The first thing my father taught me was to give a firm handshake, the firmness spreading up my arm, encasing me in an alloy. ‘’If anyone ever tells you that you aren't good enough, don't listen to them’’, ‘’you’re special’’ and ‘’no matter what, never give up on yourself’’; words uttered by parents so to equip their children with the armour necessary to survive a hostile world. But the world I live in, the west, is no longer hostile. Never before have we had it this good. A truism. And yet I bare my armour, ready for battle, unused, my skin underneath it soft. The armour that was supposed to protect, now a weight upon the shoulders of a would-be soldier. Sitting in class, doing homework, my gauntlets itching and awkward when holding a little ballpoint pen, attention elsewhere, because an arrow never grazed my guard-brace. The armour takes most of the beating but the bruises come easy and make for a defensive knight. A strange creature. Half warrior, half formless mass, a mass given its contours by the armour, and only the armour. The poor bastards who for a moment’s pause, who stop believing in it, witness their feet flow out from under them, their well-proportioned shoulders collapsing, their hair falling out. The second moment of insanity. The illusion then becomes that I wear my armour by choice. I sneak a peek at my father, who sits across from me at the table, in full armour, with his helmet off, his face completely fine, well shaped. I keep mine on, my conscious reason being that he has never treated me well, and that I keep my guard up to protect myself from him – a convenient lie. It’s to protect myself from what I would become if I did the same. The shame in my father’s eyes if he saw me like that. Goo on the floor. More than a disappointment. A failed seed. A failure. I trudge along, dictated by my whims and sudden desires, never in control. Self mutilation, fatigue, helplessness and confusion mark the knight who can’t carry his own armour. Am I really good enough? The question scares me. The armour fades for a moment, panic hardens it quickly, so to avoid any leakage. The act of immediate repair becomes automatic. Now safer, and even less in control. What am I now? I never asked for this. Is all I can do complain? Whine? Struggling to lift a plated arm to the keyboard, struggling to write something, suddenly out of breath? What knight am I who can’t fight? Where are the damsels? Where are the dragons? Where is my money? I try to read a book again, I can’t, I get angry at myself, and go on YouTube. That I can do. Armour, armour. The slick layer of stainless steel that exists between me, and the world. I am a half-thing masquerading as non-thing. But there is something to be gained in all this. There is an opportunity now, to form myself into whatever form I want, unlike you father. I have been using your definitions for too long. Playing the games you prepared me for, but where is the war? You sit there, at the other end of the dinner table, drinking your beer, strong, tall, and honourable. You are disjointed, you don’t flow like mother; you rewrite, inject, and omit, and reread again and write until nothing of the original text you wrote remains. You collect snippets, punchlines, and buzzwords, only to later weave them together like a surgeon would flesh. Are you injured, father? That's how I am currently writing this text, as the only way to get to you is to think like you. I have conversations with mother. I socialise with you. I don't want to fight anymore. I don’t want to fight you two. I don't want to be a man, I want to be me. There is a war to be fought, but not here. Mom and dad. The conflicting narratives of the brain, with me caught in the middle when you fight, when I ran upstairs, even when I didn't hear, I knew you were still fighting in the dining room. To find someone to hold me when you fought caused my loneliness. I screamed at you, called you ‘’retarded’’, whereupon you would respond with the classic ‘’you’re living in our house’’ in a brief effort of solidarity, against me. You both wanted to protect me in your own way, but I am leaving now. Father who art in heaven, the heaven of my brain, the prefrontal cortex, you built my armour in a social mesh, stacking brick and lime, pouring cement, paving roads, building schools, nightclubs and drug stores. An armour for the world. And because mine is the same, built in its and your image, with my flaccid skin pressed up against its edges, I too feel the sidewalks, the cracks in the asphalt and the flowers growing between them. You pave and repave to cover them up, the flowers, as mother spreads her carpet over them for me.. I feel my skin extend into the clubs, father's machines beating away their telltale monotony, organising the people by making them dance, ordering the world in architecture and public transit systems. But what when you run out of asphalt? What when mother runs out of cloth… When I die? When I am standing at the edge of the red carpet, and looking down, suddenly feeling an old hand gripping my own. The familiar firmness that I now no longer can hold. For a moment I see you both. Mother subconscious, her ferocity, and you, suddenly without your armour, frail, old, and shy. You look at me through the clouds telling me ‘’remember who you are’’ - you wanted me to grow up, and to mother I was always her baby. I grew up when I realised I should stop trying to explain, but show. I flow through your world, father, the one mother conquered, but I do not end in you. I end somewhere else. I end here. With your firm hand crushing mine, as my foot lands on the green grass, with no more asphalt paved across it, no more memory, only insanity, no more armour, only me.

Now I'm sitting on the train home again, and it reminds me of a dream I once had. At least a part of it, as the rest I've already forgotten. I was on a train, much like this one, and it was me and what looked to be a shaman, though wearing casual, civilian clothing to better blend in. I morphed over, somehow, to his side, by one of the train exits, and he began to talk; “where I am from there are no mentally ill, we cure it by making soldiers out of them” he looks at me, nodding, “in my language the word “blood” is the same as the word “mask””, he gestures as were he by hand painting across his face, “the blood, it becomes the mask, and the mask covers the broken face, the broken jaw, making it whole again, making speech easy again… making living with oneself easy again. And the blood of the enemy, when it covers them, they are gone, just the blood, just the mask. We have no mentally ill, only soldiers...” distracted, I saw a girl, the most stunning woman ever, walk pass me, she smiled at me, and I didn't even say goodbye, not even a polite “hey”. She leaves the train. At a in-the-middle-of-nowhere stop, standing there, and watching her vanish behind a bend of the tracks, I feel something familiar brush against my mind. The breath of a dragon. My skin red-hot under my armor.

P.S. People run from you father, trying to escape your rigidity, right into mother's arms.

P.S. I knew there was something off. I was so busy fiddling with my armour that I forgot to keep my subconscious in check. I'm rereading and recognize her handiwork.