"It's like when you buy a used book, and it's already highlighted," I explained. "It's like I got a book with all the shitty parts highlighted today. The other stuff, the good stuff, is still there. I just got the shitty chapter today."
It wasn't a perfect metaphor, or even a really good metaphor, but it worked.
Because that's exactly what it felt like. What it feels like.
This isn't my life. I'm just reading about it. I'm reading about the multitude of injustices in the worlds surrounding me, and I can't do anything to fix what's happened -- what's on the page is on the page. And maybe it gets better in later chapters, and maybe I have a part in finishing the story. I hope so. But this chapter has already been written, and it sucks.
And I'm sorry, because my parts are the black-and-white, the uninteresting, the just-good, the unnecessary-to-highlight parts. I don't add anything to the story. I haven't moved the plot along. Background noise. What a privilege, to blend into the background. What a privilege to be irrelevant.
I'm sorry because it's not fair, because I want to rewrite the whole book.
I'm sorry because you don't deserve any of this, you didn't ask to be that character, and when I couldn't explain what I was feeling and she said, "Like survivor's guilt?" I said, "Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like survivor's guilt."
I'm sorry for how we background folk get by without catastrophe while you get highlighted in history books and memoirs and dreams. I'm sorry you have to go through this chapter.
I'm sorry.
I love you.
No comments:
Post a Comment