I just want to acknowledge (if only for my own sake) what I recognize to be a bewildering stockpile of content across platforms, and I have to remind people that social media for me has become over the years more a form of self preservation and self defense than a form of self expression.
The methods used to silence and punish me—for my personal religion that values life and knowledge with sincerity—was to try to teach me about the value of domestication by setting my house on fire and blocking all the exits.
This was literally true at one time, or attempted at least, and while from the outside it probably looks like I tried to survive by breaking out a window and running across borders, it’s much more like I gathered bedding and held out in the bathtub with the shower head running—with sopping covers wrapped around my head and forearms fending off rotting embers of burning ceiling and walls that gathered steaming at my feet, and twisting pilons and joists anchoring me in impossible positions in a tangled, drenched clod of soot and steam and smoke and smoldering charcoal.
Meanwhile, what gasping cries for help I can manage are self-consciously drowned out by sirens (or blaring classical music) and used to train fire hoses that are meant to drown me in place instead of put out the fire. I have learned to sleep in impossible contortions and live on meager rations slipped through cracks.
“This is how we treat wild animals,” is the message.
The irony, of course, is that I was living in a home I was building out of love. I feel right in grieving that it was not a feral brush nest that was burned down but a hospitable doorway carved from old wood.
The only thing that has survived is a charred photo album.
–
I am entombed.
The first waves of firefighters-wearing combat boots-broke through what remained of the doors making sure there were no survivors. My family’s heirlooms were rummaged, a fire hose trained on me to ask (waywardly to the air) what the combination might be, and I learned the hose would stop if I answered.
I didn’t know that my mother’s jewlery would be worn by a cadet to train me to shutter at the sound of rattling metal, that they can simply use a rusted length of chain for.
There is laughter about this, at times.
I hear the ghosts of my loved ones answer when some stray passerby asks if there are any survivors. They did not survive. My mouth is too muzzled by the cement of wet ashes to make any words past the old threshold, trampled by firemen with matchbooks in their pockets.
The fire marshall is an arsonist.
–
There is no word in my language for the effect of being punished for surviving a tragedy by being buried alive in its ediface. So I just scream and let the dust and char and debris muffle it naturally.
Early on in the excavation, I heard my study cracked into and the cynical rifling of my years worth of handwritten notes “of historical importance” (they were my future) and poetry ripped from their binding page by page, along with the shuffling of irredeemable artifacts, and handed to bidders and cadets with family at university in Vienna, and Prague, and Brussels, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo.
“Is this a violin? My-two of them?” I hear the sickening crunch of splintering wood, and some meager notes strained out of another.
“Love letters?”
The girl I wanted to marry has her address pocketted, and I hear through muffled chatter that they have taken to calling her “porkchop” as the rations I’m slipped include fragments of bone and dried red meat-I convince myself of normal origin to force food down my throat. I can dissociate to eat, then use my survival to writhe and curse and cry.
It’s the only memory left alive but this photo album.
Months later, the daily crunch of combat boots on the rubble stirs a nest of earwigs, ants, and termites trying to make sense of the wreckage around me. I can hear the rumble and crunching of bulldozers and axes and shovels.
The Taxable Fund for Victims of Arson.
