from Startles

 

Startles

I met myself at the intersection of Despair and Compassion roads. They looked about the same, but the book had said to choose Compassion, that Despair led to no good. I felt most comfortable in the intersection, not on either of the roads (whose signage was non-existent), so I lingered there with myself, suffering through yet another Platonic dialogue. Both of the roles were mine, though they felt more sturdy than roles, because I knew I would never forget my or my lines. That I and I spoke them all at once seemed normal, for I was accustomed to public places, their cacophonies of opposing voices.

The book makes a separation between the two, like a Maginot line between speakers of different languages. (I met two Germans in the cemetery today; one was east Asian and the other middle eastern, but their words came from Essen.) There was a reason the two roads crossed, did not simply run parallel. The word “despair” hadn’t yet suffered the fate of vocabularies emptied of meaning by fascist word workers. Nor had “compassion,” more mist than air, more air than earth.

How would I know compassion, had I not known despair? I asked myself. How would I know despair had I not felt the soft fleece of compassion? I had met myself, but we talked past ourself, not arguing exactly, but also not capable of agreeing. If the first amendment is dead, how can I talk to myself at all? Kill mockery, but leave hate behind like burned rubber, pretending to write but only impressing tire prints on the mud.

So, like the watercress farmers of Pearl City, I put down my hut at the intersection’s center. I preferred the “inter” to the “section,” so I called it “cross roads.” Around my hut they built a roundabout to keep traffic from flattening me. I appreciated the roundness, the cyclical nature of this traffic pattern, though it still led from Despair to Compassion, or vice versa. When I wept at night, having watched the news on my phone, I felt a kindness rise in me, as out of despair’s mud a lotus bloomed.

There was still nothing I could do about the beaten, the disappeared, the hung out to dry, those drowned in debt, the meek who had thought to inherit the earth before the oligarchs took over instead. The meek may still wear their Meek signs, but they also cradle AR-15s, because there’s no getting away from the argument that isn’t one, rather a violent assertion of one over the other self. I raised my Swiss flag, hoping there was a sliver of memory left that wars leave some mountains out. I worried only that traffic would stop, that the corner of Despair and Compassion would die of drought. I will go fund some water for me.