Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Loan
I was born with a mountain on my back: parents not descended from gods; so I’m cursed to carry the gods like my parents did, like all our neighbors who borrowed rocks to weigh themselves down so they could eat and live and teach their children down here, because there’s good money in making life harder for yourself and better money in making life harder for others. But I mustn’t rage or kill or hate and bury you with my own burden. I must learn all I can about gravity and government, to fortify the knowledge under calluses and accept that I may spend my entire lifetime paying people who call themselves specialists to remove my mountainous lack stone by stone. And because I’m privileged enough to know the body is never enough, I will fill my hardness with buoyant dreams, dreams that I might someday eat alongside the gods, if only in name or blood or memory, and dreams of myself spiriting the gods into revolution, forcing nobody to carry us because we won’t make mortals move rocks anymore, like tyrants or pharaohs or vengeful myth-spirits. We will share our magic of knowing that motion is life instead of stone, then mountains will stay where they are and everyone will move around them by sunlight, air, and water, with clear lungs and unexhausted strength, soberly honoring those who walked before, the martyrs of the systematic, who killed themselves under the weight of everything they would never have and everything they would never be, “so WE could be different.”
I wrote this while thinking of my Political Economy professor, who once walked into class and (almost angrily) told us he’d just finished paying off his house; he then silenced our fomenting congratulations with a curt “Don’t clap. It’s nothing to clap about.” And we all instantly obeyed, straight-faced, because we knew exactly what he meant.
Love always,
your Mister
Lonely Hearts Chapel 
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