Part of what’s so terrifying about me is that I don’t believe in anything. Not just in the way that one would demand the nascent comfort of having their life be explained away by a satisfying or at least logical ending, but anything anything. Like having interests and opinions and politics that inform my identity. Instead, my identity is the grey profile picture placeholder. Alien to this world, it is generalizations sloppily pasted on a warm blanket of everything. Adapting from human to human. Coming to terms with the monster under my synthetic skin. Trying on origin stories for sport. Was i sent to earth to draft an intergalactic report on the buoyancy of our atmosphere? To get trade secrets? For love?

These days should be no different. Except that the world has slopped off its upward slope in such brusqueness and expediency that, confronted with these new realities - the rise of the far and further right, so aptly captured by the long-postponed (or awaited?) hero’s welcome of a dictator - I am ripped apart and finally forced to choose a side. And still, I cannot. 

While I condemn these infringements on our civil liberties (so explained away to uphold the Good), I can’t help but still see the humanity in the people who think otherwise and try to understand their narrative of being disenfranchised, so fucked over, ill-represented, and with the same things happening now in a much, much more hushed way. I would argue though that even just the mob righteousness alone is much more appalling - the righteousness that pardoned these present brutalities, and allowed us to distance ourselves from an other who is every bit of the same make up as us, but who just took up the wrong vice. What’s frustrating is that because it’s a war on values, on intangibles, the point is so easily lost and skewed. 

But I am dumb, fake news and, even, facts-exhausted, and already half-expecting someone from either side to swoop in and smite me down. All I know is this country, and world, is mine, but not just mine. It’s a shared space and I wish we could let everyone be heard and understood, considering everything they’ve been through. That we could listen, and listen deeply without intent to rebutt. I suppose we don’t have the luxury to do that anymore, but that’s exactly the world I dread the most.

And really all I’ll do is to keep trying to find the schism where fighting and keeping the peace fold over, and fit myself in that hole. Tell myself there’s beauty in self-erasure. And hush that smaller voice that says I’m so sad and scared and just more than anything sorry for staying silent, and this may very well be my attempt to lobotomize my guilt.

It won’t work, don’t worry.

I have a deep, dark anger inside me. And like most other iterations of one’s own myth of sisyphus, it’s boring and gross and tiring. It has no start or end. Just a whole lot of middle. My middle is a scuffed up scab suckering me into gorge-submission. I dig deep at it, like swatting away a mosquito, until I’m left with the hole. Then, the next day it blossoms into the same rough form. I pick at the wound again and again, hoping that the hole will stay. But the blood always coagulates too fast. But the body is always forty-seven steps behind my itching fingers. I always forget.

Which is funny because I’ve always had such a soft body. Baby pink in softness. I can’t run in place for 1 minute without my throat closing in. I can only make my legs form a small letter v, before they deaden. My back snaps back to its witch’s curve after a few pulls. I would lose every race to a newborn. Worse, I am exactly what’s expected of my outside, no matter how much I rebel against it. They will still tell me that I can’t possibly carry that, or know that, simply because my attempt will betray it. I want to know, is there a graceful way to push a boulder up and down?

There must be. But I forget again that the possibility of this was important. Instead, I am inside your car and fixating on one word you said wrong. That you spent too much time being angry on a phone call for work. That you told me I didn’t have to help you there and it must have meant you thought I was weak. It’s not like I don’t see how stupid it all is. But right then and there, when I can see clearly but there’s a damn spot that won’t rub out and I’m asking for so little, just for everything to be still and the same as it is in my mind, falling prey to the weakness of my body is just so easy and comforting.

The act of rubbing out is fruitless too, for the most part. I inflict a lot of non-lethal marks on my person with blunt surfaces, like fists and palms, because I like pain but I don’t actually like pain. I want to die, but I don’t actually want to venture into the unknowingness of it. All I want is the ringing and that it’ll ellipses your senses into mulch. Rubbing out is fruitless because it is not selective. It wipes your entire memory clean. You wake up. You look at yourself and imagine that you’re just 3 tries away from scaling the mountain.

And this is where I am, on the infinite zigzag of the eternal return. I am broken and ugly, but I’m okay with that. Because I am functional. I am allowing myself to reap the forgiveness, anyway. I have not gone to sleep yet. This is an attempt to push back against myself. 

I will remember, I will start here.

(day 0.01/ so this is how it is)

when you work hard and work noble, in the way that you do as you barely touch the base of your measuring cup, you do it to vindicate yourself of your 87% ability to do most of whatever you want to do, while revving that ability up +13. you do it in a zero-sum way, where everyone else is an ecocidal narcissus, while you are gingerly pressing the nails to your palms — “they do not know, and i (I) do.”

this is how it is when you think that all you need is good intentions, when you think that the shortcut won’t hit snags. how it is is that your want to suffer spectacularly will lead to the biggest ass whooping of your life: you will toil in a painfully banally, slowly way. how it isn’t is that there will never be any good to come out of it.

so this is how it is. you press your head lower, and keep finding other ways in.