Padded locks lining the door frame,

Keeping the monsters outside at bay.

Attempting constantly to have monsters tamed,

The pounding of the fists and claws continue to eat the door away.

Next day you have to put up a new door behind the previous one,

Before it falls and exposes the unknown.

 

Not knowing what the other side holds,

Continuing to build another structure to hold the door.

Each time you build another layer the room shrinks,

Ever so gradually the room becomes smaller and smaller.

The ability to move freely in that room is cut in half,

Then in half again and again.

 

The room is so small now,

The pounding makes the room shake violently.

Not knowing what to do you begin to panic,

You now are also beginning to pound the walls of the room.

Trying to crush through the walls,

Splinters slide into the skin of your hands.

 

You don’t care about the pain,

Pound after pound you try.

Try to crush the walls down, but it’s no use,

You have built so many layers from the other side.

So many layers it is impossible to break out of,

For so long you worked on these walls.

 

These walls are now your enemy,

The sound of your fists on the walls now exceed the noise of the monsters.

The monsters don’t matter to you anymore,

You are now ready to face what use to be your greatest fear.

Your greatest fear now is suffocating and trapping yourself for all of your life,

Fearing never to be able to escape from the only room you know.

 

The only room you have learned to adapt to and accept,

Nothing else was safe enough for your reality.

To continue the reality you had learned to live,

Threatened? Build another layer.

Another door, another layer,

Another layer from the outside world.

 

Finally ready to face what use to be your greatest fear,

Your panic is now a normal.

You get use to it,

How to think properly with it always there.

You decide to start to think strategically,

Calculations, logic, realism of living.

 

Looking around trying to find the weakness,

Weakness of your reality.

Searching everywhere,

Flipping everything over ripping out the objects contained in the room.

A glimmer of light catches your eye,

At just the right angle you can see this gleaming light.

 

The brightest light you have ever seen,

Blinding you if you look at it for too long.

Walking over to the tiny hole that exposes it all,

Through all the layers there was a continuous imperperfecting.

In the same spot throughout the layers,

You get closer to the hole to see more of that imperfection.

 

Everything in your room is perfect,

As you liked it from the very beginning.

Now it looks fake and disgusting,

Your shielded reality away from the real world.

It’s all you know anymore,

You need to know what is on the other side; the unknown.

 

The unknown can’t be scary,

You don’t even know what is there.

For all you know it could be the greatest thing you have ever witnessed,

You begin to break away the wall.

The hole begins to expand as you peel away the splintering wood,

The light gets brighter and brighter.

 

From what was a blinding light,

Is now fading.

A colorful bright picture begins to form in your eyes,

Is this even real?

Of course it is,

The picture forms something magnificent.

 

Something you remember long long ago,

You don’t remember where this memory came from.

You know that it is the most satisfying feeling in the world though,

You peel the last pieces of wood from the room that captivated you for so long.

You take the very first step into the unknown,

The unknown has a certain feeling that isn’t replicable.

 

You begin to walk,

Running now.

Exploring as much as you can in the least amount of time,

Taking everything.

Forming a tiny story,

From the being the unknown you now have a story.

 

This unknown is now something,

It has a story.

You saw another human that was crying,

Being picked up by another.

Behind that other human was a tiny dollhouse,

Why?

 

You turn around to see that your room is now growing smaller,

Smaller each time you have another story from the unknown.

You continue to make this room grow smaller,

You realize that everything about that dollhouse you saw was progress.

This is the story of life,

Moving forward.

 

Creating stories from different experiences,

Gaining knowledge from the unknown.

It is not at all the unknown anymore,

It is your life.

Happily you claim it to be,

You do what works for you.

 

Without doing what works for you,

You begin to struggle again.

Following another human will get you caught up behind them,

Where their reality is.

Following your own way that works for you is the best way to move forward you discover,

Seeing others perform actions you can take into your own.

 

To follow others though is a poison into what could be their reality,

Then you become trapped again.

Follow the path for you,

Gain the proper knowledge to survive in the unknown.

This is the story of the unknown,

The story of life.

- By Jared Chavis