do you think we live in hell? do you believe we live in hell?
why would you, or what has made you -- is it the abject desolation of our plastic world? everyone's remorseless or ineffective (in)action for pungent inequalities and injustices? that no one cares, and if they do they get ground into the dust? is it the ecological crisis that seems to become quieter and more furious with each passing year? or draining american money to commit war horrors?
No one I know has tremendous hope for the future, no one in my age group. Many of use are voluntarily lead poisoning ourselves. Anyone with a positive view seems to have deeper roots in the past, for better or worse. I am not yet sure if their advantage of history tesselates into the future. They are mainly straight, cis, white, wealthy people, or religious and uplifted by strikes of blind luck. I wonder how these engines sustain themselves. The world is oppressive, and worsens every day, as the decay of overproduction fails to mold over, clinging relentlessly to our ecosystems, a scourge to continued life.
it presses in on me, compacting everyone's pain into my receptors. closing myself to it would mean dying in some way. blissful ignorance would make my life so meaningless as to be useless. why is this? it doesn't seem that i care so deeply about all these things, otherwise i'd be trying to solve them. instead i remain aware, painfully open to these horrors as they encircle our conscii, snapping away a good future, a future i could be proud or in some way confident to pass forward. i do not want to die, myself. i would rather help commit species-wide suicide. i sit. maybe it is valuable to experience this now, and feel it remain in spite of these dangers. i feel small and ragged, almost hunted, in my awareness. but the days always pass along to each other and i keep waking up in turn eyes burning as they open to another sunlit morning.
when you say it like that, it doesn't sound so bad. but why would so many horrible things happen to my friends, and why would i grow up thinking all my worst options are the best while tying myself to nothing over and over? life leads nowhere and there is no path through the void of choices around me. i feel alone and too hot, separated by embarrassment from the people around me, scared to ask about my more pressing currents of thought and interrupt their diatribes on the affairs of the day. my body would repulse them so i don't even show up.
although sometimes i feel the air on my skin and let it just be that, itself, peacefully, moving.