lament of ineloquence

If you are anything like me, you devote a solid portion of every week to thinking about assorted family members. They are always in your head, and haven't you been bringing them up at the dinner table? Let your fingers take dictation and type the gripes or anecdotes while you talk. Since you're at the computer anyway, segue into a memory and rewrite (revise) it. Change the season of the event. Create a new climax. Let it unfold into a new and desirable outcome or vice versa. The idea is to imagine the answer to "What If?" Set the stage using scene and exposition, and after you've rewritten your past, include your present feelings about the alteration.

"What did you think of the song?" 

After moving back home post-breakdown, I rejoined my old theatre troupe, and with a new lease on life, I'd grown temporarily fearless. No one asked me to do this, but I wrote an a capella lament for the finale of the show, a retelling of Hamlet with Trumpism as its source of tragedy. 

"Well... it was pretty repetitive." 

Take my ashes / Take my ashes

Thanks, Mom. "I guess I was trying to express being at rock bottom. You know, when you're so low you can only feel that one thing? Haven't you ever felt disenfranchised?" 

Did you think you had a voice? / No one can hear you, no one can see you 

Dad looks blank. Of course not, culture has curled around his desires–everyone a Marvel fan. 

Did you think you had a choice? / You've been bought, you've been sold 

I'm lucky to have parents who love and accept me unconditionally. So why is it impossible to share?

This is the part where you give up

This time, you find how to say what you mean–not in lyrics, but now, on the couch. They turn off their screens to listen, attentive, without wearing their skeptical eyebrows. Steady breath, not impatient sighs.

By the end of your speech, peppered with their thoughtful questions, you have successfully conveyed generational mental unwellness as a condition of capitalism and climate crisis, the consequences of liberalism, queer time theory, and how every superhero movie is a cop movie. Maybe they won't, or can't, agree entirely. But through their love, they make every effort to understand, and if, and when, they don't, they lift you higher because they know you have to tell these stories, and they know there's someone who needs to hear.  

If only.