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Rejection hits like a physical blow. It’s a unique sort of feeling, balancing on the tightrope between mind and body. If a reaction is psychological, one would expect it to stay there, confined to the psyche. Instead, it sprouts from elsewhere, rooting itself to the stomach, the guts, the heart. Blossoming outwards, bearing its cruel fruit—a harvest is always plentiful, even if the weather barely permits, because it doesn’t take a thunderstorm to be the catalyst for growth, only light rain.
Thus, a simple dismissal can be enough to have her reap what she never chose to sow.
And it shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s no rejection for a big job opportunity or a scholarship or anything like that. It’s the small things, when someone laughs a little shorter than usual, or less enthusiastically, and the idea in the forefront of their mind is palpable to her—I don’t want to listen to you anymore. A slight change in their tone and words begin to dry out like a heatwave has swept across the city of their personal exchange, and the atmosphere becomes apocalyptic. This is what happened last summer, and the summer before that. June never used to be this hot, not when I was younger.
It is half a lie, because memories are always sweetened by time. A current moment may seem bleak but whatever stands out as good will be what remains after time has eroded the particulars away. So whatever has been forgotten is no longer important to her, and all she pictures in her head is a version of herself, unbridled by judgement.
There isn’t a singular moment she can distinguish from all others where that began to change. Any faults can just be attributed to youth, move on for now. It is only when you never grow out of them that people notice you never actually kept up. Be treated as precocious, then ultimately fall behind.
And so she likely wasn’t thinking much when she fashioned herself a helmet with rabbit-like ears, it’s just part of the design. She had just always liked them. Something about how small and cute they were, how unassuming. Little symbols.
Nothing about prey instincts, about innocence and naivety. Fawns, lambs, rabbits. In headlights. To the slaughter.
And nothing about the colour red, at all, surely. The colour of love, of passion? What about blood and sacrifice?
Tragedies are defined by moral paradoxes. The people in them are not always necessarily bad, and there are no villains, only misguided characters. It is when a protagonist has to face the mistaken beliefs of a monolith alone, founded upon false assumptions and reinforced biases, that they then have to make a courageous decision between two terrible options: to continue to favour the safety of lies, denying themselves an existence where they are whole; or, to finally embrace what is true, and in the process make of themselves a martyr.
Though, isn’t there some comfort in unique suffering? Something unable to be fully understood by the external eye—a righteous and easy excuse for personal failures? It doesn’t matter if she does wrong because there is something rotten deep within me, am I not allowed to be angry? All this harm done, yet I am still expected to put in all the work to become better? Eventually stagnating in a prophecy of self-fulfilment, no one has ever been through what I have and I will never stop deserving recognition for it.
Yet she thinks it an aggrandisement to consider herself a human tragedy, a dramatisation of what essentially is just self-victimisation, and why would she ever be worth even half the letters in those words? I am no protagonist. There is nothing special about my human condition. Pariahism is no badge of honour and she wonders why she treats it as such.
Regardless, the mind clings to what it believes is easiest, and in what reality would being culpable be the easiest? What ease comes with the emotions that arise from it? Are you allowed to feel angry when you are rightfully at fault?
If no one is at fault, does that make you a worse person?
She sees her shadowy silhouette spontaneously manifest in front of her in the sudden brightness and it makes her stop. It’s unusually overcast for the time of year, and as she walks the underpass for the nth day in a row she can’t recall the last time the sun graced the pavement like this.
As she stares, the cool air around her slowly becomes warmer.
Everything in the universe is constantly trying to return to a state of equilibrium.
She isn’t exempt from this when she internally fights to keep her emotions at bay—she’s decided it’s too much of a struggle to differentiate right from wrong, right now, there’s more important things to worry about, dammit—no matter how much going against the tide will not actually pull you out of a rip.
Perhaps she would find some solace in knowing there are atoms out there fighting to reach a stable form, too, no matter if their half-lives are as little as a few hours or as much as several million years.
Her phone buzzes and as she retrieves it from the pocket of her overalls the cracks in the screen erratically reflect the golden sunlight. Through the glare she can just read a text: Get home safe.
Did you know there is likely at least one particle in you that is as old as the universe itself?
It makes every problem seem much more minuscule, when you remember I am the universe. Time will pass anyway, because more than thirteen billion years have gone by with no issue. Problems become a lot more trivial, and you learn to cherish the small things more.
Maybe she walks home a little lighter than before. How lucky am I, in such an awfully big universe, to have been able to experience such a specific moment as this.
Truly, she can’t just turn her mind around—no matter how flexible it may be, it still latches onto familiarity—but it makes her think. What real solace does it bring her to act like she is unsalvageable? In what way does it make her feel better besides being a bandage over a bullet wound?
When she returns to the universe, would it have meant anything at all?
And so she tinkers with her thoughts. And it doesn’t happen all at once, but maybe soon she starts to think it isn’t the end of the world when she does something wrong. Maybe soon she starts to learn to look into the open jaws of the same rejection that has whittled her down for almost as long as she can remember and go it’s okay, because I am more than this.
Maybe it isn’t easy to admit you’re at fault, but if you suffer regardless, it isn’t much of a tradeoff in the first place, is it?
The difference between her and tragedy is that there are never only two options. There is never a big choice she has to make, no dramatic turning point. Her life is not predetermined, her fate not sealed, because she is alive.
The dust will eventually settle, and I can always try again.