Rage is not just a punch that ravages someone else’s face.

Rage is not blazing fire, not a splash of red, not a guttural yell, and certainly not a violent smash. Rage is not a transient flash.

It is a muted vibration spreading from all of your organs that threatens to disquiet the room if you don’t grit your teeth to hold it in. It is invisible to the diluted pupils yet razor-sharp for the focused. It is the one-second short breaths you draw before three longer deep breaths ensue. It is the reiterations of calculations you’ve done in your head night after night about how living out your most homicidal fantasy won’t transcend you to the nirvana you seek. Rage is everything that happens before your sunk nails uproot from your bloodied palms.

Rage is their quick glance cast your way and the hardened freeze in their second gaze as you approach. Rage is their change in tonal tenderness the moment you open your mouth, letting your best accent carry over. Rage is when they politely retreat after conversing, turn to another more similar-looking customer, and immediately grin at them. Rage is when you can elucidate yourself perfectly in a language they prefer, yet the skin you wear doesn’t elude them. Rage is the very need to satisfy all of the above to beseech them for a pitiful modicum of decency.

Rage is the turning heads and strained necks when your fingers interlock with another human as you saunter through a busy street. It is their failure to restrain their startled looks as you take notice. It is the deafening blow of “I respect it, but I don’t like it.” It is also the delightful “Congratulations!” that occasionally hits you from behind, which simultaneously obligates you to appreciate their expressed progressiveness and reminds you how you have, just then, earned the approval for what you thought was rightful. Rage is the fact that you hadn’t felt abnormal until they taught you so.

Rage is, at the dinner table, your eloquence subdued by other interlocutors who are louder by both volume and first impressions. Rage is when you’re conventionally categorized as the docile lamb so you have to practically shout to get yourself heard. Rage is when you finally get the microphone and attempt to air out your frustration just for previous speakers to return and take your stage to cry about how they don’t have it better. Rage is when you’re boiling to go berserk, but the very first animalistic act would put you back in the cage of the culturally backward, historically undeserving. Rage is when they ask you to move on from history but proceed to remind you every day how that history is your past, present, and future.

Rage is when you find your place on a picnic mattress, and everyone is lamenting about life, but you can’t begin to tell your tale of woe to someone who has never been marred by it. Rage is your facial muscle melting, incapacitated to put on a smile to pretend you’re drinking in the dazzling flowers surrounding you. Rage is its omnipresence, wearing you down, embittering your taste, and souring your peace of mind. Rage is your inability to explicate in one simple sentence why you are stung by a utopian landscape straight out of a portrait.

Rage is when you are truly, sincerely burning to raise your fist, you realize that you can’t because, in the bigger sense, you will lose everything you are. Rage is when you know that lashing out through your fists only proves their point, that it makes you more masculine, more dominant, more imperialist, more in a manner that they so much appreciate, more “like them.” Even if you were to throw that fist, you wouldn’t know where it should land, as no single cheek has warranted physical contact with your hand, but, in the aggregate, they make an engorged and disdainful face begging to be targeted.

Rage is the consequent repudiation of all binding codes because you can no longer observe the necessity to engage in moral and ethical considerations. Rage is your capitulation to your inner desires to rain devastation on anything that makes you feel apologetic as a being.

Rage is the eventual realization that ravaging someone else’s face is not nearly enough but all that you can do.