Onize Atta is a lawyer, poet, photographer, producer, spoken word artist, creative director, stylist, fashion illustrator & designer, and mental health advocate amongst many other things, who believes in love and the limitlessness of the human heart and mind. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @OniZay.
The Pessimist
Perception is an illusion born of perspective
Situational, in respect of one’s mental position
As normalcy to the spider is chaos to the fly
And the gentle breeze you feel at the foot of the hillI is nothing
like the wind you feel when you’re on top of the world
Often I sit and watch from my ivory tower of solitude
Watch all the many people on their high horses
And the many people trudging through the mud
Watching everyone with their armour of indifference
Their masks of carefully concealed hopelessness
Lost in their human obsession with hope and fairytales
In the belief that hope is a yellow brick road that ends in fairytale
Forgetting that fairytales originally had tragic endings
That skies are as much darkness as they are starlight
That a glass is as much half empty as it is half full
This obsession has led to the metamorphosis of realism
Because in this infinitely twisted world
Realism is, more often than not, seen as pessimism
And sometimes we get lost under the realities of the world
Lost in a world of endless possibilities
Lost in exploring the meanings beneath the surface of reality
This innate desire for truth leads to this utopia we call What Is
Which is not a world of what could be’s but it is what it is
And in our perception we find ourselves estranged
Trapped in a loneliness born of a lack of belief in hope
Trapped in a loneliness born of a belief in tragedy as much as fairytales
Enjoying our satisfactory self-banishment to the island of our thoughts
And maybe we have other reasons for being lonely
Maybe we don’t belong to this time and this age
And this generation of blatant liars and blinking lovers
Love like butterflies and shooting stars
Love that burns so flagrant then withers into nothing
Love that fails to find the balance that is found in solitude
That fails to find the balance that is found in reality
That fails to know what it is like to be free
Because there’s freedom in solitude and in silence
There is freedom in a detached involvement with the world
Freedom in being able to soar high and watch with a bird’s eye view
Freedom in being able to balance fairytale and tragedies
But in a society that romanticises the truth in reality
Maybe we are pessimists who call ourselves realists
Because, like everyone else, we would like to believe in happy endings.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
To view the types of work we typically publish, preview or purchase our past issues.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 
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