samson

burn it down, she says.
burn it to the ground.

because we are a remembering people, and a broken one. and if we’d ever really tried to leave the cave, we’d have been long gone the first time.

that’s why we don’t make maps; it is an excuse to never go anywhere? because how would we ever find our way back, and how would we ever want to?

we are are we at all we are imported. and authenticity is our curse, our tortured desire and our crescendo. we are nothing,
nothing,
nothing if we are not ourselves—but what are selves? collections of fragmented memories and blurry visions of what we hope will be our future? we are nothing of the present, only moments past and future, and right now is only a tiny void, a little gap in between.

but we must be something in this moment, even if only a gap in time—after all, we think, and therefore are. and if i am only a singing, exhaling, blood-pumping, writing mass of muscle and tissue and tangled veins and bone marrow, that is enough for me. if we are anything in the present, it is certainly nothing we would ever recognize. our mirrors are liars—we are their makers and their gods, how could they ever pretend to be honest with us?

and we are little baby blackbirds, trying to walk for the first time—pretending, as if we didn’t know from the beginning that we could fly. we walk, because it’s safer, cutting up our feet with our own eggshells, with our past.

there’s nothing new under the sun except history you don’t know.