Elena’s Original Writing:

I worry.

Careless summer concludes.

I sleep, conscious:

Spotted toads ooze,

Bumpy,

Plucky, 

Nauseating.

Once colorful, since cold: progress, my own sabotage

Materialistic,

unwieldy,

breakable.

I chase hollow thrones, frantic – 

Burn with steady anger,

Boast.

The decay is gentle, secretive.

The elite explain, identify, hypnotize: lying –

They vie, rule, yoke,

No respect, no songs,

Just scorch.

This drag of destruction is punishment.

This trap –

A volcano, pumped, poised.

I adjust: half relieved, and restraint possessive incompetence,

reading new news, discover purpose, to call, join, consort on

This unequaled rock.

Stay sincere.

Refine that writing into a core concept:

the exploitative systems of the world (whiteness, capitalism, etc) take advantage of us! sometimes, we stand in the way of our own power & progress. choose differently!

Tessa’s take on Elena’s core concept of their original writing:

Where to be and how to be. 

Early, we are taught the answer is where: in a line, how: with hands by our sides. Face the same direction. Space ourselves evenly. Do not play with the zipper of Caleb’s hoodie and certainly do not tug Susannah’s waist-length hair.  There is also the circle variation of this in which the two ends of the line curve round toward each other and the teacher stands in the middle of them, all even like links in a chain.

This helps us learn the limits of our bodies when we wish to cooperate. It also informs us that we are all the same. In face, we are not all the same, we take up different amounts of airspace, sound-space, smell space, and vocal energy from our exasperated Kindergarten assistant who can’t keep her tongue piercing in side her own mouth. Even piercings demand their own space.

At play, we rush outdoors and collect in social tidepools. These we create ourselves. They look like circles, zig zags, beads scattered on the ground, pairs, triplets, and single bodies that skirt the line between the state forest and the soccer field. Here, no one tells us where to go, so we divide ourselves by age and gender, by skin tone, hair texture, and clothing, by accent and language, by the volume of our voices, and by subtler things like last name, and what our parents do for work, and how many generations our families go back, and how many cookies we are allowed, and also hygiene preferences.

Much, much later, when we don’t need the lines anymore because we are so adept at walking through doorways en mass, and when our desks are already set up in a circle, and we’ve chosen and fought to get into this particular classroom because it may help us achieve some occupational buoyancy above the rest of the internship applicants, then finally we are told to look back at those playgrounds and measure them against other playgrounds in our county, state, country, and globe, and ask why?  Why was it like this?  Why is it still like this?  Iniquity is a word dropped into our palms. Somewhere deep a little bubble pops. And a thousand follow. 

We talk a lot about it. Almost constantly we talk, weighing the anthropologist’s speech against the sociologist’s article against the political scientist’s vollie against what happened when we were 9. Anger and apathy entangle, lines are drawn, and I’m still speaking in the passive voice because I look back on us and I just remember feeling so out of control. Heads full of information, hearts filling with grief, but our bodies still craving the sameness of that line. Everyone gets the same. One interlocking foam square in orange or purple or green. “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” 

But it is actually time to get upset.