God help me, I’ve lost my faith in the world.
Which isn’t the same as losing my love or my fight for it. Rather, I know where I am: on my knees, lips touching dirt, while something very large and distracted is pressing its boot to my neck.
Why be instilled with a sense of justice, if justice means nothing. Everywhere I look, terrible people are getting away with terrible things, while their cheering sections jeer and crow, celebrating a superficial and cancerous certainty, replacing problems with wins.
Meanwhile, spring has come, and nature is putting her hope in pretty things. Have you seen the daffodils? Do they still impress, when the sunshine fills them like torches and their brightness lights your way home from work?
I want to join you there. I want so badly to believe it’s all that’s needed. I miss so much my reveries and dreams.
But I still remember a spring three or four years ago, when our dog discovered a nest of baby bunnies in our backyard and proceeded to swallow them, one by one, before I could do anything to stop it, the tiny creatures screaming from their pink and tender lungs, and me screaming from mine, long after the deed was done.
You just ate
You weren't even hungry
He wasn’t sorry, but for months afterward, I felt differently toward him, however unfair the charge against instinct and nature, which manages to be both pretty and terrible, without any evidence of internal contradiction. Then time stepped in and covered things up, as time does, and I gradually returned to finding him adorable.
He still goes out there at this time of year to eagerly sniff and paw at the ground. And I love the beast, in spite of his beastliness. I love this world, not like a child anymore—but like a parent does. Guardedly. Sadly. With loss always threatening, and making the heart sore.
I have no control when it comes to politics, or the truth’s distortion, or the monstrous pretenders who have their hands on the ropes.
All I can do is look for the baby bunnies each spring before letting the dog out, and fill my bird feeder with birdseed, and turn off Twitter when I’m choked with sadness or anger, and love my children—who just this year have grown taller than I—and keep putting pen to paper, to try and defend the charge of beauty for one more day and tender hour.
