Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

“When you see yourself in the mirror, do you like what you see?” “I try not to look. I think a lot of people like me are like that.” “When you say ‘people like me,’ what do you mean?”

Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion. There are better ways and places to spend your time.

Guns are like pets. Even if you don’t own one, it’s only a matter of time before your neighbor, friendly or unfriendly, brings one into your life and you have to cross your fingers and hope it’s friendly.

Maybe the love story here is more reflective, you know? Like maybe Narcissus had spent his whole life hating himself before that one day when he saw his own beauty, his own worth.

Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that?

Me and everyone who looks like me are the same. We all carry that same weight. We all live lives under the hanging sword of fear. We’re buried under the terror that our children will come into all of the same burden and be trapped, just like we were. So we stay put, running in place. Most of all, people like me fear that we can’t do anything to break the cycle. And I don’t know if we can or not. I just know that we have to try. That I have to try.