Cash Torn

Sometimes I feel like a bottle without its cap. I feel like a straw with an extra hole. Maybe I am torn cash. 

I have everything. I am everything yet I can’t do what I could. I could do so much. I could be like everyone I see. I could push myself. I could impress you. I could try. 

Yet my cap is lost. I can’t carry water like I was meant to. I am misshapen. When you try to drink with a straw that has an extra hole, it will do nothing but disappoint you. The physical translation of value, a piece of paper that could carry you, that should carry you, it is utterly useless. But it could have helped. I could have helped. 

Everything I see I treat like a reflection. I think this is a mirror, this is me. Every time I see a winner. I see the girl who got the boy. The athlete who blew everyone away. The genius who made her parents and the world proud, it’s a reflection. A reflection of me. The mirror refuses to show me who I am. The reflection I see is potential lost. Opportunities not taken. I love this reflection so much that when I really do look in the mirror, when for once I do not look at the life I am experiencing but the life that I am, I feel my soul ripped from me. I feel betrayed. Me, my own self, the one thing that is supposed to be mine, is taken. My being is ripped from my chest, a hand shoved down my throat. It grabs hold of me, it grabs hold of the warmth, the substance of me and just takes it. 

After I look in the mirror I feel deflated. I am a balloon and the air is taken from me. 

I still breathe. 

I am left with nothing, and somehow I stand in front of the mirror still breathing. Alive, I must look. Alive, I look at the reflection of what could be, everywhere I go. I see the accomplished, I see the experienced, and professionals. I see everything that I am not, and everything I am all at once.

 It all surrounds me but I can never reach it. Even my own self, is too far. These hands and arms, that told me they could reach, that if I put my mind to it they could give me anything I grab, can’t take. 

It’s too late. 

Too late to change. Too late to pop the balloon I am trapped in, not when jealousy has beat me to it. Without something to hold, to show off, and make others proud, I feel stripped naked in the cold. The bite of the atmosphere, of the earth I am stuck on, burns but brings no pain to my numb heart. The warmth of my own soul, the thing I should love, disgusts me and reminds me only of what I am missing. 

Those hands that stole my soul dangle it above my head, reminding me that I look nothing like the winners in the reflection. That the glass that shows me who I am, only ever disappoints, but not as much as I have disappointed myself. 

Seeing and feeling, it is hard to say which is worse but when what I see proves that what I have been feeling is real, then there is no room to deny. For once I wished I was crazy, that maybe it was a sick joke someone had played, even I had played. But why use a bottle without a cap when there are perfect ones next to it?  Why put up with the broken straw when you can get a new one, not use a straw at all? You can’t fix torn cash. Why not throw it away, leave it alone? 

Please. 

The cash is sick and tired of seeing the rest of the money in the world go places, do what it was meant to do. So, please throw it away. Leave it alone. Hide it from reality. 

I wish to never see any reflection of mine or of the world again. 

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