Tilling

There is someone telling you that your misery is nothing compared to their own. You both stand in the suffocating heat, and you’re both exhausted and sore and dirty, and you’re both stuck in a godforsaken cornfield because you’re both terribly apathetic and couldn’t find any other possible job. Now you hoe weeds and tell each other about agony and loneliness.

“My mother is always telling me she should have had an abortion” you say, sweat dripping into your eyes, blisters forming on your hands from the tool you swing. He quickly counters with his own family problems, but you stop listening. 

Because you know that pain is relative, and that everyone carries something, and that some people carry a lot more than others. And you wish you could be like a sponge, and you could soak up everyone’s sadness. Because you know you can survive. Your father did, barely. And now you will too. Thunder clouds start to block out the unbearable heat source. 

“I want to save everyone” you say, but you know you cannot. Instead you love them, and you love them so much the love drags your heart down, and you heave that organ around like a ball and chain. The tears start to well up, and you hold them back, along with all the things you should be saying.

All the things you want to be saying.

“I just want to save you” he says, stopping the hoeing to take a better look at your face. He searches in your eyes for something, but your eyes are hallow and black and desolate. There is no answer there to give him.  

Two voids, two pits, existing in your skull.

And it starts to rain, and the sweat and the tears and the water all mix together inside of those empty spaces to create something. You just don’t know what it is yet.

Broadcasting

They sit in the room, waiting for their sadness to hit a national spotlight. Because maybe if they spread it out, maybe if they infect as many souls as possible with their aftermath, they won’t be as lonely.

Just as miserable, but not as lonely.

And soon the screen is filling with her life story, and there are actors pretending to be doctors, and in the room there is a doctor wishing they were an actor.

And they speak of ataxia. And I have no order in my life. And they have no control of their emotions. And maybe we all have ataxia in some way. 

And so much of the story is left out but no one notices because their eyes are filled with tears. And only so many words are said but no one notices because they can’t hear over their own sobbing. I shouldn’t find it so sickening. I shouldn’t feel so much loathing.

“She was the better person. I would have gladly taken her place. Still would.” Her brother, speaking to the world. To everyone. And it is cliché but it is even more heartbreaking than the death itself because he really means it. Sincerity always kills me because I have none of it.

And finally the show ends, but their sadness does not and they do not understand why, after all the banquets and scholarships and memorials, after the great escapes and the grand returns, after they made everyone else cry with them, why do they still have all these tears in them.

And this burden makes them more upset than the her death ever will.

And I sit and I wonder where to go and whom to talk to. Because this family isn’t mine, because this burden will not weigh me down, because I have my own tragedies but no desire to tell anyone, and no desire to have an actor play my part, to act out my demise.

And suddenly it is raining in the driest summer of my life, and my mother is crying with the family that took her in, and I can finally pity someone more than myself.