I Thought If I Could Redeem Something In Him I Could Redeem Something In Me, Too. But I Failed Us Both.

There was a worse fate than death, I found, as the god I once worshipped laid his hands on my very soul.

To be unmade.

You weren’t there on the mountain

when its last glacier melted,

You weren’t there in the river

when it’s water ran empty,

You weren’t there by the ocean

when it’s body rested over much of the land.

You didn’t watch the dying happen, but nonetheless, it happened. And one sunny day, when the skyscrapers stand hollow, and the cars don’t run, and the world’s heart has beat its last,

You won’t be there.

When I was a child I’d only known depression through medicine commercials, where the depressed person was a porcelain wind up doll that had to be wound over and over again to walk. I didn’t really understand it then, tucked away neatly in my television set. Why wouldn’t they want to keep going, always? Why would they need to be wound? And now as I look down at my porcelain foot, I wonder why it isn’t shuffling in front of the other.

I’ve a pin with a ball end pinched between my index and thumb. Ego inflating like boils in me, I pop every idea that I am something good, worthwhile. I wonder if a harsh inner critic is a blessing or a curse as she darts pushpins in my spirit, and punches holes in my identity until I am paper thin and hollow. Light as a feather taken by the slightest idea of greener grass; convinced going anywhere is better than here.

A letter to my father,

I behave youthfully around you, happy go lucky and thoughtless at times. This isn’t because I am those things, but because you let me be. You have never been a parent to me, but a friend. And as your friend, I must tell you:

I behave as if there is nothing the matter, to keep the peace, and not ruin what bond we have, but I have been lying to you, and to myself, that our differing politics needn’t ever intersect. In fact, they intersect every time I look at you and remember the hat you hang in your garage. The red one, with the white letters. I remember you voted against my interests for your own, which foolishly you did, as you will not get your way in the end.

And seeing as I cannot have my father and honesty at once, it seems neither will I.

What could you have if you let yourself dream? If you didn’t squash anything that shone under that worker’s boot of yours?

Intelligence grand and ever expanding,

his head pounds with new ideas, while the heart in his chest beats slower,

his empathy is sluggish and cold.

The same old cruelty that ran in the veins of the cavemen is steady in him, his wisdom in vain. He has become acutely worse, torturing with metal tools instead of wooden ones, brainwashing with television instead of word of mouth, colonizing with guns instead of swords. What use is knowledge in the hands of a dominator? It becomes just another weapon, words to razors sentences to spears. Do not waste intellect on brutes, they will wound you deeper because they will know where it hurts.

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

More hours in the day ought to do it. Just four or five more, and my dreams don’t seem so far away.

Polymaths are rarer than single subject experts; lofty does not begin to describe my future. But who ever aimed low and went high? Better to do the opposite I say, and maybe I’ll warm up to medium.

I adored living as a shell of myself. I held echoes in my chest where my heart used to be, and laughed in tickles as the words of others caroused my rib bones. Nothing at all was serious, nothing mattered the littlest bit to me. Until someone I knew recognized me. A girl I went to elementary school with, with sharp blue eyes and now dyed brown hair; she used to be blonde. I used to be too. Everything feather heavy caught weight on me, my skin was saddlebags, my heart beat for the first time in eight long years. It was a rapid hurried thing my heartbeat, like it had just woken up from a bad dream. The girl, well, a woman now, ogled at me with a sort of cold consternation—she looked sorry for me. My hair sort of tangled, my outfit worn since last night must’ve been so starkly different from the neat hand-raised-in-the-air-eager-to-answer-a-question girl that used to sit next to her in Mrs. Jones class. It hit me then that something did still matter to me, not present me, but to my childhood self. Little me was still alive, she still cared about what Jasmine thought of us. She used to cheat off of our math quizzes for god’s sake and she’s sorry for me? How could I ever be something I’m not in peace when there are lingering living memories trooping about, forcing me to remember who I was, and acknowledge what I’ve become. I adored living as a shell of myself. Nothing hurt so badly as it does now that I don’t anymore.