Self Searchingmature

I run. I walk. I beat around the block. Something inside me says that I've got it wrong, but it's a feeling easily ignored. There's a lot that I ignore, especially here.

I'm in town. In the city. The vibrant, pulsing mass that is the heart of the nation. One of many such hearts, one of many unique and opposing pulses. Contradictory, but nothing is perfect.

But that's debatable.

I find perfection everywhere: in the trees, in the lake, in the cool crisp breeze. Can I improve upon any of those things? Can I heighten their design, make them somehow more advanced?

No, of course not.

I can change something, anything, alter it in an attempt to make it better, closer to what I desire. In the end, though, it is no longer what it was, no longer that thing that I started with. I can take a ragged bush and make it taller, fuller, and fill it with fruit and flowers. But then it is a tree. I may wish to take these new trees and place them in the grey streets I walk down to add life and colour, but now I've made a boulevard.

I can change whatever I please, fix its attributes to my own liking, prescribe my own sense of progression. It only changes its name, though, it simply receives a new label.

A girl in my class walks by, face done up but hidden behind Vogue. She used to be on the basketball team, but now she cheered on the guys from the sidelines instead, short skirt and scandalous top a far cry from the baggy shorts and jersey she sported on the court a year before.

Is this true, then, of people? For the endless faces yearning to satisfy the trends? For the vain individuals hiding behind a self-constructed mask of beauty? For the rising masses conforming to non-conformity? Are they all just exchanging one name for another?

I glance at my reflection in a window, see the young man that the world sees. His movements and expression match my own, though his name does not.

Am I?

I change. I push. I beat around the bush.