Healing Machine for James
For the disappointment that though you have a deep sense of justice and the ability to do meaningful good, you have taken your place as a cog in a machine.
You were born with an impulse to make the world better, but all of its bullshit systems have crushed that spirit into dust. At this point, you're just a cog in a machine that grinds you down a little more every day. This isn't how it was supposed to be. It doesn't sit well with you, being made smaller and smaller when you should be expanding with joy and purpose. You live in quiet terror that it'll be like this forever. The fear of meaninglessness erodes you.
Your husband wakes up one night to the sound of you grinding your teeth. He resists the urge to wake you. He listens to your teeth moving in a perfect, syncopated rhythm - side to side, side to side. He listens as they gnash, tap, click into a strange crescendo. It's an unnerving performance, this dance of bone against bone, but he doesn't mind the way it sounds. He puts your ukulele in your sleeping hands, and you begin to play.
Your music fills the room, harmonizing with a beam of moonlight, and spills outward into the night. It sways the house on its foundation and wakes the sleeping lizards. It stirs the bugs in the grass. It shatters the streetlights and pisses off the neighbors. It gives your boss jock itch. It fills shitty people with a sudden, overwhelming sense of shame. It gives the earth an extra spin, just for the hell of it. You wake up refreshed. Try as you might, you just don't fit inside that damn machine.