Weekly Writing – December 21 2024

It isn’t worth being the one who saves the day. Who sees the plot coming together with wide, roving eyes while everyone else gapes at the screens mounted high in the square, which have started to flicker with symbols and sights not meant for the human eye.
It hurts to be the one who shoves through the hypnotized crowd, feeling those same symbols like bile in the back of your throat, the bottom of your mind, but for some reason, you’re still stumbling and struggling while they all stand hollow and placid as mannequins.
Seeing the ones you love smile as if there is something beautiful about the horror that is lunging in from your optic nerves, up the ladder of your spine, trying to sink its claws into your brain. Looking in their eyes and not knowing them, not knowing them, because they would never have been so happy while you are hurting.
Bleeding reason from your eyes and through your clenched teeth, hunched like an animal to hide from the glare of the screens. Swearing to put a stop to it is no more than that animal’s mindless instinct to escape from pain. Finding where a new, smooth, sinister white box has been plugged into the broadcast system is a fever dream – alleys and listening for its electric whine, the only part of the nightmare you’ll ever be able to forget.
Ripping the box from its rubber-insulated umbilicals, smashing it on the concrete. All the self-destructive release of ripping an arrow from a wound. The screens all sputter out, black and silence, and by the time you limp back to the square, the crowd has started to disperse.
By the time they reach the sidewalks, they’re talking about books and dinner dates and maybe catching that new movie later. As if the last shrieking forever never happened at all.
It isn’t worth being the one who steps up and remembers. The only one who still sees those symbols and vistas, distortions and revelations playing on the screen behind your eyes, the only one you can’t unplug.
I can’t stop seeing them. I can’t smash the white box of my memory.
They’re starting to make sense.