meaning I had made it further away from where I was in my attempt to escape the doom that I knew to be coming. I looked forward, and for the first time I saw a line that had appeared. I could only assume that this line meant a place to hide, so I angled my frantic wiggling towards it. Keeping my eye on my goal, my wiggles got more precise. I discovered that if I moved just right, I would go closer to the line rather than off to the side. I tried again, attempting to move straight towards the line, but I kept ending up going a little to the side as I could only move one side of my body at a time. Moving the left side, then the right, then the left again was the pattern I followed. I kept alternating the side I put the forward thrust behind as I moved closer and closer to the line. It started looking more and more like a gap that got ever so slightly bigger with each thrust I made. I knew I could make it if given enough of a chance; I just had to keep following the same pattern I was doing and I would be there in no time, able to hide in the gap that kept growing as I continued forward. I glanced back once again to see how far I had made it. The only thing left that I saw of the friends that were to share the same fate as me this dark day was a few bags and the thermos of milk. My friends! That evil child had eaten them all, not even leaving a small piece behind for those of us mourning their life! I saw the hand again headed towards me. I had to get away now or all hope of me surviving this massacre was lost. I started wiggling again. Left then right then left again. The gap got bigger and bigger and I was starting to feel hope that I had made it. Suddenly, I felt the fingers digging into my sides again, gripping me in a death hold I knew I couldn’t get out of. I felt like I was floating again like the time my two sides had been slammed together. It was then I decided that the feeling of floating was never, ever a good thing to feel as something bad always seemed to happen when I floated. The bag I was in was opened and one part of me was pulled out. Not only was this child bad enough to eat me, but he was going to torture me by doing it piece by piece, making me watch in tortured agony as he did it! Part by part, I went in. Luckily, as that part of me was separated from the rest, I seemed to lose all feeling in that part allowing me to pretend it wasn’t happening. I closed my eyes and thought back to happier times. The friends I had left behind. My parents and the warning they gave me. This was for the benefit of the child. I was doing a good deed in giving my life right now. There was no higher honor for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich such as myself. I decided that I would go out with honor at that moment. I would be the brave sandwich that gave his life for the greater good of this child, as monster-like as he was. This is what I was born to do. It was, after all, my destiny. How could I let my parents down? They had raised me to be what I am today, after all.

Sometimes

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s easier to live only by the light of the day. Sometimes it’s easier to hide from your fears. Sometimes it’s easier to curl up and say “not today.” Sometimes it’s easier to lock away the tears. Sometimes. Sometimes what’s easier isn’t always right. Sometimes what’s easier ends up causing more pain. Sometimes what’s easier blocks out the light. Sometimes what’s easier holds back any gain. Sometimes. Sometimes support seems so far away. Sometimes a smile is too hard to greet. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how to play. And sometimes it’s almost too hard to stand on your own two feet. Almost. But I’m stronger than that. Right?