All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

There’s enough. The lie of the world is telling you there is not enough. The government can print more money, can buy fewer tanks. We could build houses and share land and not be afraid of eviction marshals showing up at six in the morn. We could organize our lives a different way.

It is an act of courage to want to change your life. Don’t you think you would like that? To have a better life?

What the questionnaires had not asked that might have been useful to me: Do you wake up each day for yourself or for someone else? Do you believe your life to be your own?

As I carefully poured manuka honey into the slash ringing my girl’s finger, draped it with gauze, told her she would be right as rain, I felt the terror I would come to be ever better acquainted with in the years that followed, at the fragility of bodies, the bodies of everyone I loved; we are, at the close of things, bags of meat and blood encasing what’s ensouled: mercurial, flickering, holy.

What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you. What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.