When I was eighteen, I could not help but notice, like all teenagers inevitably do, that the world was pretty terrible. There was this anxiety that anything good to come from activism would be ripped away, chipped away like a sculptor chiseling marble. There are days that I still feel this way. However, somewhere during my college years and even now in early adulthood, I find myself thinking about the type of person who stood on a small stage in a library and sobbed this existential prayer for something, anything to get better. I wrote a response to that mindset, that paradigm that I was engulfed in.
I thought I was digging my grave Overturning earth and silt Remembering the world humanity had built Watched it crumble And erode Like a maddeningly widening river Tearing away at the coast lines Bit by bit Until the beaches melt away Giving way to flood plains And rocky coasts. I believed I was digging my grave Younger me burying adult me Embalming me in the magic of my childhood Glitter and fairy dust Painting my lips red with the blood from my depression Combing anxiety picked lashes Singing psalms of woe is my life All my optimism clutched with the dead lilies artfully placed in my cold hands. Younger me thought I was dying As the world retreated to a Handmaid’s Tale. Unaware there is a rebirth In the shroud draped over my painted face Underneath the newly turned earth Deep in the rumble of the tectonic plates Where the ground water kisses the soil There is the rumble of feet The pounding of a drum An incessant reminder that I am one life One body added to the timeline of history One beast yet to be studied I’ve been digging and digging Digging my grave Trapped in this feedback loop Of every negative utterance in existence Most often from my own damn head-- But Individuals can’t make history Controlled like a marionette Strings from my place of birth My socioeconomic status The color of my skin My uterus! The puppeteer tells me to walk When to dance For a GPA, a job, a picture-perfect life meant to be enclosed in a children’s puppet show. But what is this? I’ve been digging and digging Digging my grave Collecting sand for my hourglass Selecting a headstone Anticipating The End. As if I am too small to be made into anything Too weak under this rock we’ve called home I am not the new Atlas shouldering the world alone I am no Hercules Joan of Arc Or Odysseus. I am not some mythologized figure Like those taught in history class Giants wandering the earth biding their time Until the world told them They were to make history. I’ve been digging and digging Digging my grave Clutching my spade Drowning in the darkness brought on by the shade Of the trees On whose roots I sit— And it is here That I remind myself how to live.