perseverance

a note on the state of the world

You’re sitting at the bottom of an indoor pool. You don’t remember how you got here, but it doesn’t matter. The buzzing sound of fluorescent lamps reminds you how violent mornings have felt at times, at school or the hospital, though the memory is hazy, teetering between chlorinated swimming lessons and the alarm ringtone from a past life. Your arms, long and pale, are cutting through water like butter knives: nobody told you to get to the other side of the pool, but it feels rational. Is rational rewarded? And is it really water if it pinches your skin? Are we done now, or is this part of the lecture mandatory? You’re a big fan of the narrative and raspberry jam. You get a jar and a spoonful, but you don’t get your dream story — not yet, not now. You say you can’t recall the last time happiness didn’t come with a repayment schedule in fine print. Every time somebody yells good things take time, the pool floor gets a little deeper. And every time the light goes off, you’re left a little colder but less bemused.

What happened to knowledge, you say, and I will tell you nothing in this pool is bound by physics, legislation, or civic duty. Knowledge is one of many methodologies of numbing out what you know and feel is right, a needle through the hot air balloon flying over Domino Park. When you stub your toe in water it doesn’t hurt, because I promised it wouldn’t and you listened, and now the responsibility of following through is on neither of us but on the beast. But the beast is prone to lying as much as the next guy. Don’t you believe in miracles? I’ll spare you the details if you spare me the difficulties of your condition: it takes two to tango and half of that to fuck things up. I don’t need to read the slogans on their hats to know what they’re made of. It’s all hearsay anyway and I never signed up for fearful nonsense. The beast doesn’t know he’s beastly and the believer doesn’t know he’s foolish, both asking for trouble on equal terms.

Would you have given up on faith if you had other options? What makes us faithful is there’s no absence of faith to hold in our hands like there is a probable absence of everything else. Namely, when the opposite of love is hate, of blue is red, of desire is indifference, there is no opposite of faith to tug and caress. People are selfish, we need something to hold and hold onto. Touch is proof, it made us good at survival. We hold onto hope begrudgingly as though we ever had it. We’ve always had it — and we never did.

Believing in things you haven’t seen with your own eyes is an intricate art; to do so you must tell yourself a story so rich and decadently soaked in detail you forget you’re halfway in it. Yes, it’s something you tell yourself, but you are the words being told and the pages they’re written on, and you’re the drunk narrator and his usual whiskey order, too. You are the bartender who doesn’t ask questions, and the soft calfskin detailing over the polished oak countertop, and the beautiful lady in the corner he wants to go home with. Some may call it delusion or fantasy, I call it getting lost in the things you’ve already guessed to be true. What is there left to believe in, you say? Democracy, change. The kind that breathes wind into the sea, which is not to discredit ballots and rallies, though maybe just a little. Unconditional love. Peace? Equality, community? Justice. Don’t laugh, hear me out. Applied pressure on what is now and what will be tomorrow is how truth is born. Whatever’s left of yesterday is not a concern of mine. There’s a lesson somewhere in here I can’t remember now and a sweet voice of a friend who drinks a lot of tea. A cigarette lasts as long as a phone call, but trying is forever. And that’s where I met you first, between trying and pretending, when we were kids together and wanted to kill the beast. You were so beautiful to me and you still are.

You’re on the other side of the pool now. It doesn’t matter how you got here. The light reflects off the blue porcelain tiles, casting a shadow on your face you’ve grown to love in old photos and hate in motion. You’ve forgotten what it was like just an hour ago. In part, forgetting is what makes you swim so well. I’d help you out of the pool, but I’m still at the train station. I’m late, I’m sorry; there’s raspberry jam and a warm towel in my bag. For you, friend, anything you want and then some.