The pieces I’m posting this week aren’t polished. They aren’t revised. Some of them wander, some of them end abruptly, and some of them discover halfway through that they’re actually about something else entirely.
For years I treated first drafts like evidence of incompetence when they’re really evidence of process. The first draft’s job isn’t to be good. Its job is to find the story. The second draft can be judgmental. The second draft can be ruthless. My first draft doesn’t have to be.
So this week I’m sharing a few pieces exactly as they arrived: messy, unfinished, and alive.
I would never kill anyone. That was the one thing I had promised myself. No matter how bad things got, no matter how desperate I was, I would never take another person’s life.
Frankly, I don’t believe in not having a choice. People say ‘it was him or me’ after the fact to justify the awful things they’ve done. Not me. I refused to put myself ahead of anyone else.
It would never come down to ‘him or me’ because I knew that I could find a way, I could build an alliance, and find the mutual benefits. Make them see that we could work together, survival wasn’t a zero sum game.
But that’s the thing. You can change the way you view the world. You can vow to do the best for everyone. What you can’t change is how other people see the world.
Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Regardless of what you think that other guy thinks it’s him or me and so…
In the back of my mind it was something I was going to have to do eventually, it wasn’t like society slowly eased itself into chaos. My main concern was that, once I did it, it would be easier to do the second time.
And the third time.
And eventually killing someone for their water would be as easy as going to the store and buying water used to be.
I don’t know how other people do it. I try to tell myself it is for survival, that I’m trying to help those around me, the people who trusted me. But there is no noble spin to this.
I’m a murderer.
Humans have an amazing ability to justify their horrible actions and I’m sure the people killing their way across the country have some doozies whipped up.
But right now, it is just a burden. One I refuse to let anyone else take on. When we have a moment, when one of those ‘you or me’ types show up, I’m the one who handles it. I won’t let anyone else take on the burden.
I won’t allow them to be marked.
David says I’m playing a dangerous game. That I’m taking this all on, but what happens when I lose? What happens if I win them all but die, eventually, of natural causes.
What will become of them then?
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