from Raquel Gómez Savoy: The Dirge
The Dirge
I won’t be gone long, but I’m not here right now. The world spins at a frenzied, merciless pace, and I cling on, fingers slipping. A hollowed-out body, bled dry of everything I had to give. Trying to stay true to who I am when the world insists on remaking me in its own image. Fully grown yet still getting lost like a child in the labyrinth of self.
Longing for a soft landing, for smooth sailing through these turbulent waters. I need a moment of silence—no words barbed like fishhooks, no insistent pings shattering stillness, no discordant sounds. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. My heart, ravaged by my own hand and by the brutal reality I cannot outrun.
Nothing is ever truly within our control, is it? People dying, starving, weeping, taking their own lives. Killing each other, not just with bullets and blades, but with the sharper weapons of words, inaction, disregard. All of us just trying to grow in the same poisonous soil.
And I can’t breathe. And when I finally do, the air is toxic. I can’t see, but when I dare look, the earth burns. Can’t hear, but the babies’ cries pierce me. Can’t touch without breaking everything I lay hands on. I was born unfinished, a puzzle with missing pieces. Part of a simulation project I didn’t get the instructions for.
The people just don’t care enough. I pray, but God doesn’t listen. What’s the use in hope, in the grand scheme? You may ask yourself, what is the point? Why am I here? I lack the vernacular to make myself heard, to find success on this alien planet.
I’ve drowned, and now I await someone to find my bloated body drifting. Maybe this departure will take longer than anticipated. Maybe I’ll find my way back eventually. But for now, I want to stay submerged in this nothingness, floating in a comatose state. Wake me when the earth stops devouring itself, when my mind ceases its mutinous unraveling, when the demons inside and out abandon their relentless hunt for me. Wake me when everyone has forgotten my face, my name, the fact I was ever here at all.
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