Wild Horses

My insecurities shift like the tides. Last week, I starved, and this week, I am full of guilt. Suddenly, I’m consumed by thoughts of what blush Lily-Rose Depp is wearing. How am I unique when I can name four other girls just like me? Starving for thinness, guilty of indulgence, and obsessed with the same Chanel blush. That blush is on its way to me, by the way. Is it the age of TikTok that’s made us all the same? The female manipulators, the Black Swan wannabes? I guess I’m just another one in the crowd. Sure, I’m different in my own ways, but are they even real? I dyed my brunette hair blonde, have you heard that before? I’m changing, yet I’m still the same.

Am I nothing more than a caterpillar, forever trapped in the same cycle?

I dream of something else. Something more. A western town with saloons where smoking is still allowed indoors, a horse beneath me, and the breeze, the breeze. Anywhere with air that can give my lungs a break from pollution. Anywhere where the air isn’t polluted with thoughts, where my mind is free from the noise. It’s strange how no one listens to these dreams because they’re not the ones society wants me to have. The big dreams. The lawyer, doctor dream. Those are the dreams everyone wants for me. But I want fresh air. I want freedom. I was promised freedom the moment I was born into the shithole of industrial America. So why can’t I see it? Why can’t I find it? Where are the words I was promised, written across the sky with the sound of an eagle's cry?

There is no freedom here. Not in my town, not in my school, not in my body, and certainly not for me.

I dream to be a wild horse, to feel the wind tugging at my hair as I run through the fields. To know that I am unique, not because I follow a trend, but because I am a wild horse. Free, while everyone else is confined to their cages. I want to be different in a way that matters--by being untamed.I can't be a wild spirit, because it's not in the cards for me, and it will never be. I’m consumed by the same things. TikTok's thinspo, Lily-Rose Depp’s blush. I am drowning in my phone, drowning in the same patterns.

I want to be the wild horse, running through fields, while the world around me is trained, tethered to their screens and their bodies. But I am not running. I am tethered, too.

All that’s real to me are my flowers sitting in my vases, and the hope that someone out there is keeping me safe. I’m not a believer in God, but I hope someone is watching over me, keeping me sane. I know that if I think about it long enough, I’ll see the irrationality in it. I’m alone. I make my own choices. But there’s comfort in knowing someone, somewhere, is going through the same thing. Maybe that’s why I’m always on my phone, searching for someone as lost as me.

Maybe the realization that no one is out there protecting me is why I cry so often, without reason, without answer.