You don’t belong here

You can’t remember its name: the place where you came from. This helps. When people mention it, the words wash over you like soap in your dirty cast iron pan.

That is to say: it comes out dirty and your fingers feel wrong.

Not that your fingers ever felt right.

It’s normal to grow up and discover that many of the things you loved or respected as a child have become or were sick and disgusting. It’s normal to want to rip and tear at something and someone you used to love.

You wonder if your finger nails could get any dirtier, if they could give any more diseases to those they claw at, then what they already do. Presumably. 

Extrapolate, externalize, exterminate. 

Alliterate, assonate, assassinate. 

But you aren’t a donkey and it doesn’t work like that. You can see the future strewn out in front of you like your white bed sheet stained with whatever comes out of your body at night.

“It was there when I bought it,” “I spilled some wine on it,” “oh, that’s new.”

You can’t resist telling the truth. Lies have to be prepared, which makes them so much worse. It hasn’t helped. 

So, you curse the city without a name, the country without a face, the place where you’d be dead by now if you hadn’t left. It’s not worth wondering about if you’d have killed first. Who you’d have killed. Killing happens in books. You know two or three people who killed themselves. If the number was six, or seven, would that be appropriate to write? At least you have your father’s name. The point is, killing is something you do to yourself. You eat poorly, drink too much, decide to ignore the doctor—or not go. Or, obviously, you shoot yourself in the head with your favorite brand of pistol. 

If you want, you can go out like John Hanning Speke, make it look like an accident.

I don’t think I know anyone who’s killed anyone but themselves. No veterans, cops, violent criminals, protectors of themselves and others. But there are places and people who probably know more people who’ve killed others than killed themselves. 

In english, suicide is not a verb, it’s a noun. You can’t ‘suicide,’ you must ‘commit’ it. It shares parentage with the italian verb ‘suicidarsi’ or ‘uccidersi.’ ‘uccidere’ means to kill. ‘Sui’ comes from latin for ‘oneself’ and ‘si’ signifies that a verb is reflexive. I was hoping that by the time I finished writing this half-assed etymology that I would have come to some sort of meaning out of this. It is certainly interesting to make the phrasing around suicide less active, and makes for a more clunky and less poetic language. But, I’ve been told that suicide is a poetic topic; can’t write a book without it.    

Perhaps, instead of asking people to imagine that it was themselves or their family that died to extract empathy, we should ask them to imagine it was themselves who killed themselves. That way, they get to see both sides of the crime. The twisted perversion and the loss. Some may not care if they die, but there are very few whom none would care about, and this, no doubt, keeps many alive.

The message I’m reaching for is that the city you come from, your home, is filled to the brim with murderers and their cheerleaders. If the metaphor feels less vague now, you are either uneducated or the point has been made. Message me on instagram, I’d love to hear from you.

The city will only get worse. It wasn’t something you thought possible. You’re rather disappointed in yourself for not seeing it until it was pointed out to you. But, now, it is inevitable. Now, you are forced to grow old and lose your grip. In a sense, this is good, culture is always bad. It’s just an exertion of power and control. But it is a comforting touch. Like a lover's embrace. By the time you're old, they’ll probably have names for you and the others. You hope you get to keep yours, you hope they don’t take it from you. 

The logic is simple. The murderers won’t win because they’re right, but because the people who don’t want to murder, the people who have the power to stop the murder, will just leave. Kind of like you.

In the end, the death may slow, or even reach an ‘acceptable’ level, but the legacy of violence will never leave. Nobody remembers the vikings for their fishing techniques.

Nobody remembers James Hunt for the speech pathology.

Rightly so.

Just like an oxbow lake filling with blood, so the logic of the universe will dictate this too.

“This too shall pass” evokes a laughter that catches on the phlegm in your throat.

If it weren’t for time you’d be just like the fucking Tralfamadorians with your eye in your hand. And, you’d squeeze and squeeze because grip strength is a marker of longevity and maybe, if you live long enough, you’ll live long enough to see people forget. Never forget my ass!      

It’s all going to end up a bit too much like Dune.

The stories are about exile, about finding home. Home is a metaphor, obviously. It may even be about the search. The casting out, the wandering, the searching: all of that is what makes us, us. A metaphor for the truth seeking of our scholars, the quest for love by our parents, the desire for peace by our leaders, the movement for righteousness by us all. It’s active. It’s something you do. When it stops, when you stop searching, when you leave that desert, you’re not one of us anymore. You’re a heretic, a different type of person. You’ll die just like Jesus, for something that doesn’t exist.   

When you plant that flag and appropriate our meaning.

You don’t belong here.

You don’t belong anywhere.