We See Each Other’s Instagram Posts.
We see each other’s Instagram posts.
But we don’t talk much.
I know what he thinks of the current administration. He likewise knows what I think of it. We play music on the car radio and sing along, not saying the words aloud.
I hear the posts on his phone undulating like neon gelatin, sugary nothings calling to him. A mixed bag of nuts that instagram feed, one post is an ai cat driving a semi and the next a cry against the white identity under attack in America. They’re both for my father. The algorithm knows him better than I do, he listens to it more than his own daughter. Our conversations are rarely in words.
He has women up in his garage, I covered them with grumpy cat pictures when I was only a girl. Make it lighthearted, make it fun, my objection to his sexualization of women. Why am I so eager to cater? I am a woman now. He has maga hats now, Trump ornaments up when it isn’t even Christmas. On the other side of the ornament is a mirror. It’s poetic. I keep turning it around, putting Trump’s face toward the wall and the mirror toward my father begging him to look. He turns it back around. How can I look at someone when they cannot look at themselves? How can I speak to him when we never have?
More Posts from Jean-elle-writing and Others
On friendship:
When I spend time with you all, I feel a ball of light pool in my weary palms.
The weight in my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, releases like smoke out of my lungs.
I can breathe again, I can laugh again.
I take the light home with me, and it isn’t so dark there anymore.
Ode to the Red Boy
I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.
Why does life exist if only to be snuffed out? What purpose is there in the temporary but pain.
How on earth did you find me?
Oh sweet siren, every inch of water you touch tastes of sugar. I couldn’t lose you if I tried.
Well you ought to at least try.
Bite your tongue lass.
Or what?
Or I’ll do it for you.
Rotten sailor. I’ve no desire to play with you anymore. Leave me be.
How can you lure me off my ship and not even finish me? What am I to do now, drown?
You’d better not. I’d snap your neck myself and let the ocean have you but she retches at the taste of pork.
I’m no pig you finned whore!
Then why’s your nose look like that? Go to shore and dry off before your wife finds you wet, piglet.
—Diary of a Siren
Smaller hearts beat faster, ever faster. Run rabbit run ever faster, ever faster. I’ll cut your finger cut your thumb, wear a plaster, wear a plaster. I’ll tell your secrets to the room, such disaster, such disaster.
Forgive me gentle heart, I didn’t mean to be a bastard.
What could you have if you let yourself dream? If you didn’t squash anything that shone under that worker’s boot of yours?
The sailor girl slides down her boat’s rope the hour after sunset and awaits her black haired siren on the far end of the beach. She fusses with her hair. Tries to part it differently, and then differently again to no avail. She kneels on the shore to get a glimpse of herself under the budding moonlight on the still ocean water. A pair of eyes stays on her, gently raking over her battered, poorly patched clothes. She never was one for sewing. The sea called her. It always called her, to what she didn’t know. Suddenly, the pair of big black eyes in the water rose like fishing bobbins in her reflection, and startled her.
“How long have you been there?” She asked.
The siren smiled coyly, and held a finger up, telling her to hold on a moment.
She disappeared under the water and bobbed back up with something in her hand.
“What’s that?”
The siren rubbed the sand off of it with her thumbs, and held it up. A small abalone hair brush.
I was his worry stone.
he couldn’t pick my face out of a crowd,
Or name a single interest of mine;
he couldn’t bother to wash his mug in the sink,
Or put the coffee on in the first place;
he couldn’t braid my hair while he spoke,
Or untangle the nest he made.
All he could do was rub his hands together,
And wonder where I’d gone,
after eroding me away.
Even in its darkest hour, the world carries good people on it. And we must fight for them. Love is sustainable, a replenishing and revitalizing energy. Hatred ravages the wielder just as much as those it is wielded against. It can propel you, surely, but for how long? How long can you hold the fire before you, too, are turned to ash?
Intelligence grand and ever expanding,
his head pounds with new ideas, while the heart in his chest beats slower,
his empathy is sluggish and cold.
The same old cruelty that ran in the veins of the cavemen is steady in him, his wisdom in vain. He has become acutely worse, torturing with metal tools instead of wooden ones, brainwashing with television instead of word of mouth, colonizing with guns instead of swords. What use is knowledge in the hands of a dominator? It becomes just another weapon, words to razors sentences to spears. Do not waste intellect on brutes, they will wound you deeper because they will know where it hurts.
