“Special” / “Retreat”
Ana tells me I am special.
She says she loves me for who I am.
She is the only one I believe.
What even am I? A mediocre writer? A bundle of pathologies? A desperate need for someone to be dependent on me? An insatiable hunger for knowledge?
What am I if I’m not what she tells me I am? I don’t know.
I want to know everything, but I’m scared of finding that without her, I’m nothing.
She promises me “til death do we part.” A more stable ground than any I have known.
Chödrön would tell me to grow up. I would tell her there’s no childlike innocence left in me to abandon. She would say stability is a fairytale. I say Ana is real enough to hurt me. I don’t know of any fairytale that can do that.
Zhuangzhi would lament that lack of innocence. I cry with him. Wuwei seems so far away that I would die a hundred times trying to reach it.
Without Ana, there is a void. I fear that nothing will crawl out of it.
Cioran shouts “retreat!” Limit our losses and live another day. He is a fool and a coward. Horror follows our steps and Time waits for us at home.
We have no ground to stand on, no safe place, no refuge. Retreat is a myth. All we can do is fight to save our dignity.
“Time never tires of finding new ways to humiliate us.” Then we must never stop finding new ways to uplift ourselves and each other.
Ana promises me a refuge. She only tells jokes. Nobody finds them funny.
Community is not a ground. Community is an organism. It shifts beneath your feet and cannot promise to save you any more than Ana can. But at least it is alive to resist Time’s decay. Ana is only a prophet of death, Time in disguise.
Words are honest: They promise to fool you. Love them with strings attached.
Never retreat. Suffer with your dignity intact.