 The doctor said she would live in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair, crippled by pain. That was thirteen years ago. Instead, Mirissa D. Price is a 2019 DMD candidate at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, spreading pain-free smiles, writing through her nights, and, once again, walking through her days. As a Huffington Post blogger and emerging writer, Mirissa has publications in Yellow Chair Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Tuck Magazine, and more. Follow Mirissa’s writing at https://mirissaprice.wordpress.com/. Fondling a Lie But here’s the truth: I wonder if he feels the same insignificance. Being just a number among so many. Rapists. I wonder if he feels as obsolete. His crime doesn’t matter. His strength doesn’t matter. His power is nothing more than the other guy’s. Tagged with a metal clip around his collar, I wonder how many victims it took to get his two-week chip. And how many stories he’s told to cover the truth. I’ve told four. Pretending I know what it’s like to not feel a knife, to not hold a penis, to not live a lie. Pretending I even could tell you a bleeding semblance of the truth. And yet, I keep on pretending. I keep on just standing. In the dark center of Cheesman Park. I keep climbing back. Into the blue-grey sheets where he raped my mind. I keep going back down for more. Like a good victim won’t tell you – I never stop fondling a lie. Today, I Tell Myself Today I tell myself I will not hunt Pokémon like I am searching for terrorists in every dark alleyway and open park. I will not lose sight of the blossoming greenery in every news article I read. I will not give in to this state of mindless strolling through violence merely to capture a Doduo alongside a gunman and bomb. Though it’s hard, I’ll admit, to stop tapping and flicking at a virtual reality when the world is just less augmented without fiction, and less playful without games, when all I want is to go back to the days when I traded cards at the lunch table and didn’t know the word ‘terror,’ to the days when I thought of black and blue as a Luxray and not a conflict. Of cops against man, and man against racism. My parents say they don’t get how a group of twenty-somethings could really lose themselves to Pikachu and Poké Balls. But I look to the Germans and French. And the Brazilians and my neighbors. I look to the elections and authorities, the vigils and violence. And in my free-to-play reality, I get it. The drive to gather power for a team of Valor or Instinct or to get lost in the gym of Mystic. I get it. The search for stardust and candies to replace bombs in a battle. And in my hands, I feel it: my Avatar is always safe in the game. I stopped watching the news because every time I sat down with a pen and paper and a cup of Earl Gray I wanted to tell a story about dreams and hope. I wanted to paint a page cheerful, in rhymes set to iambic pentameter. I wanted to do more and write more and feel more than terror. I wanted to know more than grief. So I stopped writing and I stopped reading the papers or watching the news – as though not seeing the violence meant it didn’t exist, as though the chaos was all just imagined. And for a second, the noise – the sound of a heart that stopped beating, and the cry of a street stained in blood – ceased. For a second, not a gunshot went off nor a protester shouted. For a second I didn’t notice that the American flag outside my window had been at half mast for half a month, or that the news hadn’t actually changed except for the time, and the place of the story, except for the names and the faces of the people who died. For a second of peace, I had to make it all stop.
0 Comments
|
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed