Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

I can see from the smirk on her face that this isn’t her first late-night rodeo. She’s been around. She’s danced on water in life’s late hours.

“Life’s chaos,” the woman says, sounding suddenly like an oracle. “It’s all just a runaway mule hell-bent on destruction.”

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. Reality is full of bad news.

He squeezes tight enough that I think that, when this greeting finally ends, I might find a raw diamond where my hand once was. “You’re as welcome as hell,” he says, finally giving me my hand back. No diamond. Just bruised flesh. “.

I’m notorious for saying the wrong thing on account of how often I have trouble distinguishing between what’s real and what’s imagined. And when you spend enough time in a world that’s likely just your imagination, you tend to not care as much about the anomalies that you see. When you question whether or not people are actually real, you can’t help but feel a little stoic at the news that someone has died. And it’s not that you’re a bad person, it’s just that you have trouble getting emotionally involved in the life of someone who may or may not be real.

And let’s face it: in this world that we live in, the fact of the matter is that it’s hard to think of anyone as being real. Everyone is just an image on a screen somewhere. Even the people that we meet and come across in the flesh eventually get reduced down to an image on a screen as we interact with them and their social media.

It’s the soundtrack of America right now. The jam we all bump and grind to. People being shot is the way we mark the passage of time now. Like, where were you when Sandy Hook happened? And do you remember who you were dating around the time when those people shot up that office building?

You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It’s a type of emotional triage.”

We have to admit that maybe some of us actually have it better than others and, in having it better, we have to admit that maybe we could get by with a little less so that others can have a little more and that means giving up some of the things that we have.

But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore.

Sometimes all we’re doing is waving at one another in the middle of the night and that’s as close as we get to being together.

“But how many books you read don’t make you a good or bad person. How many books you read is just how many books you read. My daddy didn’t read a whole lot of books. My mama either. But they were damn good people.”

His body knows how to keep him safe better than his mind does.

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? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.