diseases and cures
They spend all their time learning how to defend their dogmatic views, and no time at all just sitting quietly, imagining what it’s like in someone else’s shoes.
Imagine having to work the overnight shift on New Year’s Eve at a convenience store in Nowhere, Utah. Imagine being involved in a felonious assault. Imagine wrapping up the last recording session of you playing saxophone for an album of ambient jazz. Om Namah Shivaya. Imagine being young and getting in a drunken conversation with someone you just met and feeling like you're falling in love. Imagine resolving to change your life without telling a soul about it. Imagine walking outside in the morning only to find that the whole world was nothing but gas stations, each parking lot connected to the next. And the people were getting out of their cars to pray on the pavement, because there was nowhere else to go.
Imagine you have a disease where you die if you don't create new worlds, or a disease where you die if you stop devouring this one. “I’ll take unleaded please, with cream.” These diseases exist, and so the hospitals that try to treat them exist, and great academies of learning to study them exist, and people mock and despise those who have them, while others pay no attention. But what is a disease to a cell might hold a cure for the body as a whole.
At night the highways in the deserts are dark, but the pathways in the forests are lit by fireflies. Do you know what it’s like to stand at the edge of a road, kicking dust and looking both ways every so often, always waiting for a ride to a place you’re just trying to get back to? Imagine. When you get back there could even be a new park with a merry-go-round, and people who really, really like you.
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2023 - 2024