Neon Headlights

what were the neon headlights even for, to be honest?

Isn't it crazy when you get picked apart by the people who made you?

You're sentient,

a growing fragment of the universe

a spirit capable of altering the courses of entire worlds,

maybe even making them

Yet somehow,

the couple who happened to be the vessels

for birthing you into this tiny world

you were supposed to walk in and maybe mold,

raised you like a machine - trainable, obedient

You got some nifty tricks out of there

learned to walk through the training weights they gave you

learned to talk through the language classes they played

for you, around you, and when they like to think you can't hear

They gave you quite a lot of training gear too.

More training weights, some misbalanced or without pair

attached odd parts to your limbs

connected new wires to your system

(they stung from being jammed into flesh, but hey,

what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, yeah?)

Oddly enough,

they never taught you how to take them off.

You never figured out what these extra parts

- that made your back ache

your arms tight

your chest numb -

were for

Surely, they were for something right?

So you do damage control your whole life.

Tape for sparking parts

new wires for boxes that don't connect to anything

back support to help with the weight

painkillers

menthol patches

untrained first aid

more weights

extra backpacks

bigger pockets

Heck,

you don’t know what neon headlights were for

but you tried them anyway.

If it's under this sun and you can afford it

you've tried it at least once

Some friends convinced you to change to better gears,

helped you remove some, with difficulty

lifted some of the weights whenever they could

You even gained the courage to pull out some of the implanted wires.

They've been in you for so long now that it hurt

when the flesh growing around it was torn, pulled out with the wire,

but the wound is finally closing up, protected under trusty gauges  

Isn't it crazy when you get picked apart

by the vessels for your birth in this tiny, tiny world

when they liked you in your training weights better,

preferred you hunched in a familiar silhouette of endless baggage?

Bc their image of true strength

is the image of a turtle,

the image of continued struggle

despite under the weight

of the shell you grew up in