I wonder what kind of martyr I will be tonight, or who I will rescue from the brink of death.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories. I only pretend to comply, hide the wire thing in my mouth instead, then back in the cell I act as though I’ve forgotten who I am all while plotting our prison break. I whisper the plan to my cell mates. The disguises are ready. The people on the outside are contacted. And now we are out and we are running from snarling dogs and laser wires. But I’m fast, too fast for them. We’re climbing up electrical towers fast as ants swinging from electrical wires like acrobats, looping through the air high on adrenaline, knowing they will never outsmart us.
I make a banana blackberry smoothie for breakfast. It’s gritty, not smooth. But my goal for today was to eat a real nutritious breakfast. So I swallow it all. Put a checkmark next to “breakfast” on my task list. I rinse the cup, wipe off the gritty remains off the rim with my fingers, then stick it in the dishwasher. My housemate is saying something about how Mitch McConnell deserves to rot in prison, or maybe it’s one of those other crusty Republican establishment fucks. I’m not really listening. “Mhmmm,” I say, waiting for her to leave so I can continue my morning routine undisturbed.
I’ve infiltrated a secret committee on an island— I am some kind of undercover spy. From our conference hall I watch the storm picking up. It will flood coastal villages in the coming week. All the more reason to complete my mission. Then I see the kids, probably part of a rebel group, lurking in the doorway. I make a secret hand signal, mouth for them to go away. Too late, the committee has seen them. They take out their taser guns, point them at the kids. “Don’t tase the children!” I shout and jump between the flicking tongues of the guns and the children.
Frosted wheats today. With almond milk. Does the sugar cancel out any nutritional value that hunks of wheat may have? No matter, I feel like treating myself. I even make coffee instead of tea. I turn on a morning news podcast as I tune out and flick though Instagram on my phone. Daily death toll from COVID is over four thousand again. I have no feelings about this fact. A notification in my inbox: “Please fill out this when2meet for our presentation planning meeting.” I click and make boxes turn from red to green, then I keep scrolling until the podcast is over, not because I’m absorbing any information, but because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself otherwise.
The gap between train and platform is unusually wide. I land the jump, but she doesn’t, she falls, hangs onto the platform edge by just a few fingers, the tracks have dropped far far below, a deadly abyss. With one harrowing leap, I’ve caught her and pulled her up to safety. Then, together we’re running up a staircase that is melting under our feet.
Toast with a fried egg. Leftover soup from dinner. The rest of a bag of potato chips I left on the floor last night. The days are differentiated from each other only by the date I write on top of my lists. The nights are dizzying escapades, chase scenes, battles against injustice and life-saving missions which leave me confused, unsettled, reliving my dreams in a loop in my head for hours on end.
I’m called to help an unconscious person on a ski slope. I check their pulse — still breathing. Someone nearby is in panic trying to start CPR, but I am cool and in command. I gesture for everyone to back off, administer the glucose this hypoglycemic diabetic needs for survival… I am a target of the state. I pack my bags, run from school, whisper through the cracks in the bricks of my house to tell my family that I must go. Then I’m dodging through the night, through an abandoned church…. We’re ambushed by cops, but we are prepared, with my spiderman powers, they are incapacitated in no time… I’m sprinting backwards dodging bullets in impossible swerving maneuvers that leave me somehow unscathed…
I do not know how to process the multiple existential crises facing humanity. It is perhaps not so much a surging pandemic, climate change, or state violence that is most daunting, but the hunch that I am powerless in the face of it all. I take classes in wilderness medicine and self defense. I do planks on the floor of my room. I join more activist groups than I can actually commit to. But I am a small unimposing human who was raised as a girl and fidgets with their hair too much. Someone once told me I was weak and part of me still believes them. Believes I need to prove something by saving someone. During the day I cope by eating chocolate for breakfast. Sometimes I am angry but mostly I am numb, and I watch hours on end of Drunk History on Youtube. I congratulate myself for my small successes, for planting lettuce starts, for reconnecting with an old friend, for writing something that flows. I find bits of hair on my head that are out of place and I cut them off, thinking, now, now it will be fixed. At night though, I am a hero. Last nights’ dream stands out because the enemy and the persecuted are less clear cut, are perhaps one and the same. And I wonder, which part of myself is the prison guard, the active shooter, the abyss below the train, the little girl with the chainsaw.
Some little girls have gone berserk. They’re sawing off their parents’ legs. I’m watching from some tall place, maybe a tree. Everyone is in a panic, trying to capture them, incapacitate them. But I know they are just people, scared and confused, have probably been abused. I want to find them before the hordes do, to embrace them...