Sometimes I’m moving along life, absorbed in my own daily minutae or that of those in my direct circle of friends, and then I’m struck by something. It seems random, perhaps, but it’s always in the category you might call (if you’re religious), “there but for the grace of god go I”. It was a phrase my grandma used (stop rolling your eyes, you), and it took me awhile to understand it on my own terms.
There’s no reason at all that I, specifically, had to be born into the circumstances I was, with the experiences I had that made me who I am today.
Today, I was driving, listening to music, just thinking my thoughts, and it came to me unbidden: What would it be like to have been put in a chain-fence prison on an island for five years without having been charged with a crime? I talked to the wrong person at the wrong time – easy to do when you have family and friends at home in a society at war with your own. Even if you were telling them to get out of this crazy mess, you’ve incriminated yourself, and without any lawyers or habeas corpus filing or “your day in court”, you have nothing to prove, and no one to prove it to.
So there you are. Any time you spend outdoors is in blindfolds and chains. Interrogated for years. YEARS. I mean, your life will never be the same. You will be fucked up, like the absolute worst abusive relationship you’ve ever had, and you will never be the same. You’ll never think the same thing about the country you’ve been living in for years. No matter how much love you might have had for it, when -you- are spending your nights in a fully lit chain link cell for FIVE YEARS without representation or any day of freedom to look forward to, it will change you, and you will be no friend to that country. The most they could hope for is that the constant strain has ingrained a deep fear in you.
That could have been me. If I’d been born to someone else, that could have been me. I try to wrap my mind around the idea of celebrating FIVE YEARS in detention with NO sign of ever being let free, and it makes my brain scream in anguish.
You kno’, that is much too deep for me on a friday.
At least you didn’t say “tl;dr” ;)
I would never say that.
too long; didn’t read
I think about that sometimes, and it kind of makes me ill.