///
Justice is a poor mother.
Revenge is cold, yes, and sessile; it is a constant loop, or a hard death, inorganic. When I craved the righting of the world, I thought it was justice I was after. Maybe, in a way, it was. But the justice that we know gives nothing and takes too much. It is loveless and stagnant, a handsomely refractive oil slick.
In a world where the animal drive to kill and eat is unjust, where our efforts ought to turn to the modification of the world to remove from it any desires which make us uncomfortable, in that world, we destroy ourselves. No human logic can justify the existence of the predator. We cannot logically justify ourselves, let alone that which we understand even less. There is no rational explanation for the mother’s giving of her own flesh for her young. We gain our sustenance from a million decaying things things, large and small, whose decrepit bodies feed the world as ours will, too, in time. Tell me, is it right or wrong? Just or unjust? Ought we be litigated for our endless, constant cannibalism? Is a fetus a parasite on its carrier? The answer is, of course, not if it is wanted.
And when we come to each other in life, in conflict, what then? We try to allocate blame with each other, to reveal, stowed away in the defendant’s shirt pocket, the desiccated pith of the ancient apple. We carry with us the belief that we are doomed, each but a misstep away from irredemption. And each of us, walking on that sky-high tightrope, swaying back and forth in the wind, can only pray that we will never fall, because that would mean we had failed. And what could falling be but just? And why bother reaching out in defiance of a foregone conclusion?
We fail to envision life without the tightrope largely, I think, because it is too painful to consider what we have lost. The world below; the solidity of earth. Love felt in the arms of others. The sound of birdsong. There we knew togetherness in a way that we, now, here, can only dream of. We still know that it exists, but we will spend our lives pretending that it is impossible. We will rush to beat back any mention of it, for daring to suggest that we might have something to live for. We fill our daydreams with hollow imitations of humanity, allowing the waking mind to be persuaded that it knows what it wants. Our desires are never sated, and we have convinced ourselves that that is the nature of desire. An unavoidable consequence of daring to want, an inconvenience which, if we were honest, we would prefer to eradicate.
And we have certainly tried to eradicate it— oh! We’ve tried. We’ve drowned it in chemical markers, tried to float it away on a river of inhibitors and uppers and downers, distilled from the parts of the world that make us think we can forget what we want. Our own minds can be made to give up on wanting, like plants in poor soil, withering and coming apart until it opts to end its own suffering. And we pour chemicals of all kinds onto that problem in a vain attempt to spark life again, so that we can go about the world like reanimated corpses, to perform the charade that the not-quite-dead have convinced themselves is better than living. This is necropolitics. The moniker is dissatisfying to me, when I think of all the dead and dying things that go with grace into the earth. Necropolitics ought to be the honoring of bones, the sacrifices of love and loss. Instead we have made into this bright and terrible facsimile, a draining disease of our own creation, an insidious affliction of seeming and mimicry that undoes the very substance of the world.
And so it is that I don’t know how to shape my anger anymore. I never did, in all honesty. Does the world need more anger? Anger often takes the shape of justice. Or rather, it takes the shape of a desire for justice. This is an acceptable, precedented shape. To put those writings of mine out into the world would be to capitulate, to let the fury be pulled from me like taffy, stretched until it is appropriately malleable. The power has a way of making anger convenient for itself. It’ll chew me up and spit me back out.
///
Justice wrings truth out of people, abrading the fibers and stretching them taut. It squeezes vocal cords and clammy fingers clenched on pens, cold-licked lips and tight throats, until they release the legible shapes. It speaks exclusively in a language of its own creation, where it demands nothing less than fluency. When given the choice, it is preferable for the words of the damned be cut by the mouth of another than for sounds to reach the ears of the judge which he cannot comprehend.
Justice gathers its clerics in white-walled rooms where they smile with their teeth and discuss ad nauseum. Where dying plants and unwashed coffee cups live out their last days, and the carpet forever wonders whether it was supposed to be yellow or chartreuse. Where the unturned stones of agony are labeled with post-it notes and tucked into drawers out of sight, locked away.
Justice is curious, certainly, a ceaseless string of questioning. It reaches for a beautiful shell by the lip of the sea, and finding it broken, casts it into the water without a second glance. It never learned to lift up such treasures and let them catch the light, to wash them in the gentlest waves so that the colors would drink in the seawater and show their brilliance. It hoards perfect shells like a child with a bucket, bringing them home to sit by the door, forgotten as soon as dinner is ready, sequestered far from the sun and the salt that made them shine. Perhaps at first it will dump out the collection and line it up, judge one against the other: these stripes are more even, this purple brighter, this curve more pleasing. And each dry shell, indisginguishable from the next, returns to the purgatory of that abandoned bucket, parched, bleaching in forgotten dark.
Justice calculates, strings stories on its ephemeral abacus and adds them up, subtracts, divides. It weighs against the fullness of the universe one quivering soul, and in the eternal and lifeless arithmetic of notaries long dead, finds it wanting. They have told me that justice is blind but it is not sight that it lacks. Justice cowers before the world which, if asked, it would claim to know perfectly. Justice, the child of Abraham’s God, swaddled stillborn and laid to rest in its cradle.
///
I sometimes feel like I am stranded swimming in a gritty, briny ocean, and occasionally I grasp onto a piece of something to keep me afloat for a while. And then a person in a boat comes along and leans over the side to say “Oh, that’s the wrong thing to use. You’re supposed to use that one instead.” And they point to a smaller, worse piece of rubble farther away. And then they sail away.
I feel like I was taught from a very young age that I had to swallow entire live frogs. Every so often, someone would just sit me down and put a frog in my hand and force me to swallow it whole. Eventually I learned to do it before they asked, to get it over with. No one that I met found it alarming. You’d get the occasional, “oh, you need to rinse them off first so it’s less slimy,” or maybe “try washing it down with water.” But on the whole the consensus seems to be that it was simply something one had to do, even if it could be a little bit unpleasant. So I go through my life like this, and whenever I encounter a frog, I know that I have to pick it up and force it down my throat. I watch all my friends do this. Until finally one day someone comes along and says, “you know, it’s fucked up that people made you pick up frogs and swallow them whole while they’re still alive.” And you want to just weep from relief. So you make friends and slowly start to build a life where, layer by layer, you deconstruct the whole thing — yes, it hurts you to do it, and it hurts the frog, and maybe we shouldn’t even be eating the frog at all, was there even any reason to eat the frog to begin with? But outside of those few people that you occasionally encounter who seem to have somehow come to an actualized understanding of the situation, literally everyone is out here just swallowing frogs. And you still have to do it, because that’s life— people get very angry with you when you don’t swallow the frog. You realize this is why you were forced to get used to doing it in the first place. But now that you know, and you know, with bone-deep certainty, that it is utterly bullshit and that there is no reason to be torturing yourself and killing frogs, you still have to do it sometimes. And it makes you so fucking angry.
///
She was wearing gold hoops earrings and impeccable makeup. Even up close it looked airbrushed. Impossible to imagine how she managed it, every day, living for six months in a homeless shelter. She had a narrow frame and was sitting even more narrowly, knees crossed pressed together, hands on top of them. Not tapping or jiggling her leg, just still. I know I was staring just like everyone else when I passed her but I couldn’t help looking because it was too painful to see someone sitting there like a live wire. And I knew why. So I took her into the room to talk and maybe she thought I was insane for asking for her number. Did she think it was an elaborate flirting technique? But she smiled at me and said “hay que tener paciencia.” And her perfect mask did not betray anything. And I saw her in the fingerprint room and I gave her a little wave later. And we called her up for a conversation about gender identity that was like pulling nails, for the cis lawyer, I mean, although she was really very nice. This trans woman was the Big Event of everyone’s day, and I knew that she truly could not have wanted anything less. She was such an event to everyone, and she ought to have been both more and less than that. I wish I would have hugged her. Lying in bed tonight, remembering, I was for the first time in my life struck with the strong desire to pray, to plead a with a higher power that she might be loved by someone the way I love my trans friends. That someone might see her as we see one another. That she might find people where she is just a person, and not an event. I won’t pray, but I want to.
After the meeting the attorney told me, “the universe needed you today!” I couldn't understand her and made her repeat it twice. She didn’t like that. It was too loud in the clinic, is all. I swallowed too many emotions to name, few of which were charitable, and I said, sardonic and faggy, “honey, the universe needs me every day.” The way I said it was supposed to sound like I didn’t mean it. But it was true. And that attorney can eat shit.
///
I am glad that I learned about power before I had a chance to acquire very much of it.
I used to have these elaborate fantasies in my head, where someone I wanted to be close to, but who had rejected me, had to come to me for help: they had some problem only I would understand, some hurt only I was capable of soothing.
This is when I was a child, a teenager, maybe, and since then, I’ve actually had the opportunity to help people in this way. It has never given me the kind of satisfaction that I got in those daydreams. It was disappointing to me at first, that those encounters felt more like soothing of mutual pain, given the empathy I can’t help but feel for others, and didn’t give me the tight knot of pleasure in my gut that I imagined I would have. But I know now that my fantasies were not about fixing things or helping people. I do have those fantasies too, to be fair. There is too much hurt in the world to feel any other way.
No, these were power fantasies. And part of the fantasy is the grace with which I imagine myself wielding power. In reality, hardly anyone is capable of wielding that particular power gracefully, and certainly not an angry child. I had the cruel kinds of power fantasies, too. With my first childhood bullies, I imagined locking in cages and forcing them to listen to me. That was the cruelest thing I could think of— or, rather, it was what I thought would satisfy me. That’s how power shapes desire. If I could just make them listen, then I would get what I want. Or, in the case of what I can only call my mother hen fantasy, some terrible, unavoidable circumstance suddenly renders me the only viable ally in their world. In other words, that I might have the power to force them to be my friend. I was only so cowardly as not to admit that that was what I wanted. Because helping a friend in crisis doesn’t feel good. It’s a crisis. Things are not going well, and, try as you might, you generally cannot fix it. That was the other truly fantastical elements of my daydream: that, once they were driven into my arms, the friend in question would be able to lay the burden on me. I suppose I should allow that it was a fantasy of strength, not purely of power. The two are not indistinguishable, though they are both part of the same family, of which power is the progenitor.
I would really like to believe that I was born with a deeply human desire to help others, to right wrongs, and to be of use to a community. I would like to believe that these genuine desires have been warped by circumstance and pain. I would like to believe that there is some thing which drives me more fundamentally than the need for control. What I do believe, more probably, is that it is more complicated than that. Darkness is also human. Power has never been absent from us. Indeed, we are its sole source. This truth sits unpleasantly in my stomach.