When people say, “we have made it through worse before”
all I hear is the wind slapping against the grave stones of those who did not make it, those who did not survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no solace in rearranging language to make a different word tell the same lie.
Sometimes the moral arc of the universe does not bend in a direction that will comfort us. Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are people who fall off in the process.
Please, dear reader, do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies that I might one day begin to believe.
We are not all left standing after the war has ended. Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.