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One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.
She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.
Forgetting was not the same as healing.
Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?
She couldn’t determine which was worse: the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her.
Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?
“What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
We are descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom, thrown overboard, deemed too much a drain of resources to stay on the journey to their destination.
She had room to think. To know what she wanted and believed. And all it had cost her was everything.
“But your whole history. Your ancestry. That’s who you are.” “No. I am who I am now. Before, I was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. Nobody. You don’t exist.
In the old days, when we discovered a ship that threw our ancestors into the sea like refuse, we sunk it. Now we will sink the world.
Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose.
Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.
This time, the two-legs venturing into the depths had not been abandoned to the sea, but invited into it.