I've grown weary of fighting.I'm tired of my own old stories, even though I've come to peace with some of this history. I'm tired of looking for the good. How can I shine that brighter against the corrosive rust of humanity adrift. It used to be the struggle for my own life. my own light. my own liberty. I ate glass and walked fires to survive. I survived.
Like the ultimate stretch of strength for an animal, being boiled alive, to climb and clamor from the hot pot, to win, to pause and take a near exhalation, only to be gingerly lifted up again and splashed into the center of the roiling.
I survived my childhood, for the most part. Some shrapnel and amputations are still in the process of reclamation. But, here I am...survivor of bending realities, cruelty and meanness, violation of spirit and soul...balanced between the thumb and fingers of a country gone rogue, a species gone rancid. And, just like that, I'm back in the boil. A sociopathic narcissist, contorting truth and speech, a bloated bag of skin, emptied and rotted from the inside, launching his shattered nothingness of a soul into violent projections and so, all the beautiful things must die. all the light in the world must hide under the shrouds. to accommodate defense, the darkest rages find their footing and tooth and claw begin their wrestling to the bottom of the pond. and, if the sun rises, it has been snuffed in public celebration.
what is more significant of hope than an animal, a child, a right to life with dignity and love, a peaceable sharing world where everyone has enough, when no light is stormed out by another, when there is sky big enough for all the stars?
and now they are in cages, crying forever because the soul shatters in all that blind terror. I know. and now they are extinct, stuffed behind the veil because that kind of wilderness and wisdom must not remind people of their own possibilities. I know.
and now they are leaned on crutches, sucking on dry crackers because if they are at the far edge of their basic needs, they will not speak, will not rise, will not rally. they will comply and go quietly into that dark night. and now they are othered, because this whole nation of people are balanced on the head of pin and told to look out and to destroy the enemy. and now the colors run, the singing grows hoarse and the ink dries. the dancing feet pull together in their shackles.
I say that my light is fading. I say it and as I speak I feel the fire. It's still there, hot and smoldering. I'm still alive and more than an ember.
I don't know what it will take to journey through this next moment. I can be so easily overcome. I have been so well adapted to hopelessness. To submit and seek smallness and to make a shelter of my own hands surrounding the flicker of flame...that was my roadmap. These were my tools: Dance in the periphery. Sing and laugh when I can find it. Seek solitude and lay in the grass with animals. Talk to the moon. Rage and empty the buckets of tears into the warm waters of the sea. Keep the pen moving; make sure there is proof that it happened, that I happened. I was here. This is real. I exist. Seek the kindness of strangers but keep them strangers so they don't have time to know my bullseye. Tolerate the loneliness. It is better than the terror. But, the terror is soothed by company so it circles me back to the humans and becomes the dilemma and diamonds of relief.
I am still here. This is real.
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