I don’t like the stars tonight. They give me a funny feeling, a feeling I can’t even describe. They’re beautiful by all means, glittering, shining, but down here, it’s dark and starless. In the pitch of dark, I imagine so many things, the temptation to walk barefoot in all blindness. I imagine the silence, without the crickets that crick ‘till dawn. I imagine the earth stopping to turn, stopping everything in full momentum and a sudden crash that puts an end to my headache. If the earth were to stop turning, I’d stop thinking, I’d stop turning with it. I’d stop with everything that makes me a shattered individual. There is nothing wrong with this world, but everything. Every goddamn thing that goes is wrong. War and guns, the addiction to kill, the obsession to possess and sex, to desire to be a hero in all the mess and corruption. There is nothing wrong except our dreams. The problem with us is we get carried away with self-worth and individual power. We hear the word freedom and we want to run and rescue everyone who isn’t living it the way we do. I get a funny feeling in this pitch dark that everything we are doing is going to shape the next generation. The thing is I’m not sure we are doing a great job shaping them. We are not exactly teaching. We’re obsessing and talking the talk, wrapped in the fight of us and those we call terrorists.
This isn’t what I imagined when I first learned I have a right to an imagination. I didn’t imagine fear and helplessness, nor did I imagine hypocrisy and contradiction. I didn’t imagine that this is what we’d become: observing how our soldiers die, how their citizens die, how our men fight, and how their men resist intrusion. I imagined starlight because I was an idealist. I idealized what everyone else idealized about a great land. When you’re 11 and don’t know shit about politics, money, sex, guns, drugs, and happy endings, you believe what they tell you to believe because it’s prettier. Everything without detail is pretty because you make up the details yourself; you become the writer and the painter and the illusionist.
But writing is shit if you have no details to paint a sad, starless night. Writing is shit if you have no music to back up the word before and the word after. Writing isn’t worth writing without describing that very funny, strange, hollow feeling at the end of a night that leaves you completely estranged. You become every word and every detail. You become the great land in which every teacher appraised and criticized you only to make you better.
Shit. This night isn’t pretty at all and there is not a single star and if I fooled you by the very fist line, then you’ll have to excuse my imagination. You see, the world still turns you upside down no matter how you think of it, no matter how well you write it. Your whole mind turns and shakes and you stumble, but you don’t exactly fall. You just cope and wake up to walk in your damn shoes and make peace with the self everyone wants you to love and respect.
I respect the self. I respect my country and this country and this earth. I respect who I’ve become and who I was because nothing will make sense otherwise. And I’ll give you something real. I’ll tell you how the deceiving night looks from my window, looking down below from the 5th floor: A sidewalk, a single light, a mass of grass with the music of the crickets in the background, a couple of empty balconies with empty chairs. There, that’s pretty damn good picture.