Containment

He walked in every day to the desk. The desk covered in white papers filled with logical numbers leading to an even more illogical mean. An ordered chaos that he told himself he only knew in an effort to keep people out of his mind. It kept them all at bay; all within a safe watching distance of the containment that had become his life. A containment that held in the energy of a power plant that he stared at every day he sat down at his desk filled with paper and dried out pens. As he was so was the dome structure that sat seemingly silent was. Contained in it were forces unbeknownst to most and explainable only to a few of the population. Even those few could not say where it all came from but only judged what it was from tall tale tribal knowledge passed through aged lips.  Would his life be passed down as so; through lips that had spoken to him and shared in stories that became more elaborate through the years? Or would he forever stand still in the world; his own internal chaos raging and not known to the casual passer bys?

For the chaos was all masked by the stillness of the concrete and the notion that nothing could penetrate it. Sometimes he felt as if people thought he was stronger than he actual was; that he did not want to be seen out and was fine keeping to himself. He often thought the same and acted as such. He wanted to keep himself running and going on without a hitch. He wanted to be that cold, calculated professional that could separate his work and his life. He wanted to fit into the peg in the board with the white picket fence, dog, grill, and mortgage. But, with this feeling of efficiency of societal purpose came the always suspecting potential to burst; to explode from within and splatter all the prejudices and planned explorations that had been written on his list of things to do his whole life. It was this potential that everything that kept him going, that kept him operating in his life was built around. Sex, friends, gym, alcohol, music, cars, money, food, clothes, parties, vacations and forgotten Fridays were all conceived and thrown into his schedule to mitigate his mind from wandering to its natural state: chaos. For it was the chaos that showed him he was alive and still had a choice in it all. It was the chaos that made him appreciate life in the first place and made him cognizant of why, in some cases, order was needed. As in the dome, all that was ever thought and conceived as the worst possible scenario needed the order; needed the space to not become the dreadful reality that the numbers could paint.

But, there in laid the difference between himself and this inanimate object that contained forces that ran his professional life and catered to the little bubbles of millions: the difference of control. All of that concrete and force was controlled by humans and their devices wrought with fail safes, redundancies, and contingencies. He himself had built these limits and imaginary controls into his life to stop him from doing things; to stop himself from always striving for something new. He had built these controls to justify not thinking of his dreams and those things he knew would make him happy. He was the dome in the way that his emotions were being contained; that forces which he did not fully understand were being kept under wraps because they were needed to produce an understood end result; a result that would benefit the most but would not benefit the one who had produced it. The result would eventually wear down his sole; as it would the dome. The dome was meant to be worn down though because it had no other choice. Him, himself knew he had a choice. He could let himself keep running, not seeing the chaos underneath, not acknowledging or he could look inside and find all he ever wanted; tear down the controls and redundancies and give into the unpredictability, disillusion, and chaos that his young mind wanted. He could start to live.