When We Stand on Guard, Even in Certain Death

“All is fair in love and war.”

. . .

Here is the age old moral dilemma: would you kill one person to save five?

What about this one: would you kill five people to save five?

Of course you could say, these five people I am saving are close and dear to me, I will save them no matter the cost. These five people are incredibly smart and talent and will accomplish great things in life if they had the chance. These five people are fighting for the righteous ideology, the one that will save the world.

What if one of those five was a young earl, born of a military family, eager above all else to fulfill the family tradition and loyal to his country? His charming grace and good manners had won him favorable opinions even from those who did not agree with his position.

What if one of those in the other five was an extremely talented speaker, rallying behind the unshakable ideals of freedom and liberty? Even if his motives were shaky and half his supporters had more practical purposes in mind, were they not noble goals?

As I muster up my virtual troops in an Age-of-Empires-like game readying for the next attack against the “bandit chief,” so, too, must a real general have, throughout the ages, prepared his army for an uncertain fate. Perhaps he did not want to fight the war. Perhaps, more than anything else, he did want to sit by the river and fish with his hookless fishing rod.

But, as with all things history, one must decide. Despite John Rowe’s best efforts at peacekeeping, he could not preserve the fine sanctuary where the regulars dined with him and the townspeople kept on their smuggling trade unhindered. And the one hundred and eight heroic warriors forced to leave their hometowns and band together defying an unjust government? They could not hide in their mountain base forever, whiling away the days.

Their leader decided to obey the emperor in the end. Even if it meant one hundred and eight deaths.

Is there really the right decision, the right thing to do?

In twenty years, the right people were the Bostonians who had their Pope Day mobs and overthrew tea into the ocean. History only favors the victorious, and soon their sacrifices are the only ones that matter, their concerns the only ones worth mentioning, their hopes and dreams the only ones to be pursued.

But in the moment, perhaps we can only make the best of two horrible choices and map out our course using the painful moral compass in our hearts.

. . .

I am a horrible decision-maker.

There is no hiding around it. Whenever there are choices to be made, I strive to retain all of them as long as possible. I am the girl who kept multiple bookmarks in her “choose your own adventure” books so she could go back and read every possible ending. I am the girl who has five different variations of the same item that does basically the same thing in a game, because I could not decide which one to pick.

I, too, am the one who always sympathizes with the villain, because what if they had a really good reason for what they did and who am I to judge? I do not want to make anyone unhappy, and yet most of all I do not want to be unhappy.

They say you can’t make everyone in the world happy all the time, but how could I choose who to make happier and whose hopes to crush? Maybe the one who I care about more? But how could I figure that out when all I want to do is curl up and fade away slowly?

If only my misery could bring forth something good.

Then again, I suppose it wouldn’t be called misery, would it?

I know I am hurting everyone in my impasse, but even knowing so I am indecisive as ever.

. . .

The night before Joseph Warren was supposed to take up command as general of a fledgling rebel troop, he stayed up the entire night and fell asleep the next day until noon. Perhaps, even until then, his subconscious was not sure what to do.

But when he woke up, he knew.

He marched up the hill, not as a general, but as a footsoldier, to his death.

Love Is a Smoke Raised with the Fume of Sighs

Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes.

Summer is half over now that my circuits class is done with, and not a moment sooner. Each day I had spent half awake, promising myself that after this, I would get to sleep more than five hours a night, and in a bed too. Sometime before then my cat foiled my plans by chewing apart my phone charger, although to be honest if the only thing that can lure me home is the promise that I will still get to talk to the people I would normally talk to online then maybe I would have come up with some other excuse why I should sleep in a moldy chair in a poorly ventilated basement rather than in a bed, in my even messier, smelly apartment.

This summer I had gone to Boston, the first since I last visited Yuma. We took the train into the city and saw the statues remembering civil war soldiers and the red brick paths meant to be historic. We took a detour from the Freedom Trail into a cafe tucked away in the North End, then stopped by Paul Revere's house, where we saw the bells he casted and the fine silverware he made. We had the obligatory trip to the aquarium, which was under construction and so much neater because they had the sharks, stingrays, and other big fish in the area where they normally kept the penguins, and you could see the daily shrimp feeding much clearer. There was also the trip to Chinatown, the long dinner of hotpot and inappropriate jokes, and the subsequent stay in Cambridge.

I had thought to visit old friends but I had not contacted them in so long I did not know if they were still in Boston or had gone home already. And of course, what would I say? "Hello, I haven't talked to you in over a year, yes, yes, well you know me, I never stay in touch with anyone." That is not strictly true, because once I mailed a letter back to a friend who had somehow found my address, although she never contacted me again and I left it at that.

In a few weeks I will go south, to where Khajiit is, to where another friend of mine now lives, to where my parents eagerly await me. I have not called them in a while now, first because of exams and then because my phone died, but mostly because I am putting things off again. If I did not need to perhaps I would slowly set my parents aside too, like my other once-upon-a-time friends. The thought is unsettling only because it seems true.

Between then and now I do not know. There are tentative plans for visits to the Old Port, maybe some horse carriage rides, a visit to the gallery that never made sense to me, figuring out whether to go to the cathedral or basilica of the same name (and which one is which), a glance at the overpriced touristy cafes and restaurants catering to the old yet not quite old French way. Maybe we will climb the mountain that is really a stumped volcano. Maybe we will see the stadium that is now full of plants and animals. Maybe we will even see fireworks, red and white and glittering bright.

But emotionally I do not know what will happen. If I am prepared, at all, or if I would rather confine myself to my stale basement and microwaved food and the occasional venture above ground to feed the cat that both brings me back and sends me away.

She is oblivious as ever.

I Know You've Read So Many Books

Hot summer night, mid-July, when you and I were forever wild—the crazy days, the city lights, the way you would play with me like a child.

April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

. . .

I still remember the first poem that ever called out to me. It wasn't some masterpiece, but it did win a poetry contest—Terra Incognita it was called—and it called out to me like no other poem had. I don't remember the exact details of it, but I remember the elements of charting new grounds, deceptive sirens, and that flamboyant adventurous spirit rooted in some sense of reality. I wrote a poem too modeled after that, one about my desires and fears and hopes and dreams, all stuffed into a hero's calling across an almost impassible ocean, that archetypal plot.

. . .

It may sound childish (and heaven knows I've been called that a lot), but my favorite book is The Tale of Despereaux. Maybe it's because of the tried-and-true recipe of a knight, a princess, and a villain—but more so, it's because the villain is not quite a villain and the princess is not quite a damsel-in-distress princess, and the knight, oh the knight, he is a knight by virtue and courage alone. Here, even with strong veins of fairy tales spun into the story, things never go as planned and even the smallest thing such as a watercress soup can hurt and heal in an instant.

. . .

Oh tell me why / Do we build castles in the sky? Oh tell me why / All the castles way up high.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams / his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream / his wings are clipped and his feet are tied / so he opens his throat to sing.

. . .

I can't help but cry at the intro of The Titanic, when Jack Dawson wins two tickets to board the eponymous ship. I wish with all my might that I could wave my arms frantically in front of him and snatch the tickets away from him and rip them up so he wouldn't die only days later. But had he not gone on the Titanic, would he have ever met Rose? Is it okay to rob someone of a life-changing romance to save their life? How do authors justify it to themselves when they put their characters in peril for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Do they cry when their noble heroes and heroines die trying to be rather than merely am?

. . .

In The Kite Runner, the protagonist's father claims that all sin can be simmered down to theft. A lie at its very basis is a theft of someone's undeniable right to truth. But what do they call it when you steal from yourself? Every time I read a book or watch a movie, I am lying to myself. I am telling myself that I live in this world—and I very much wish I did. I wish I could live in this constructed world of perfect coincidences, no matter how much pain that might require (and authors do put their characters through a lot), because some days anything seems better than this emotional cyclone I am in, no matter how calm the eye is.

. . .

"Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire." He suddenly got to his feet. He looked at the ocean. "Sybil," he said, "I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll see if we can catch a bananafish."

That Night We Ran Away with the River of Lights

Now that The Great Gatsby is coming out in movie form, all decked out in the kind of frivolous extravagance to be expected of a movie of that era; now that it is summer, just as it was the year Gatsby constructed the infamously haunting fantasy; now that I am back here, in this basement, in this room, hungry and pained, once again, now that I am in front of the computer typing in front a familiar screen with a familiar pain in my throat—where has the past year gone?

Once again the room is hollow, once again only my shadow steps in place with me. Once again I cannot stand up straight and soldier on, I am instead shivering in the slightly chilled air mulling over the past few days, the past few months, the past few years that have slipped by so silently I barely had a chance to turn around.

Maybe, just maybe, "tomorrow is another day." I have always hated the ending of Gone with the Wind, because I want to believe in the happy endings, but if life must end in uncertainty and heartbreak, maybe we should still stand proud and hopeful. The Ashleys in our world will always remind us of our painful pasts and all the horrible mistakes we have made, but maybe, just maybe, if we are lucky, the Rhetts in our world will bring us to our senses—wake us from our nightmares and save us from our callousness.

. . .

Is it late enough yet?

Lately I have been rereading Homestuck, since the author is on a hiatus. The first time I read it was last summer. I spent a good couple days up all night reading the pages in a dazed fervor, and when it was all over, I had to face what had been tormenting me with my full consciousness again.

Reality.

I have often said that I write to face reality, because in words black against the white, I can slowly take them in without having them burn me alive. In life, the overwhelming thoughts are suffocating, parasitic, and all-consuming. But reality is rooted in life, and more often than not, my writing is merely reactionary.

Is it late enough yet to talk of the nights spent draped under a thin felt blanket, crying into the telephone desperate for the tiniest amount of consolation? Has enough time passed that the stars are now hung high in the sky, cold and out of reach? Are the bells tolling midnight, past midnight, much past midnight?

Is it too late to retrace our steps and pretend we did not just take a detour into a land that tore us apart and rebuilt us with desolation? Even if we do not know where we should go from here on, even if there are a million paths and every but one of them leads to horrible suffering death.

And if we can, could we still build the world we want to see?