Walls

Once upon a time, before you even knew how to rhyme, our world existed, before you made it wicked and twisted. It was a place where truth was the language, freedom was the anthem, and kindness was the only religion. Joy flew in the air just as a pigeon.

    Time passed by, and you felt unsatisfied. You wanted more than you could have. The blue smell of joy had left and you tried to bring it back any other way. You sold your blood for power, seeking an enrichment within your soul. This made you smile for a while, and you started to smell yellow flowers all around. Without realizing, however, that every flower quickly dies.

    The bitter taste of envy was on everybody’s tongues, tasting the ugliness of the success you temporarily owned. They threw you angry rocks because they wanted equality, so you built a wall to protect yourself from such brutality. Now the world was divided in two: the ones who owned nothing and the ones who owned it all.

    It stayed this way for some time, until more problems arrived. The solution everyone reached was to build a wall just as you did. That way they didn’t have to deal with sharing ground with humans who weren’t like them, who wanted different things, who followed different dreams. They couldn’t stand having to compare themselves.

    Our world had been divided by so many walls, that each person was a world of their own, with walls on the sides of their eyes because they were afraid to stare at anybody’s soul, worried that it might be better than their own. Thinking they were all different, yet they were all the same. Filled with sour emptiness.

    The walls were too high to even hear other people’s palpitating hearts. All the worlds were so terribly unconnected that on one side of a wall, a mother smiled at her newborn baby, while on the other side, another mother cried watching her baby being murdered. On one side, a girl wrote a poem about how much she loved flowers, yet if she had been born on the other side, she’d be writing a letter to her dead father.

    And that’s when humans went extinct, when walls separated and classified them depending on the way they looked, where they were born, or the way their minds worked. In that moment, they were no longer humans, but labels.

    It’s been this way for too long.

    But you’re not stupid, you know there’s something that must be fixed, yet the dust falling from the carbon on the walls blinds your melancholic eyes and doesn’t let you see the lights.

    You don’t realize that all your problems come from your inability to look in the mirror and see more than skin and meat.

    You blame others for it, and believe your tiny world is the only one that should stand, so all the problems could be solved. You complain there are no kind people left, but you refuse to be one. To make love you hide, yet when you fight you want to be watched in the daily light. Violence runs your streets desperately hoping to find peace. You prefer to use the fire around you rather than the eternal flame inside you.

    And above all, you know you started this, and you lie to yourself saying it’s too late. So at the end of every long day you float in your bed of dying flowers under an intensely dark sky, and want to ask God why he doesn’t destroy all these walls of oppression, but you never do it, because you’re afraid he’ll ask you the same question.

    The world is starving because it craves the warmth of smiles. Happiness is no longer something mom cooks at home, nor is it found in the market. No one remembers its flavor anymore. We need to reinvent the recipe.