Bemused Musings

- written over 20 years ago

Have you ever lived inside a pressure cooker?

The fine silver-colored metal enclosing you endlessly; and the one single opening being shut with an impassable valve in the zenith of the dome of a lid?

The trace of heat reaching every one of our senses and increasing by the second?

The breath of life slowly being sucked from the leaves of the tree that constitutes your lungs? Your every part of being pressed into the walls, binding your existence, and building this enclosure of limitations? You want to expand. You want to spread those wings and start flying, but somehow you ended up in this pot. You want to flower, to release and feel the air, taste the water, smell the earth, and touch the fire. Yet in here you only think of survival, not yielding to the pressure and burst, just surviving - in order to merely remain hopeful for reaching that glorious day of freedom and peace.

I am not mute, nor am I blind. I am as healthy and whole as many wish they would be. I am a man at the brink of the 21st century. I am 30 years old, if you look on my birth-certificate, but am as young as on my first day, and as old as on my last.