Passages, February 2021

I Write Passages So I May Make My Own

The selfish purpose of these near-coded correspondences has been simple. I want to write letters even more coded in doublespeak and wordplay, so that I can say I have been honest with you without ever having to speak the truth. When I said that I was lying, I might have been lying. The more complex I write them, the more predicated upon our reading of the last each one becomes, the more wiggle room I afford myself. So before we submerge ourselves, clad in the thin, oxygen lacking diving suits of limited time, I will speak plainly. This week’s starring roles: yours truly as my nation, founding fathers as Founding Fathers.

• • •

Reflection, it seems, is something spoken, not acted upon. We’re aware of the state of our nation, our relationships with each other, but we don’t act to improve them. Every one of these letters I write represents a week gone by in which nothing has fundamentally shifted for me. I’ve become very good at measuring the distance between my dreams and my reality. Between justice and what just is, the relationship that once pointed out has rattled around my empty head to create a skeletal maraca, keeping me alive only by a necessary dance to the rhythm of tomorrow.

• • •

We are placed in these metaphorical positions by very literal forces. Our daily lives are defined by what came before, our existences written out in the shorthand scribble of seconds over minutes. We bleed history, something I’ve been taught two ways. There’s the hopeful version, where points in our collective past are subjected to drawing delusions of what could have been. The bombs should never have been dropped. But when the home invasion yet to come would be met with fiery resistance, and failing to strike would lead an older, colder man to make your choices for you. then the bomb was always going to drop. From the second we took Prometheus’ gifts into our hands and left our Fathers’ garden, flaming swords in hand and fangs in mouth.

• • •

The men who did very little and made quite a big deal out of it are seen as heroes, while they fall into the same pattern. I’m told I look like the ones who came before. And I know that. No matter how long you let your hair grow or how little you look in the mirror, you cannot change your face by not trying. That anyone can be unlike those who came before is that daydream history. Not when they’ve spent their lives for nothing but loss. Not when your home’s halls make up the fallout zone for one last playground prowl of hide and seek, looking for something to blame. We are copies of those who came before, thinking they could change things. I’m the living double of a single fiction.