November 8, 2024

log 2: I am convinced that hope will save the world

The Society of Sadness and Evil Defeaters [Log 2]

Doesn’t it move you, too?

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I had a dream last night that everyone left. They didn’t go very far, just to the library in Lang music, but they went all together. I felt very stupid, first, then deeply lonely. In the dream I smashed all the people I’d ever loved together: my best friend from primary school was sitting next to the girl I danced with all through college was sitting next to my secondary two crush. “Why did everyone leave me?” I asked. I don’t remember what they replied. The scene changed abruptly, as scenes do in dreams; we were all sitting in a circle in the quadrangle of my old junior college except I was standing in the middle and a panel of stern-looking adults formed a grim line on the outside. “Explain your actions,” said the stern-looking adults, so I did. As I did, all my friends began to dance. 

x

The primary notion that stops me from writing work like this is that there’s too much of myself in it and too little of anything else. There are many things I’ve wanted to say, want to say still. And I realized as I was pouring protein powder down the funnel at four a.m. that I may as well. We can only live in our own bodies, after all. Occasionally someone receives a heart and half of a soul, but we have yet to replicate the results with the exact same base conditions. Thus, for better or worse, we are stuck here. I am stuck in myself. So I will write— from this wretched body, to you.

My dreams have been unsubtle. There is a vast quantity of grief that is inaccessible to me in the waking hours or I have blocked off or is stuck inside like a congested sinus system lodges gunk in your lungs, ears, nose. In my dreams I am still home but I have to go soon. What follows is always the same: a sadness so great it feels like my chest is being crushed by hands the size of tectonic plates. The hydraulic press of hurt stamps me deeper into the ground and I reach out with increasing desperation. In my dreams I take long, meandering walks with my friends across the landscape of our shared youth. When I wake up, they are already gone.

In spite of this growing familiarity, last night was particularly brutal. There most certainly wasn’t the in-dream infrastructure to support a major global power’s election and the results, but despair took the fire access stairway and got in all the same. I hurt and fear for my friends who are in the place right now, the place that is falling out of itself. I want to hug them and hug them and hug them. But distance is a killer, and I am going down.

Singapore is a country of sterility and I am rotten to the core. I watch everything unfold from the city that stunted me for nineteen years and I want to do anything, god, anything at all. So I find things to do. I write messages, I send emails.

Still. Still.

x

Eight hours ago I watched The Wild Robot with a friend. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this in the dark of our living room, the occasional static of a car driving by outside shearing open the silence and leaving it raw and gaping.

The Wild Robot covers a remarkable amount of ground in its less than two-hour runtime. It’s the kind of movie that creates a world so vast and kind, anyone who has ever been loved or hurt or left behind can find themselves in it. It’s about motherhood and growing up and being different and finding ways to change the world and ways to survive when you can’t change it yet and all sorts of other things which I can neither access nor recall at 4 a.m.. It made me cry.

This is a big deal because since last March I’ve cried maybe three times. I cried after the first dance concert last fall, drunk and exhausted and broken out of my own heart. I cried— when was the next time I cried? I must have cried. Cried again. Then this movie came along.

There’s this thing stories about animals do where there’s just enough wiggle room for you to jam all sorts of analyses into the gaps. Right now I’m thinking about how to keep going in spite of a world spinning and spinning out of your grasp. I’m thinking about places and names and distances.

I’m thinking about the part where the goose says to the robot: what happened was not your fault, but what you did to try to fix it is everything.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m going to try to fix it. We aren’t the worst things that happen to us or we’d never get better. And we do. Famously. We are a species cursed to keep getting up. Historians document the getting up and the going on along with the grief, which is neverending. And then they go on. We all do.

The truly remarkable thing The Wild Robot managed to do on this specific and wretched Thursday for my friend and I, who walked out like two soggy fries, is dispense hope. It said there will be pain and grief in unimaginable quantities but there will be hope, too, hope always, hope as long as we don’t sit down and stick our faces in the dirt. It said you can be born and everyone can think there’s something wrong with you and you’ll be okay. It said there can be something wrong with the world and you’ll be okay. It said you, you right there— you can do something about this. And you don’t have to do it alone.

There’s something wrong over there, in the country where all the people I love are. And yeah, it’s not my country, not really, but they’re my fucking people.

What did Ursula Le Guin say? We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

I am far from where the horrors are on their way but the fear is the same and I feel insane! Crazy! Out of my mind! But it is love that moves me! Doesn’t it move you, too? Look around you. Who do you want to hold today? Who will you say I love you to? How can we build and build and build ourselves up in our communities in the face of overwhelming disaster, the bridge burning down like in the nursery rhyme, patches of wet concrete falling from the sky?

I am convinced that hope will save the world. That is to say, that the hope which we nurture in ourselves, that gains momentum as it hurtles down the street, dragging people’s pasts, presents, and futures with it, will grow into a force vast and unstoppable. I must believe this. The alternative would be to throw in the towel and go to sleep.

But it is five am and I am wide awake and burning.

Anger is easy. It is infinitely harder to put aside the anger and back bravery into a corner and make it concede, drag it into the light, say: Now this is what I’m going to do. I have a pretty bad track record of being brave. But this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to piss on my senator to cosponsor S.J.RES.114-115. I’m going to make a donation to the Gaza soup kitchen and a local abortion fund. I’m going to message all my friends in America and Singapore and Malaysia and Thailand and tell them I love them like beds love being slept in and flowers love waking to spring and blankets love being folded up in the morning sunlight. I’m going to eat and cry and sleep like a motherfucker. I’m going to find out what else I can do.

Distance is a killer. Right now we are so far from where we want to be and I don’t have words of consolation, I don’t know what the imminent future will bring. But I can promise this: I will hold your hand until the flames go out. I will love you until there is nothing standing.

This is not the time to throw in the towel and go to sleep. It is time to set the world on fire.

x

Defeats:

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Triumphs:

-Small child smiled at me on the bus. Usually small children scare me but this one looked at me with eyes so bright and honestly thrilled to witness my existence that I felt some of the frost around my ribs thaw, just like that.

-One of the landscaping company workers held the door for me this morning. You know when you’re clearly in sight but kind of far away from a door that is rapidly shutting so there isn’t really any good way to gauge your options and either way it’s going to be awkward and you’re going to get a bad grade in social interaction. This was one of those. He held it anyway.

-Cat is sitting on the ground a few feet away and staring at the door as I write this like a true stoic. Half an hour ago, she sniffed, licked, and then enthusiastically bit my foot.

-Jaywalked and hopped a fence and jaywalked again to catch the bus and when I pulled up red-faced and out of breath the bus uncle raised his hand calmly and coolly, eyes warm with sympathy as if to say hey, you made it. I’ve got you.

-I sat on the edge of the pool downstairs with my feet dangling in the water and talked to a friend on the phone tonight. The sky was clear as glass and the night was still, save for the security guard who wandered aimlessly in and out of the bathroom by his post and the snails, which moved steadily across the concrete. I kicked my feet in the water as I spoke and remembered being seven and learning how to swim for the first time. The styrofoam paddleboard, the frothy water, the instructor telling us to just kick, kick your feet. As I did so, tiny ripples spread across the water, almost as if someone were talking to me from the other side of a great and long distance, their voice unfolding towards me from the sky like a bridge across which everything good and kind is permitted to cross.

-When I looked up, I saw the three stars of Orion.

x

-Hey, you made it. I’ve got you.