On Passing the Torch

         “What do you want us to do, imitate you? Tell you how great you all were? Okay fine: You built a really impressive world. But it’s broken now and you won’t throw it away and you’re mad because we don’t want it. You want us to live by rules that have nothing to do with the way our world works and you hate us because we won’t. You are lost gods. What’s pathetic is you’re lost and you’re still around and all you do is bitch because we don’t appreciate you.”

         “We’re trying to pass the torch before you forget how to make fire.”

         “Your torch blew out thirty years ago. You go ahead and hold onto it. One day we’ll bury it with you. And then we’ll go on and live without you in this world, the one you couldn’t adapt to. It really will be our world then and we’ll figure it out just fine. We’ll make fire our way. We’ll make history our way. So fuck you. Fuck all of you.”

         And suddenly I understood why I was crying. Under that cracked overpass on a crumbling freeway in that dead world. At some point recently but without realizing it I had already buried my father, buried his world and buried the whole selfish lot of them, and I was grieving, and grieving all the harder because I knew I would move on. Because all of us would bury them and move on.

–from Elegy Beach (2009), by Steven R. Boyett