Knives Out

 Sometimes I think we're born like a hunk of wood. Just a piece of life cut from the wholeness of the tree. That is how we sit until someone, or a group of people take their knives and drive it beneath our bark, pulling away the things that we feel we are protected by. They whittle away our leaves, each one saying to another, that there should be more marks here, or less coarseness there. They scrape away at you with their etching tools and the cutting devices... until you fit some form, a rough image of what they have desired all along. Some of us are born like Balsa. Some of us are as defiant as oak.