Misaligned shoes

I’d like to blog today, which I’ve been missing on due to travelling, but now I’m in a long bus ride from ninh binh to Cat ba so I have time to write, writing being a cleansing ritual for my mind but publishing takes it deeper, like scraping the gunk off the teeth with my fingertips, although what ends up happening is that I start eating my fingertips instead, and the skin protecting my nails, so what I’m left with is uneven fingertips, broken and bleeding in countless places, my nails when I straighten my palm into a blade look like the silhouette of a mountain range, the skin around them a contour of a hiking trail, my anxiety climbing down through its uneven patches, for which I’ve received countless scoldings from my mother, and gotten perhaps hundreds of smacks on my palm by teachers with steel rulers, these giant ones, that looked like instruments of torture designed specifically as a release valve for the sadistic minds of lonely underachieving adults, who before striking my tiny spongy hands into red pulp, often threw a look of disgust as an added bonus, and even as a child I understood the absurdity of this interaction, and wondered if they too needed nail biting, maybe more than me, thoughts like these would make me smile, which would piss them off further, escalating the sentence into being asked to become a chicken, which is when you squat real low, wrap your hands around your legs and hold your ears, which you can never reach perfectly, so you end up wobbling on your feet trying to reach a stable position, like a chicken, with the underlying idea that you now look stupid, and everyone will laugh at you, which matters for children maybe as much as adults, and you should feel shame, shame which I didn’t know I had for that particular thing, which is what I believe most experience of shame is, it’s something you don’t have but are made to feel like you should, the missing component of shame being shame itself, which creates a conflict, the conflict of misaligned shoes, a terrible place to stand, your nose pointing one way and your feet another, the nose being the free mind that never had the shame and has no one forcing it on you, the feet being the mind that swallowed it and now punishes itself for feeling what it feels, eyes fluctuating between the two, biting fingertips harder in transitions, their corners shooting visible bloodstreams under a thin membrane, with at least one wound always hurting, the teacher no longer required.