In my room I have a shrine to the truth. It is difficult to find things to place upon it these days, so most of the shrine consists of relics of the past. There is a stack of polaroids – a collection of memories that I have been recording since I was a child. The oldest ones tend to stay on the top because they are the ones that I want to sift through the most – the days when the truth seemed possible, achievable. Something that could actually be attained and grabbed and held on to and examined. But I often find myself looking at these images and not recognizing the people in them – I would say they were not real but the weight of them in my hand, the resistance of the paper as I try to rip them, crush them, tells me otherwise. There is also a boxtop lid on the shrine, where I keep all the newspaper headlines proclaiming the truth. It is covered in a thick layer of unmolested dust, the single headline laying in it no longer legible except for one word: “misinformation”. There used to be a red poppy on the shrine, but you smeared shit all over it and ruined it, so I stuffed it in the drawer at the bottom of the shrine, putting it on top of polaroid images of flags, families, and friendships, and all the other things you have destroyed. Sometimes I am not sure what goes on top of the shrine, and what goes in the drawer. There is a newspaper clipping of a mass of bloody dead bodies in front of a bombed-out hospital, for example, that I keep clutched in my hand, my sweat mixing with the red ink and dripping down my fingers to splatter on the floor, and these red splatters are everywhere, and you spread them to all corners in giant red footprints. The shrine sits in the middle of the room, which creates some awkwardness as you try to avoid its sharp edges and skirt around it to different areas of the room to look at tin rainbows and false unicorns. Every time you do it, you complain loudly about being constantly poked and jabbed by it, saying that if only I would turn some lights on, then it would be easier to avoid, yet the morning sun blares violently through the large glass windows. Besides, the truth should not be held against a wall, so it will continue to sit in the middle of the room, no matter how inconvenient it is for myself or others.
Contributed by Daniel Fuller - 2024/5/31 - 15:42
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released May 21, 2024