A Very Particular Horror the funny glass of time

nostalgia is such a thing that the past is rosier, sweeter, better than it was

and it glosses over how hard it was the grayer side of ages

pain was so much worse than we let it be, looking back but go far enough away or ask people in another culture

what do you think of psychological torture that’s so mild, so insidious, so convincing that you become completely alone among your own kind you can't trust anyone, you are ashamed of your questions your own people treat you harshly, impatiently, try to rid themselves of you?
show them how everything looks pretty but people kill themselves by the dozens and kill each other even more, even faster, and there’s no brotherhood, no sisterhood, no family

there are no walks through a forest, collecting and discerning the most beautiful growth among us, the sun dappled leaves pure water running over the rocks, herds of animals roaming free to exist, buffalo not annhilated for white men’s amusement and sport. tell the people who’s foreign to our specialties, the relentless subjugation of everything female, the body, the spirit all dissected to be applied to the work machine, as parts of the machine working 14 hours a day, feeling despair upon waking each morning feeling grief that can’t be named, can’t even exist unnamed, so powerful so buried, so rooted with the trees of rage, that to be real and safe become incompatible. to survive is to conform and die inside but live out your days following rules, laws, directions, social, racial hierarchies, the merchant and petty-bourgoise class’s relentless disgust notwithstanding not affecting you personally. they hate me, but i must keep working for them or my babies will die. then they show you how they can kill your babies if they want to, for no reason at all, and no excuse afterward we are nothing to them, but we still do our lives, 9-5 and no more if we’re lucky. if we're women, then all of our labor in the home is rejected as meaningful, valuable, or worthy of recompense

then to live the horror but not be allowed to see it, say it, name it to be shunned and bullied when they see you don’t like it you don’t think cruelty is funny, you don’t admire them you pity them, and they’ll kill you for that without hesitation

is that someone anyone with freedom would choose? if they weren’t bound by it, like they didn’t attach that reality to “the reality,” because it’s such a bloody set of lies but the trinkets and bobbles, the benefits to classes higher than straight up poor, the pathetic Amazon delivered bribes, are too attractive to us. convenience is too valuable to America.

all this shit aristocrats invent and shove down our throats to make american lives more convenient and cut off from the reality of genocide and slavery, and we even think 'it’s not my fault, it has nothing to do with me,' then why such misery, fellow shipwrecks?

if ‘it’s not our fault,’ why rush to gorge on addictions, beg for hits, outsiders might say, they’re not living people.
being undead, dead, consumers, consumed isn’t this a viscious sort of experience? learning to hate your own body and view it as something the aristocracy owns to use and dispose, to pretend to agree to that, is the pain so not just the pain itself, but the song and dance for them.