Chimera

I had a breakdown today. There have been many other, smaller breakdowns every day now. For months. Images of suffering, of loss, of desolation, of apathy. Together, like a veil of chains over my face. But today, I broke down completely. I could not see through tears that burned my eyes. Hands held tight against them as if to suffocate their fire. My lungs rejected anything but shallow breaths. I had a breakdown today and the world…remained. The world has always been this way and never been this way. But not the earth. The earth is the earth. The world is the world and the world is made of only two things: thresholds made (crossed and erased) by people and change.

We are told in one ear we must remain steadfast and in the other to embrace change. Change no doubt happens because it is proof of the unstoppable engine of existence in motion. Life, for us, is thermodynamic. But it is, by our own hand, also entropic. We seek out warm narratives, see them as deserved without getting too close to the source of heat. Chase down shimmery things while swimming in a milk of chaos. If people weren’t so dedicated to rushing past the threshold to drink from the glass this might all be beautiful. But it isn’t beautiful. But it is. This is change.

Some changes, however, are changing us in ways akin to violent amputations. Unexpected ruptures. Sutures with no anesthetic in the room. Wounds into which other things are sewn. Anger. Grief. A want for the earth to manifest a maw and swallow nation-states up, bones and all. Slivers of dissociation (as if the days do not arrive halfway-singed) in bids to maintain ‘business as usual’ (as if the ‘usual business’ doesn’t perpetuate the machine). A sliver, still, of something someone might call hope, a flickering in eigengrau.

I broke down today and something changed. My patience for flowery notions of liberation drowned in the bathroom sink, taking several beard hairs with it. I packed away half my altar (the half with my ancestors remain). I cannot imagine something more useless than meditating till the world somehow finds and fills its dry mouth with cool water. There are no mantras to shatter antiblackness. No incense can mask the smoke of families smoldering in the embers of empire. I admit I am obscured by dukkha and fully leaning into it.

I question what “communities” mean when “communities” here (the imperial core) are not so much connective as they are agglutinated by a chain of transactional thirsts. The supplication to celebrity is a reflex. The narrative of worth, of presumed royalty or owed influence, is a blindfold. Rather, clouds in the maculae of the obedient. No, then, there is no question. I reject the question of community outright. Any collective thrust to arrive here at something resembling community will first have to come through the shattering of egos and even then, where would the line of community begin or end? Whose community? Who is community?

For that matter, who the hell am I? I broke down today but have no illusions on what the illusion of ‘I’ means. What ‘I’ doesn’t mean. What ‘I’ benefits from. What chains ‘I’ cannot escape without burning down the plantation. [It should be burned down.] What part of ‘I’ must be destroyed. What part of ‘I’ never existed in the first place.

I broke down today. Am cracked. Fractured. Ruptured. Rusting. Exposed. Sutured. Stripped from and thrown into a future. Something else. I am becoming something else. Many somethings. Or nothing at all.

I am a chimera.