29: Impotent

Hard to dredge up words from all this gaping dissatisfaction. The days' color and texture have bled away into an amorphous void; toilet bowl-white.

Thursday is Thanksgiving and yesterday I thought about the old lessons that we used to learn, the lessons we roughly shed in adulthood, about the noble, generous Pilgrims and the pliable, humble Native Americans, coming together for The First Thanksgiving, sharing their bounty, swapping recipes, taking duck lip selfies. I thought about construction paper feathers, glue sticks, crayon-black buckled shoes, chirpy prayers, syrupy words like grateful and blessing and togetherness so our teachers would nod, pleased. I thought about genocide, about fleeing broken countries and finding a new ones, cold ones, about crushed bones and burnt flesh and severed limbs, of red hot blood in golden goblets and battle cries echoed in drunken song, loud and terrible, from throats that drink power like wine, that scream their animal lust and dominance and proclaim it God-given. I thought about the first being last and the last being first and wondered, when? I thought of stories trampled of their meaning, wrung dry by centuries of retelling, of rephrasing, of forgetting. Of re-interpreting and passing off our forgery as memory. As fist-thumped doctrine.

I thought about these things, and felt angry, and scared, and tired, and as always, raggedly impotent. I hugged Eve closer to me and I did not write anything down.