Dead Letter Department #125

You are unbearably lucky.

It is the ninth consecutive day of heavy rain. The weather app tells you there’s a hydrologic outlook, severity: unknown. You have to look up what that means. At least it’s not a flood warning again, you think, until you see the flood warning listed lower down. At least it’s not the six stacked apocalyptic weather warnings from a couple of weeks ago; at least there’s no wind today & the remaining century trees in your neighborhood may make it through another winter.

The daffodils are starting to bud six weeks early. There is a plum tree in hazy bloom next to the laundromat. These things should not be happening. It is too early. You seem to remember that it used to be easier to not feel despair; it strikes you now as almost comically distant, another era entirely. You read another headline about icebergs melting, & you think about the thylacine, the vaquita, the poor comical passenger pigeon. You think about the killer whale carrying her dead child.

There was a pandemic and it did not kill you. You have gone and stood in any number of protest crowds, chanted any number of chants, and no one has shot you. The logs on the back of the final destination truck have not careened off and punched through your windshield to strike you square in the chest. You do think about it, though. You thought about it a lot on the winding roads to the coast, to stay in the rented beach house alone. You did a bunch of trauma work, read a lot of books, did all the journal writing one person can stand. That didn’t kill you either.

You are unbearably lucky. Sometimes you even remember it.

You are unbearably lucky, in the sense of tremendous, unasked for, unearned; also that it is difficult to bear. There are no reasons that you can lay your hands on for it. There but for the grace of God implies in the latter half of the phrase that the other has been granted no such grace, but you are unwilling to accept the premise. You have always been unwilling to accept the premise.

If you indulge the compulsions, they gain strength, so you try to erode them instead, but sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache & the only thing that seems like plausible relief is stepping into the pattern. Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow, the sing-song video tells you. You are doing your best.

This last protest was for a woman who was killed, shot in the face, by law enforcement that you pay for. You keep thinking about the glove compartment, the little row of her children’s stuffed animals, about her wife, about her dog. You think about what it would feel like to have someone kneel on your neck, on your back, until the breath was finally crushed out of you. You think about traffic stops, about no knock entry, about having to carry your papers, about the dangerous inconsistencies in your own papers.

You think about your first protest: Matthew Shepard’s murder, how they tied him to a fence and left him to die, the furious hand-scrawled posters all over campus, begging people to come to the capitol building to protest his death, the way the older protestors taught all the crying college students how to sing We Shall Overcome. You have not forgotten how to sing it.

The optimism from before feels foolish now, doesn’t it? The arc of the moral universe, how the phrase stings. You were unbearably lucky; for a long time it felt like things might really get better. You remember the day that the White House lit up with rainbow colors. Now you are older, and tired, and have so much more understanding of what the older, tired people in your life used to say to you.

It is hard to care about your dreams. They seem deflated, in this grey light; improbable. You suppose they were always improbable, but your grasp felt stronger before. You are still stubborn, even spiteful enough to keep going, keeping clawing away. At least until lunchtime; that’s a manageable span of hours. After that, perhaps you will last until dinner.

It is the twelfth consecutive day of heavy rain, and you are unbearably lucky.

More soon from the Dead Letter Department. In the meantime, solidarity to you and yours in the daily battle.