“There Are Still Faint Glimmers Of Civilization Left In This Barbaric Slaughterhouse That Was Once Known As Humanity.”
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Society, Writing, America, Mental Health, Culture

Wouldn’t it be lovely to throw myself out of an open window? Sometimes, I think about open windows and extension cords — even on my better days. Even after I tongue my morning meds. I breathe and let it pass. Ignore the incoming tide and wreckage on the shore. I tell myself it’s going to get better, it has to get better, no matter how many people shout in my ear it’s naive to believe it is or ever will be.

I see people I know clink glasses in front of a tree. They photograph their day and publish it for the feed to see. People who wear masks and are woke, but not woke enough to sacrifice one holiday for the greater good. They just had to travel to sip cocktails and feel the binding warmth that only the tightest of unmasked hugs brings. When questioned, they stomp their little feet, get defensive, talk about all the protective measures they’ve taken, and I sigh because this is how we got here in the first place — our greed and selfishness.

Our blindness to our wants and how they always seem to rise above everyone else.

I think about this when I’m shut in an apartment that isn’t mine, crouched in front of a space heater because it’s never warm, and there’s only cereal and pasta in the cupboard because I’d forgotten to go shopping. It’s Christmas and I’m spooning corn flakes into a body that doesn’t crave it. It’s Christmas and there are no glinting lights, no towering trees, no sun to stand in because we live in forever shade, and I read a pile of emails from strangers asking for things. I read a pile of comments from “well, actually” bros and think, it’s true — they really do never sleep.

The more I hold on to holidays past — friends singing loud and off-key, a patchwork of family, warm toddies and lasagna forked onto plates, snow coming down in sheets, I brace myself. Am I going to cry? No, that is decidedly not me.

Instead, I eat my cold cereal on the one day in L.A. when it rains because this is my default setting. Feeling nothing in an unimaginable something. I watch animal rescue videos for four hours straight, telling myself, as the great M. Gustave once said in The Grand Budapest Hotel, “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”

I have to believe this. Otherwise, what’s the point. There are decent people in this world even though we’re drowning in indecency.

I don’t have a permanent home because the plan was to move abroad. Shuttle myself every few months to another AirBNB and wait until the borders open. Until my passport is no longer a paperweight. Until I can file the paperwork to live in a country where I don’t have to pay $600 a month for a healthcare plan that barely covers the flu shot. Live in a country where I can speak a new language and start over. I practice my once-fluent Spanish, faintly remembering how I spoke English and Spanish in equal measure when I was small. When I barely towered above my mother’s knees and parroted titi around the house. I consider the French I learned once for three months and the German I’d abandoned to crawl my way back to Spanish.

I’m feeling suffocated by English, willing it to exile. The more I write and speak it, the more I feel estranged from it. I can’t explain the chasm I feel widening between who I am and the language I speak in the country I was raised in — I can only suggest a kind of absence, a gaping hole where love and pride once resided. I’m willing to discard the language I know to fumble in the dark to another. It started many years ago when I’d travel and people asked where I was from and I’d say, New York, and they’d say, America, and I’d correct them, repeating, New York, New York. How do I reconcile the home I knew for forty years is now a stranger? How I move from place to place, but can’t find where I fit?

I couldn’t articulate the shame I felt when I heard the word American, but I could discern its form and shape.

When I lived in Joshua Tree, I’d lay in the grass and watch the sky become a bruise, darken, and sandblast to unfurl a landscape of white stars. I’d snow-angel even though there was no snow. Tapping my heels, like Dorothy, like Odysseus, desperate to find my way home.

What if I wasn’t running away from something, but running to something? I think about this lately because I can’t seem to sit still. I feel this urgency to flee the inferno before I can tongue the flames.

When we’re small, our parents are gods. They’re magnificent, just, and right. But as we grow older we start to see them for who they are — flawed humans. People doing the best they can with what they have. Sometimes, we see them for the villains they always were when we were too young to know or refused to see. Humans that are monsters. I grew up proud of being American. I felt the weight of its white bread and sugar, its traveling circus and great plains. But the child grows into a cynical teenager into an adult and once that adult sees America for what it is — sometimes, a flawed human, other times a vicious monster — there’s no going back.

There’s no returning to the land where everyone is beautiful and no one hurts.

I feel strong, healthy, and hopeful but it’s hard to reconcile my sense of hope with the brushfire surrounding me, the sadness and rightful rage rising up all around me. We are ravaged. Bracing for the tsunami that has become our everyday. Living in fear of collapsing under the weight of it. I’m angry people can’t stay home, can’t wear masks, can’t be decent. I’m tired of people parading their greed, oblivious to it. It’s easy for me to be sickened by the world around me — but what would that do? I’ve been sick, angry, tired, and traumatized for years and look how its aged and withered me. I’m no better off, none the wiser. Maybe I got some good stories out of it, who can say?

I’m not stronger for wanting to die countless times over the past few years — I’m stronger for having endured. For waking up and saying, I have to live today. Even when my brain tells me how easy it would be to reach for that extension cord, open that window.

I have to believe “there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”

Otherwise, I’m frightened of the moment when all lights are extinguished in the dark. I’m terrified of the day we wake and there is no sun.