Meaning (and Easter)
Taking it apart. Putting it back together. Grieving even though nothing was lost. Don't try again, it'll only make things worse. Trying again anyway. Over and over.
The other day I finally returned the soul I was borrowing. It didn't suit me. There's nowhere for it to go. I'm an organism, not a machine. I have to pretend to be a machine to make good use of a soul. The machine does nothing but break down so that the soul can put it back together again. And that's no way to live.
The world is oversaturated with meaning. There's too much meaning everywhere. It makes me sick. I'm tired of playing pretend. We drive past a billboard advertisement for plastic surgery, focused on an exaggerated double chin. I turn to the driver and she's feeling under her own chin, suddenly insecure. I witnessed an act of violence. I hate it. I want it to stop. This can't go on forever.
Today it's both Easter Sunday and Trans Day of Visibility. Thoughts stir about the connections drawn between Christ's scars and those left by the surgeries some trans people get. There is a definite line between the surgery I saw advertised and gender affirming care, but both at least depend on these socially constructed identities and roles, the way our bodies are not our own and how we're constantly seeking to reclaim them. We become machines to make room for our souls. Or else, we give up our souls to become something real.
Easter feels as hollow as Christmas did, in light of the "war" (or genocide, rather) happening in Palestine. What are we to celebrate? The likely extinction of the oldest Christian community? What would Jesus do if he was on earth today? I can't imagine he would side with those gleefully killing thousands and thousands of God's children and starving many more. Everything feels empty even as the world goes on as if everything is fine.
We're surrounded by empty meaning, an excess of meaning that's been hollowed out. Meaning animated by tired souls and broken machines. Meaning generated by algorithms they call intelligent. Dead meanings brought back to life, necromancy reproducing decades of cultural decay. Death everywhere, people dying, animals dying, the earth dying. Everything but civilization, which was always dead to begin with. The only life we have available is one lived inside this corpse.
Hope is the other side of fear. I'm tired of being afraid. And clinging to hope is exhausting. Maybe it's best just to accept that everything is ending, and to prepare for a slow but increasingly violent extinction.