I suppose this merits a content warning. But what doesn’t, anymore?

I don’t have an answer to that question. I just thought it sounded pretty. Maybe I’m being too blithe. Or too emo. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Binaries are boring. Manicheanism is so third century. It is impossible to be right all the time. Or left. Or pre or post or anti or pro. Hypocrisy is an innate human condition. We fit in no boxes, neither the ones they try to cram us into nor the ones into which we willingly seal ourselves. The contorting hurts, we adopt unnatural postures, but in that discomfort instead of cutting to break free, we often cut one another to fit them into our box. Or to ensure they’ll never fit. Or we cut ourselves thinking it’s worth the pain to have a little more breathing room in our cage. It’s a shame the remnants that get left behind: gossamer slices of authenticity we were too embarrassed or afraid to share in this world full of sharp edges.

I wish I could tell you all the things. Instead, I’ll tell you one. On a given morning, some years ago, a friend put the top on a bottle, stepped outside, swam into the ocean and never came back. Sometimes we cut too deep. Ourselves and one another. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Suffering is that waiting, underwater pearl   
what turns old is salt    low sobbing in every wave   
The fierce wind is a jade bracelet on the wrist  

Excerpt from Island (#2) by Yang Lian

I haven’t written in a while. At least not words that reach pages for public eyes. When life pokes me in the tender spots, my response is to shrink into myself. Sometimes this leads to an implosion; a less-than-supernova. And sometimes silence. Self-pity is banal, however, and I try not to do it in public. I used to lather it over anyone that came near, as if ruining your day would make mine better. Instead, it just multiplied the unhappiness. Needless to say, I have a lot of amends to make and seek to avoid adding new ones to that list.

The triune brain used to be a popular evolutionary model. I recall some lecturer somewhere asking an assembled group of us how many brains we had. I said three. She nodded and went on to talk about lizard brains and whatnot. Oops, I thought. I meant three as in the gut-heart-brain model. Who was more pseudoscientific? Yet there is nothing truer than myth. If our hearts hang crooked and guts churn in discontent, cognition falters, and we reach for knives. A lot of us aim our thrusts poorly. Disembowelment as metaphor. Everything is gutting.

On the other hand, all of this is rather absurd. This flock of frail, fleshy animals with collectively and individually oversized notions of self-importance. Trapped in designs not of our choosing, we scamper and crash to avoid those sharp edges, rusty with the oxidized decay of the afterlives of long-dead tyrants cloaked in their own triune of god, gold, and glory. Alas, the severity of the absurdity demands serious attention. So, naturally, knives. At the risk of recycling quotes from previous posts: “I thought about how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this.” – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars.

It will all be okay, even though it absolutely won’t. The least I can offer a reader’s salt-filled, weary eyes is the encouragement to come closer, knives sheathed, to tend to the wounds of this world, from others, and from ourselves. The stitches we weave bind us in sorrows and solidarities, a mosaic of scars, healing but not forgotten, as we rend their world asunder.