your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful
The thing about not-being-a-person is:
They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all.
They will have no idea who they are talking to.
You yourself will start to forget, too.
They will say a million small things that sow the seeds for violence done against you, and you will smile and let them.
You will do math, constantly.
How much do I want to be a person today? How much do I want this project to succeed? How much honesty can I afford? How much dishonesty will kill me? What is the cost of coming out? Is there a way to delay, soften, transmute? How long can I survive as half a person?
Ever since the world ended … I don’t go out as much.
People that I once befriended, just don’t bother to stay in touch.
Things that used to seem so splendid, don’t really matter today.
It’s just as well the world ended — it wasn’t working anyway.
Your dreams will be reduced down to breathing.
And you will be grateful.
And no one else will know. And so it won’t be real.
You will become an expert at folding away pieces of yourself, quietly and automatically and with perfect obedience.
Ever since the world ended, there’s no more Bible Belt.
Remember how we all pretended, going ’round, lying ’bout the way we felt?
Every rule has been amended; there’s no one keeping score.
It’s just as well the world ended, we couldn’t have taken much more.
And you will forget that, forget all of it, forget yourself, and then come back to yourself violently as someone smiles and talks, academically or hatefully and there’s no deciding which is worse, about those people.
And you will remember that you are not a person. And you will have to decide, all over again, how much longer you can take that.
Ever since the world ended, there’s no more black or white.
Ever since we all got blended, there’s no more reason to fuss and fight.
Dogmas that we once defended, no longer seem worthwhile.
Ever since the world ended, I face the future — with a smile.
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Julia Bascom blogs at Just Stimming.
your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful appears here by permission.
Mose Allison’s “Ever Since the World Ended” interpolated by the editor.
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[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]
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related: Ever Since the World Ended
Julia Bascom on 03/5/12 in featured, Society | 2 Comments | Read More
Comments (2)
Mark, I’m just posting this comment to let you know that the comment form still goes to your old dead address on Gmail. I’d have written to you privately, but I don’t have your current email address. Feel free to delete this message when you see it.
“They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all.” That is intriguing and interesting.