Our Rat King
By Victoria Taylor
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So now it starts.
We all head off in our different directions with lines of rope crisscrossing between us so we don’t get lost. Like rats in a maze we scuttle around, searching for things that will take us further in our lives, without realizing they take us further from each other.
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Our ropes tighten as we move away from where we started, until they split. And we move on, unaware that the rope that once tied us to what we never hoped to lose is trailing behind us, broken.
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The hope I have for the future is that my rope never breaks. No matter how far I may go from you, from here, my wish is that I’ll always be able to turn around and see my rope; my connection to you, to this. I’ll be able to see it thinning into the distance and know that should I ever need to go back, all I have to do is follow it.
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I promise to move slowly, giving my rope as much slack as it needs so that it will never break. There will be no twists or sharp turns around corners that lead into the completely unknown. Nothing will snag my rope, tempting me to break it and move on alone.
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Sometimes alone at night I wonder if this rope ties me to you, to this. If it traps me, hindering my progress into the life I’ve been promised.
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I see others like me, straining and fighting against their ropes, unaware of how the more they struggle, the tighter the rope becomes. I watch as it cuts, scarring them, strangling them until they become too weak to fight. Fears set in as I see them biting through their ropes and darting off, never to be seen again, or they seem to withdraw, slinking back to where their ropes came from, broken and defeated.
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In our search for identity, we have become a crowd of faceless, nameless people, numbers. We have lost our sense of belonging, our ability to adapt and fit in.
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Instead of trying to work together, we strain to stand out. We fight against others, ourselves, tangling our ropes together in a bundled mass that weighs us down. If we should ever fall into water, that bundle alone would drown us all. Make us equal…
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Instead of walking together, we fight to proceed alone. And when times get dark, and we can no longer defend ourselves, we turn to those we left behind and blame them. For not being there, for not helping and for not loving us enough to talk us out of it.
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We become resentful of the ropes that we once cherished, hate the things we once loved. We turn our backs on people we promised to stand by.
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And then we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the shattered remains of what used to be our morals, our values. We see the distorted image, the broken reflection of who we used to be and what we have become. We realize how far we drifted, how little we achieved and how much we left behind.
Tags: growing apart, growing up, life, moving on, new horizons, teenagers, ties that bind