Life is like chewing gum

What a day… Honestly though, what a life. A pain, really. No wonder it had become a common saying that life is hard. And while it really is hard from time to time, I rather feel it has the consistency of chewing gum. At every full stop, every new start, at all the new beginnings and every now and then, life is hard. Metaphorically, this would be when you take a fresh pellet out of its container and put it in your mouth.

You think about how great it will taste and how it will make your breath so much better, but you forget, just for a second, that before that you have to dig your teeth through this hard shell and really clench your jaw together to get the groundwork done.
So you chew and chew, and the gum gets more elastic. Malleable. You think, ah, now’s the time. To take up your life into your own hands and form it to whatever you want it to be. You can enjoy the taste, form bubbles and let them pop just to blow new ones again. It’s fun, isn’t it?

Now, common desire is to have a life or rather a path, of your own.
Naturally, you start by taking your gum and stretching it into a direction you like.
The further you pull though, the higher the resistance gets. How far away from the main cluster you can go, has to be carefully conceived and considered beforehand. At some point it might sever completely, or snap back with a force so strong it might damage you irreversibly.

In this slippery, slick substance it also occurs to me a common threat to get stuck. Much akin to quicksand. The more you struggle to get away – from expectations, “common sense” and societal rules – the more you get caught up in it. The longer you’re in there, the more you panic. It’s a war of attrition, a battle against the endboss of toughness. And you live for a long time. … Probably. I mean you arguably have the choice. You always have the choice to cut off your stretchy string. You could.

When a life finds its end… It’s like spitting out your chewing gum after it got deprived of its flavor. Some end up in bins – hopefully most of them do. But a lot of them…

Blend together beneath my feet; patches that slowly turn black. A kaleidoscope in grayscale. Painting a mosaic of long lost lives with tiles of spit-out chewing gum.