How to Appear Perfect When You Are In Danger

Assorted fictions for living

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
of the petrol and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
-TS Eliot

Photo by Moritz Kindler on Unsplash

It starts by layering your costume with items that represent stability: a strand of pearls, a good sweater, well-made boots. Make sure you’ve amassed a library of classic writers inside your head. You can deflect suspicion with literary allusion, buying time as they try to remember the author. Poe works great. He’s universal and dark and they don’t have to like books to have heard of him.

Everyone likes a good spooky story.

In the space between waking and sleeping, you will emerge paralyzed with fear. Get up. Boil the water. As your tea steeps, the warmth of the ceramic will wake your defenses. Shower. Brush your hair. Lipstick diverts their questions. All they’ll see is your smile.

Know that you have chosen your closest friends on the basis of their ignorance. You don’t want anyone who will push you toward safety. It’s not time for this yet. So don’t be angry when the ones you have chosen expect outlandish things from you, for instance, healing them of grief. If they see their own reality, they will see yours. They might call you to action. You’re not ready to go there yet. Don’t be surprised when your friends suddenly vanish.

You will become so familiar with the comfortable twang of danger that playing an alternate note might feel like dying. This is normal. Remember that concerts happen all the time, even when you’re not in attendance. The knowledge of phantom performances will you keep going until a scarred stranger slips a ticket into your coat pocket. This will happen in a back alley in an unfamiliar city. It will happen when you are lost. There will be no GPS.

Remember that whole continents have been raped by starlight navigation. Fixed plans seldom seed positive outcomes.

You will learn that you can go to work after you’ve been gutted by bad news. Your structure will appear intact for inspectors, like an airplane with faulty bolts. It will all hold for a while, and when it goes, you will be one of the lucky few to survive the impact.

It’s okay to sacrifice your art for survival until you remember the hope of art is what keeps you alive. In the meantime, you’ll worry about other people’s feelings so much that you’ll start to feel them as your own. This is normal. Keep going until you learn the difference.

They’ll have you believe that sex is like currency, the price you pay for stability and comfort as you wake up alone in a crowded house. Also like money, they’ll be ashamed to talk about it. The people walking past you, later, in the store, they do it too. It’s safer to act like it’s not happening.

You will be so frightened by God’s will that he becomes a man and you are the reason there is war. You’ll wish that Eve had choked on the apple, spit it out, and found the breath of life in Jonah’s whale song. You are convinced that, given the chance, you would have not named the animals.

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Your boots slide on the oily ground of the dark alley.

You’re in an unfamiliar city.

There’s a streetlight ahead, or maybe the moon.

Move toward it now, drawing your thick coat around you.

Run.

And for the first time, this movement will be rooted in freedom instead of fear.

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Photo by Hanxiao on Unsplash