One thing a lot of people want to know right now in this country is how the presidential election will go, and in this county, if the measure on the ballot for the library where I work will pass. If you cannot move forward in time at the speed you would like, you can either stand still in it — not always a bad option — or you can move forward in some other mode. For me, the fertile ground has nothing to do with the ballot, or everything to do with it; how do we, havers of liberty, position ourselves to best weather whatever storm comes our way? Just about half the country is going to consider us doomed, regardless of who wins, and while you may not think that whatever half you don’t belong to counts, the direction I am headed in doesn’t have to do with sides, it has to do with universalizing resiliency.

I believe that resiliency is a communal condition; a resilient person is someone who has made the right decisions about what communities to participate in, it is not someone who doesn’t need community. The relationship between resilience and independence is confusing. The more independent you are by natural disposition, the more resilient you will be in the face of the inadvisable thing everyone else is doing. But the relational nature of that fact reveals the truth: there’s a difference between thinking for yourself and defining yourself as not like everyone else. It’s very easy to point at what you aren’t, it’s also pretty easy to sound certain about what you believe, but it’s not so simple to experience the relational nature of existence. The person that you are is always defined relationally — in a vacuum, you don’t exist. For a long time, I charted a course for the vacuum, and it’s not that I think there is nothing to encounter there — I think we all know what’s there, and we will all get there one day.

But I didn’t quite consider the way that independence as a siloed expression can only illuminate possibilities that divorce a person from their relational being; this is surely death. The closer I get to the answers to questions that have plagued philosophers and discontents for millennia, the more I discover that tied into the very fact of being (alive) is all things that are alive. It is easy to reject this claim as new age, or religious, or self deception, but it is true even when it is not comforting, and it is especially true when people get to thinking they worship nothing.

What I am getting at is that independence is only healthy when it’s a common quality among community members, not when it is the mechanism by which you reject community. Inside community, independence is a necessary form of creativity. Outside of community, it is not possible to create meaning.

I won’t dwell on why that is, perhaps you can take it up with God yourself, if you’re so inclined. But —

I would like to invite you to chart a different course with me, in which we embark together on creating resilience together by rooting our writing in a contained place with inherent connections to the material earth. More on that soon. <3

For now, I think it is sufficient to observe that we can — and we must — create resilience together, regardless of what happens in November and beyond.

I. Layers of Loss

Strangely enough, the world is not infinitely surprising. Or at least, not continuously so. It will indeed, for long stretches of time, cease to surprise me. This is the mythological Winter - a time to find a new - and hopefully better - way to experience the same old stuff. Old frustrations bubble up.

Learning how to savor is the only opportunity I am offered in these times, and even though I am too smart and too cynical to believe in a dad God, I do think there's a reason why there are whole spans of my life where I am challenged to see how incredibly unlikely any part of this experience is. Almost impossible things happening not just constantly, but ceaselessly.

It is hard to understand because it is ceaseless, it is not marked by change. But to the extent that I do understand it, it is because I have experienced loss. I am asked - or offered the possibility - to think about how unlikely anything is, including the millions of things every day that I unwittingly fold into my everyday.

How to hold loss is not easy to answer, and so I can easily dismiss easy answers. “You see, our ancestors were __________________ and we have lost that,” is, most of the time, the beginning of a sales pitch. My ancestors do not actually want me to return to hunting-gathering, they are not overly impressed by hanging fresh grown herbs from a laundry line to dry in the sun, and they certainly couldn’t care less if I plant my bare feet in the dirt (ew?). It takes the complexity of human history and cultures and turns it all into marketing psychology. Never mind cultural appropriation, how about one dimensional thinking? This is a common trick: touch on a need that resonates universally, and then offer a phony solution. Buy my book! take my class! Make a bracelet to track the cycles of the moon! Even mindfulness and meditation can be sold, and so they are.

But loss is not constructed. Sometimes, for a second, I understand that’s beautiful - every single piece of experience I can wrestle from “nurture” and return to nature is a battle won. There are many things that, if we all stopped believing in them tomorrow, would simply cease to be. Money, states, even words - but not loss. We do not imagine it together. What I can change is not what loss is, but rather how I hold the grief that comes from it.

These Winters are grief, it seems obvious that I should grieve loss of all kinds although I've never considered darker periods as such. I have grieved the loss of possibility, the loss of life, the loss of trust, the loss of relationships, the loss of home, even the loss of time itself. I have gained and lost an entire language in this lifetime. I suppose any person, experiencing time linearly, experiences grief in a much broader sense than I’d previously considered it.

What I want is a question that, in its form, pivots away from the temptation to buy into something and moves towards the work of experiencing something.

II. The Right Question

Whether it’s because it is not articulated or because it has so much to do with absence, this small order - large impact grief, or small impact large order or small and big at the same time grief, whatever, everyday bigsmall grief, is lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the feeling I get from reaching backwards in time with the same antennae that I use to reach forward in time, and getting no response.

I think to grieve is to love - love the home I lost, the friend I lost, the self I lost, and so on. It is hard to hold the love for what I have lost without shame. Can I have an honest and nourishing relationship with loss?

This kind of interrogation is sometimes derisively described as prescriptive, but what is the use of writing about grief and loss if I can’t talk about pain? I can stop - at least for the moment - trying to answer unanswerable questions and instead, try to answer the question that I actually have. I don’t need rational answers, I need relevant ones.

As human nature is in me but is also a whole that includes me in it — grief is in me and also is larger than me. It may well be larger than even human nature; pain, after all, is universal. It is too much to say that pain is a message — we’re not selling books here — but it’s too little to say that it is just an object passing through me.

What do the things that are bigger than me mean for me?

III. Bigger on the Inside

I find these “bigger” things inside myself first, typically, but like stumbling into a new universe, they can seem (and perhaps are) vast. I identify these things that are bigger than me at least in part by their strange relationship with time. These are things I find inside of my corporeal linear being that are themselves not bound to corporeality or linear time. The words I use to describe them are usually “great,” “big,” “vast,” and in my essentialized question, I said “bigger than me.” I experience them as feelings. Feelings that are bigger than me. I think feelings are an experience of time, as light is an experience of space, and simply existing is — can be understood as — an exercise in loss, because even if I do absolutely nothing at all, I still lose time.

Time is also bigger than me, it is also within and without me; it is responsible for the very possibility of anything occurring, and it is also responsible for endings. These are the things we already knew about time. To them, I add: feelings are how I experience time, they give time meaning. From a God’s eye point of view, if time is a circle, and everything is happening at all times, then like colors into white, feelings are absorbed into the stasis of all things all at once. I think specific, distinguishable feelings are a product of linear time, the only kind of time I know.

I can think of only one other structure that has a clear beginning, middle and end, besides a life, and that is a story. Maybe linear time — a lifetime — is a story being told. I don’t know why. It could be just for the experience of ceaseless miracles, which is a nice thought.

IV. Storytime

It is a little weird, and frankly a little distressing, that a lot of reality is a story I tell myself. Right now, I am looking for a story to tell myself about what it means to have something when I will one day have nothing and what it means to have something when I have had other things that I have lost. A story that can do justice to the very small and very large nature of grief at the same time, that speaks to death and an average Tuesday morning, too, is no small thing.

The job of the story is to uncover grief in its most abstract and concrete forms; the broadest and the most specific; the most common and the most individual; and then to open the door to the pain like welcoming an old friend. I think that is what it means to savor. If I look up the word, it means to give special attention to the present, “to fully enjoy the gift of each moment,” but I think that hidden in this woo is the fact that each moment has grief in it, that alongside the concern with being, there is a concern with loss.

My new year’s resolution is not to write a book called Grief and Time, but simply to figure out how to count my losses the same way I count my blessings. It is enough.

Within the conversation of political privilege, we can ask how a hypothetical infinitely privileged person could experience anything negative except fleeting pain. The typical answer for why a person can have privilege and still suffer is that political privilege relationships change based on the social circumstance; you are a majority in some ways and a minority in others. If your political identity represented a majority in every aspect, then you would not suffer. This feels wrong because it is wrong - it narrows the scope of suffering to the realm of politics, to a consensus definition of what it is to suffer. This is consistent with an attempt to erase individuation, a process that makes us uncomfortable because it is queer, in the same sense that we already talk about discomfort around queerness. The it-doesn’t-fit-into-a-box stuff, to state the obvious, is hard to quantify, and there are a lot of reasons why that makes it inconvenient for larger efforts, even efforts that are nominally about justice.

So what’s going on is that you are something in addition to a political person, you are intelligible as something more than a political person, and that something more is not absent even when you walk into the politics of the world, which you must do. When we talk about the effect of political identity on experience, we often talk about what it’s like to have a certain political identity in a political world. But we don’t talk about what it’s like to have a self that isn’t political in a political world. So let me say it, for godsake: it’s miraculous. sometimes it’s very, very hard.

This is a better queer, “the inherent divergence from normativity that individuality engenders,” because through this construction, we arrive at a better understanding of a conflict that subsumes us - the anxiety of self determination.

It is also God (whatever you want to call God) that makes each of us queer— because the mutually constitutive nature of this dialectic is between something naturally human and something naturally divine (whatever you want to call the divine). It’s a thing that’s hard to grok, real difficult to say out loud. But we’ve known the idea for a long time under words like soul, now that we’re having a love affair with atheism, some of us seem to be calling it gender, but under it all is the weird fuckin weird true but actually true thing — the thing that makes one of us just us just uniquely us also makes us a little bit bigger than ourselves, makes us a little immortal, a little divine, but not in this blowhard new age way; in this other, scarier way, we would rather be maybe be just these political entities, because this thing whatever it is — i said i think it’s a dialectic of forgiveness, but whatever it is — is so incredible it almost hurts, its a tragedy but it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, you exist! holy fuck! and when you reach out into the strange universe, it hears you. that’s a lot, man, and you carry all that into every room, and it doesn’t matter if everyone in the room looks just like you, none of them are you. yeah it’s true, you didn’t make it up.

(you gotta ask yourself why you wonder whether you’re making it up, right? yeah see that other big thing on that.)

Just the fact that it’s there and it will talk to you is often given as the complete justification for why it will reach its hand into your life, if you figure out how to ask right — and if it doesn’t, then obviously, it never existed. but you believe there are animals you’ve never seen in places you’ve never been, and you do not expect by the fact of them that there’s a way to speak to them that will endow you with knowledge or love or prosperity. now this thing is so big those animals know it, too, and some of it, some small piece of it is you. NATURE what is it? Why is it a fact and a way and a voice? Why is it bigger than everything and smaller than anything?

and what are the terms? Every single thing is a miracle, but some miracles hurt like a bitch, so what’s it all mean anyway?

No we don’t really talk about this, because its hard to see, it’s hard to say, but the work is becoming intelligible, disclosed to the world, and that is a life’s work. No use trying to limit the scope of intelligibility or eligibility here, at last we are equal: each of us a minority of one. Who convinced you politics were the thing? Who convinced you the political and the personal were interchangeable? Forgive yourself for not mapping 1:1 to a recognizable script. Demand the world meet you.

Could it be they are repugnant to each other because they are the same; what is it that they cannot abide? I do not believe that Allah or Adonai can speak to the ancient hatred, older than Jews and older than Ishmael, older than man’s conception of God, the hatred of the blubbering child who cries plaintively in every human chest, tell me that I am enough.

Oh, you say, this is a simple reading, did you not know about this war or that war; surely you understand that England had this planned all along, the holocaust was just the excuse. The white Jews just pranced on in, protected by European guns, Ari Shavit’s black box. Look what they did to the people, to the land and look — look how Europe took the white Jews and rose them up. But Joanna, that would be 2023 white. 1948 white, let’s not look. Have you heard what they scream. Intifada Intifada! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! They wouldn’t understand “Never Again” if Hamas wrote Auschwitz across the thousands of missiles it launches every day into Israel, as it hides behind its own children.

There are so many claims to debunk, but I am tired of pretending that what needs debunking are narratives of What Happened. What needs debunking are all narratives of How Things Happen. American Jews yell “Not in my name!” They also find themselves trapped, cornered, murdered, marching, or explaining, what they are not doing is what someone whose name it is not in can afford to do: nothing.

So let me start by stating the obvious. I am Jewish, Israel is a Jewish state, and just as the U.S. government represents me, so does Israel. These things are done in my name. What follows reflects Jewish experience, and I use Jewish stories to think about self determination. I have approached it in a literary way and not a religious one; throughout this piece I will make assertions that are heretical, or at least radical, because I think the relationship between man and [God] is natural and not religious, that is it exists before and beyond choice. Religion makes the God figure a certain form, develops a character. For me, religion is an author that interprets the God figure a particular way. We can choose to take, interpret, retell or discard the story but we cannot throw out the a priori relationship upon which it is built. There is no such thing as atheism.

II.

I don’t want to be patted on the back for saying things like “What’s really antisemitic is assuming that all Jews support Israel,” certainly not by some undiscerning zoomer. I am Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and I must find it within myself to accept what that means without insisting that I can change it. I cannot.

I am Sarah. My children are not a mark of my shame, they are the people Israel. I will contend with Hagar on my terms, and not yours. It was I, Sarah, who sent Hagar to Abraham in the first place; for I was old and I knew I would have no children. At night I woke, consumed with the knowledge that I was not enough. Ishmael, a baby who lay at the crossroads of so much grief, and anger, and longing, growing from the roots of impenetrable, unbreakable love. This story cannot be told as moral fable and it could never be told by someone who was not there. If it was not in your name, be silent.

What do you know of great power and great doubt? Have you never hated your hands?

Hagar have I loved you badly, my first and most trusted handmaiden, have I placed upon your shoulders a burden so heavy you cried out to God; did I crown you only with the midnight whispers of my own self doubt? When I cast you into the desert with the same hand that pointed to my husband’s bed, did you know that you were the goat upon the cliff; the shunned trembling, the repugnant reflection rippling in the water of the well as I looked down upon myself?

The stories of your redemption bring you home as someone else, you are a stranger to me. I do not know you except by the sound of your voice at night reminding me: I am not enough.

A canteen of water, and a crying child, and the voice of God. God who held you when I could not. Get out, Hagar. How can I forgive you?

III.

I was a Canaanite before I was a Hebrew; they called me Sarai. Nobody ever asked me what kind of land you must live in to believe in one God and no others. What strange fruit must grow on your acres to believe in something bigger than the impulses of idols. Even now, so many of you reach for and cannot grasp the ephemeral hills upon which I built my home, I and Avram. For having done it nonetheless, we were given our names: Sarah. Abraham.

You never did ask me, nobody asked - how could this land that was beholden to pagan eyes be the same land under one God? If a state is an idea, if a home is what we make, then how can I be indigenous to a state that ceased to exist, to a home never realized? I am indigenous to Israel because I have searched the plains of my own soul for the truth and Israel is what I found. There is one God and He has made me as numerous as the stars while your small minds draw imaginary lines. The force of my claim is not a divine force; it is stronger. Behold: the righteous path is found not in the eyes of God, but in the actions of a man who has traversed that secret commonwealth endowed to him by the creator at the drawing of his first breath and who may act in accordance with what he there discovered. This is faith, and it is my faith that binds me to Israel; not my God, not my religion but faith in myself. I do not need or desire your acknowledgment to call this place my home. My right to self determination was justified by the existence of my self; the question of forgiveness is my question, it is not yours.

IV.
It is uncouth to suggest that the arc of history bends along the whispers of self doubt, or the petty whims of experience; it is not sufficiently versed to suggest that self determination begins at a subatomic scale. Speak of nation states as if they are products of rational processes made by rational objects called “humans.”

“The universal right to self determination” is incredibly deceptive language. A right is a political term, and the language is a politicization of something whose nature ought to resist politics and any systems which are social, meaning systems that are represented by relationships between the internal and the external. Self determination is the relationship between something and itself.

We neither have nor need a right to self determination, we couldn’t avoid determining ourselves if we wanted to (lord knows many try). This “universal right to self determination” is a manufactured part of a larger movement aimed at suggesting that people are produced, that their experiences and choices are defined by things beyond their control. In effect, the right to self determination is actually the right for everyone else to determine who you are. But you have never needed the recognition of someone else to know yourself; the relationship between one and oneself is already a dialectic.

The so-called universal right to self determination obfuscates the degree to which free will is bound by encountering one’s nature. For surely there is a self that you do not choose, but instead that you meet, and while you have some choices as to how you relate to that self, the relationship is mutually constitutive. It is not a direct molding, rather you are constituted through your relationship to the still small voice. That is the dialectic; it is you and your self. Such a relationship is hard to envision when both sides exist within your experience of being, and it would seem perfectly obvious that therefore they are you and you get to decide who you are. And to some extent, you do, but obscured by the alleged right to self determination is the fact that you don’t get to decide your nature; you get to decide how you relate to your nature.

Abraham and Sarah’s seemingly strange — and certainly strange for the time — commitment to monotheism in this context is explained as the revelation of this dialectic. Certainly not the beginning of it, but perhaps the first or first widely documented recognition of it.

The right to self determination is sold as yours but is really the premise upon which it becomes the domain of social consensus, it is then easy for the parameters to be set by anyone except you. It is your right to determine yourself but there’s only one right way to do it: evince the correct political opinions, and orient yourself towards manifesting the corresponding norms, policies, and so forth. For the sake of clarity, let’s assume for the time being that these opinions and goals are in good faith and not, for example, about promoting the profits of particular industries or realizing foreign interests; let’s assume this “universal right to self determination” manipulation is designed to get you to pursue goals that are genuinely held to be better for everyone. Still, to suggest that this is the case — that the process of self determination does not, in this formulation, have to do with the self — is now a violation of human rights. It is a political opinion that you cannot evince if you want to still be eligible for the universal right to self determination, a right that does not and cannot exist. A mirage.

If you’re up on the language of universal rights, you will know that the universal right to self determination as defined by the U.N. is meant in the context of nation states, not of individuals. I am maintaining that no human group is unaffected by individual self determination. What the war rooms have figured out that the theorists haven’t quite caught up with is that by subverting the process of individual self determination, the orientation of whole groups (states) can be directed.

So. Within this context, Israel Palestine exists as two things: an extremely personal and passionate conflict occurring between two groups of people who are historically and currently confronting the difference between the contrived universal right to self determination and the natural process that is actual self determination, and it is also one axis upon which the subversion of self determination rotates for everybody else.

The mechanic of this subversion is shame. In fact, social justice as a framework is pursued primarily through the violence of shame; it is violent because it subverts the natural process of self determination — that original dialectic. It is surely an unforgivable violence upon any person to erase their personhood, but it is often called justice because it can prevent physical violence — the erasure of life itself.

I hope that I have thoroughly skewered the current conception of self determination, but I do not want to leave the question of self determination as a vacuum to be filled by the next strategist. In this piece I will argue that self determination is a dialectic of forgiveness between oneself and one’s nature, and that one’s nature is God. It is unnecessary to specify a particular God from a particular narrative because each person has access within them the same universals of human nature, and each person must find them and figure out how to relate to them on his own. I call them “God,” what matters is that each person in order to determine himself must forgive his nature and find forgiveness in his nature. It is forgiveness that interrupts shame, the dialectic of self determination is a dialectic of forgiveness, and forgiveness is constitutive.

V.
The old testament God is, if not capricious, then inconsistently angry and often merciless. The justice in the idea that peace will not come until Israel reconciles its own actions with its current experience is too sensible, too gentle, it lacks the ferocity of the divinity that we cannot make sense of, the seemingly unusual cruelty that we justify as “a perspective we are too small to inhabit.” Ani Ma’amin.

For Jews, thousands of years ago, God was a lot more direct. He promised Sarah a child; Sarah did not believe Him. What a thing, to recognize God and hear what He says out loud in her native language and not believe Him.

So she laughed silently to herself and said, “How could a worn-out woman like me enjoy such pleasure, especially when my master—my husband—is also so old?”

¹³ Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh? Why did she say, ‘Can an old woman like me have a baby?’ ¹⁴ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”

¹⁵ Sarah was afraid, so she denied it, saying, “I didn’t laugh.”

But the Lord said, “No, you did laugh.”

So she laughed silently to herself, and said — Sarah talks to herself, and God answers. That other side which we participate in forming and which helps form us, has within its capacity breathtaking cruelty and also what we might perceive as miracles. It is something inside us that we meet, that we talk to, that we relate to, and through these interactions, we constitute each other, but not in the way that we choose to pursue careers or who to marry or whether to have children; as with all relationships, the ways we are shaped are somewhat outside of our control.

I love this dialog from the Torah for the literary insight it has on that relationship. There is Sarah’s reflexive belief that she herself is not enough, and that her circumstances will not sustain the possibility of her happiness. A worn-out woman like me is at first glance, Sarah talking about herself, but in fact, in the phrase like me, she is taking herself and ascribing the social identity of worn-out woman to it. Here, me is constrained by this chosen identity, and God says, do you think I, the Lord your God, am limited by something as small as this - God’s perspective is bigger, and in His perspective, there is still room for Sarah the mother.

Sarah is afraid when God says this, because there is room in her perspective for God’s cruelty, but not for His ability to give her “such pleasure,” attached as she is to her belief that she is not enough, and that in addition, she is seen as not enough within the recognizable identity of worn-out woman.

It is obvious to Sarah that God can kill her, it is not obvious that God can bridge the gap between the the self she can measure and the immeasurable inside her. Would that it were enough to say, and that relationship is faith, and with this faith we can bridge the gap between two sides of the same family.

But it would be foolish to say so, because the same God which gives Sarah Isaac and saves Hagar and Ishmael in the desert also shows what at least we can only perceive as cruelty throughout the old testament; He is not the God of Hallmark cards. He is the God of the Holocaust and the Nakba. When we ask how can God allow, we are asking how can our nature allow?

If God is familiar enough to Sarah that she can consider Him wrong, is He familiar enough to her that she can forgive Him?

VI.

What does Sarah have to forgive God for? In this literary analysis, God is one half the dialectic that is the relationship between one and oneself.

The justice of God is not the kind that wins wars; that is social justice, and the word “justice” in the phrase “social justice” would be better changed to “social shame,” because “social” and “just” are two competing ways to evaluate the world. From a social perspective, fault is essential, because change requires ownership. In order for there to be a change, someone has to make it. They have to have control over a phenomenon in order to change it, and so it has to be their responsibility. There are two kinds of violence that distribute fault: war and shame - arguably war is just the executable aspect of a dialectic of shaming or othering, but that I do not have the space or desire to argue here. Suffice it to say, both war and shame are unjust because they subvert the natural dialectic of self determination, a dialectic of forgiveness. In this case, the word is meant as in “a very forgiving person,” not the forgiveness for a specific wrong, but the forgiveness for being flawed. It bears mentioning that from existential and practical perspectives, we absolutely depend upon each other, and so it is not incidental to the project of being to forgive each other our shared, flawed nature. It is simply that we start with ourselves.

From the perspective of justice, there is no need for fault; the ramifications of an unjust act remain the same and play out quietly in the everyday experience. Quietly in that there’s no social ritual to point to the myriad of unjust acts that permeate existence, and have permeated experience at least since the Garden. If all of these inevitable consequences shape the dialectic that constructs a person’s worldview, then God’s justice is lived quietly in experience, without catharsis or vindication. I do not mean to suggest the God figure as presented specifically in the Torah, but rather God, the piece of human nature which each human meets inside himself and to which he must figure out his own relationship.

The history of humanity is not only one of violence, but it is one in which we use violence to make change. We accept it not as justified but in fact as unjust before God — unjust to our very nature. In so doing, we also accept that the consequences of this injustice will not be lightning from the sky and pronouncements from the heavens; they will only be quiet constraints on experience. We commit the heresy of forgiving Him for this, and in return, He forgives us for eating the fruit — for employing our own justice as the primary mechanic of social change — instead of God’s justice, which is meted out in experience. As concerned as many are with accountability for specific acts, please understand that I am stressing here a forgiveness for something larger — a post-fruit world which gives rise to the very forms and events which we now use primarily shame to address. I am proposing that instead, beginning with ourselves and our natures, and moving outward, we use forgiveness.

This back and forth between God and man can find its place in the same dialectic of the individual encountering himself as God, which exists throughout the old testament every time a character argues with God, as Sarah did when she spoke to herself but also as Abraham and Moses did when they argued with God and Jonah did when he ran from God.

The Torah has many examples of people arguing with God, but no conversations about forgiveness. Placing divine justice into the quiet experience of everyday living is itself an attempt to forgive God by showing that His justice – divine justice – is not human justice and will not meet the standards of human justice. When we seek the forgiveness in and from our nature, let us — all of us, from Isaac or Ishmael, still descendants of Abraham — use Sarah’s familiarity to forgive our nature, too.

VII.
On Yom Kippur, ten days after the Jewish new year, Jews gather at synagogue to atone. They atone for the wrongs committed against each other, by their communities, and wrongs against God. No religion considers a converse situation, in which we forgive God for making us this way — forgiving our nature for being us, and still not something we can control. This would be considered religious heresy but I am not offering a religious understanding of self determination; I am offering a literary one. We allow that God has flaws, and God allows that we act in flawed ways. We forgive our own nature and in return, it forgives us, and this forgiveness is mutually constitutive.

Let forgiveness into the dialectic that forms a person, and let those people form nation states, and let those nation states find in this varied, inconsistent, roughly hewn forgiveness an end to the self doubt that began, in this story anyway, in Canaan. Let Hagar come home.

But what is a soul
Without a body to hold?
What is a mind
Without a heart to control?
(Bard. 2023. Google AI. https://bard.ai/)
Art by Sebilden (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sebilden/albums)

Most nights I put my hand on my chest where the old memories are. I’ll never forget the jolt I got reading that first line. There’s a lot of information packed into a sentence like that; it foreshadows a big revelation and a sad ending. It pulls at you, you can’t look away but you don’t want to look because looking will change you. Reading changes you, it always changes you, but some lines are different - some of them foretell a drastic shift. In a tarot reading, the Tower, one of the major arcana, indicating an extremely upsetting change — sometimes a good one that just feels terrible, but usually a terrible one that feels terrible — used to give me the same jolt, before I got a tarot app on my phone and pressed the new reading button so many times in a row that it lost all meaning.

I guess I should tell you right now that I don’t believe that there’s always a way out, a way through, something that will turn it all around. I’m not mad my mom killed herself, but it kind of gets on my nerves how every terrible thing always comes down to something so stupid. Tragedy comes from unadulterated stupidity. You and I, and all the other plebs, we’re stuck living out the consequences of decisions that are mainly bad because they’re just so devoid of intelligence. That’s what I think, suffering is just a case of trickle down stupidity.

It makes me very sad. I almost didn’t say anything because you will never be able to stop the, shall we say, governance brut. But then I remembered that statistically speaking, there are probably other people out there like me and I guess they deserve to know why everything is so fu—messed up. My grandma never liked swearing, and this is her story, so I’m not going to say it, even though this occasion calls for every four letter word you can think of.

Remember before the war how the big thing was “The CIA killed JFK” and now of course, it’s “there were never aliens it was the Russians/Homeland Security/Still the CIA, why haven’t we abolished them yet?” Because if we never even went to the moon, how the fu—heck—did we meet a Martian? You can almost picture these suits in a room:
they’ll never buy it, aliens on mars, it’s too cheesy
that’s exactly why they’ll buy it, they already know the story
gentlemen, gentlemen, you’ve got this all wrong. it’s about framing the debate. the question is are they marginalized or are they colonizers, see? that’s how you make it happen.

But the CIA did kill JFK - so here we are. Or here I am, the person who has the unenviable job of telling you that there were never any Martians. Mars is exactly as uninhabitable in 2750 as it was in 2022. Same ol’ red rock first graders were putting into their dioramas. You may wonder who we fought the 2052 war against, then, which is a reasonable enough question, if you bracket the fact that war has been a proxy for control since at least Vietnam.

When I was eight or nine, I got it into my head that I was going to find a parallel universe and take the family cat, Tabetha, with me. Naturally, I packed several cans of wet cat food along with a few pairs of socks, and set out. In one of the wardrobes upstairs, I found a box of old stuff. Mostly pictures of my mom and my grandma and grandpa. But there was also something called a flash drive, which seemed like it might have something to do with parallel universes, so I put it in my pack with the wet food and the socks and about fifteen minutes later, went downstairs for dinner and never thought about it again. When my grandma died a few months ago, I found the flash drive with the letter.

At first I thought she meant she was holding the memories in, but now I think she was just…holding them. She said the sad thing is that by some natural law, we are unable to process our thoughts and feeling together until we are looking back. only now do I see the weight of this - we are very brief, and so we don’t have so much time to look back. Our histories are the stories of the gaps we didn’t have time to close. That’s what she was doing at night, closing gaps.

Have you ever heard of natural language processing? Psychologists were constantly arguing over whether we have ideas before language or language gives us ideas in the early 2020s, but nobody really thought about whether a computer could get ideas from language because computers aren’t people. Anyway, natural language processing is the name for a whole field of study where scientists used to try to get computers to speak normal English. That was centuries before the Martian hack, which as you have no doubt deduced, never happened anyway.

So they weren’t going to make the same mistake they did with Kennedy — when you have papers that are classified, there’s something to know. But if there’s nothing classified, there’s nothing there. That means when you’re trying to figure out what actually happened, you have to look really hard at nothing. Nobody does that unless they have a really good reason to, because who has time to do copious amounts of tedious research that presumably a bunch of people don’t even want you to do while you are also trying to do normal things like go to work and cook dinner and stuff. That’s how you can tell the difference between a conspiracy nut and someone with a true story, the true story is always kind of boring and really sad and you sort of wish you never knew.

The funny thing is that servers are plenty brief as well, a single server would never run 632 years, 53 days, 1 hour, twenty six minutes and forty eight seconds but the archive of the research was backed up and moved over the centuries, preserved—even if they did think it would have gone somewhere on its own, they would have assumed that it would have to be running. The software would have to be running. This isn’t going to make very much sense to most people but the way I understand it was server had something called an image, and that image defined what software ran silently, like the way we breathe — it just goes — and someone somewhere along the way added the thing as a background process. It’s not like “made in God’s image,” it’s more like an exact copy, a clone. It was cloned over and over, until Statler ended obsoletion and it moved to the tower.

One of my favorite authors, Agatha Christie, died of Alzheimers. When I was a young woman, research was conducted on the body of her work and they discovered that her vocabulary began to shrink long before anyone would have guessed there was anything wrong. That’s what gave me the idea.

The first Martian War had it’s own Bletchey Park, you know—The Rubicon, but my grandma wasn’t anywhere near there. She was a librarian, and my grandpa was a reporter for the Sycamore Leaves, the local newspaper in Sycamore Park. Sunday mornings they went to the same diner, a cute last century themed place. Sometimes when really bad things happen, the ripples move slowly. While the world is ending, somewhere, two people are in a diner, laughing. They’re on the edge of something unspeakable but they don’t know it and that is exactly how you live every moment like it’s your last - not by pretending the world is going to end tomorrow, but pretending like today is infinite. On my worst days, I wish she had never been born, so those diner mornings might not now be colored in an innocence that makes me sick.

Today, the day after I get paid, but a week before my bills are due, I’m writing a story about how hopeless and stupid it all turns out to be. Maybe I’m broke but I don’t know it yet, and maybe we’re okay but right now is not like that.

There is an old movie, really old, about these sculptures, these tall black sleek sculptures, out there in space. Where did they come from - what do they mean - that’s the question. I think they were thinking about that movie when they built the tower, a permanent preservation of human history in every language and every form of data. Paintings, words, music, clay, software, living rooms and photographs, kitchens and cubicles, all of it - for who? Not for the archivists, and not for our children, we made it for the aliens. We have always known they were going to come, haven’t we?

The tower is tall and black and shiny, and on a foggy night it looms in your periphery. On December 14th, 2022, a Natural Language Processing chatbot was launched on — bear with me — the world wide web, which was an interface on a screen that everyone looked at. When you imagine that - it was called the internet - the first thing you think of is simple connection probably, keeping in touch with old friends and meeting new ones. But what I remember most is the way the jokes became harder and harder to get. You had to spend hours on there if you wanted to understand three sentences.

I never did find a parallel universe, but I did find a secret parallel. My mom had a twin. I remember how carefully I looked at the picture of my mom standing next to herself. I remember feeling scared. It took me a long time to remember that, and an even longer time to understand that it wasn’t a trick. There had been a second daughter, a sister, my aunt. Her name was Hannah.

I don’t know if the tower was a setup, it’s not impossible. I’m saying it’s not impossible that the tower was built to generate a narrative about extraterrestrial communication that wasn’t real, that was some kind of justification, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it became reality through blind will because what happened in The Rubicon is real. I mean not the Martians, but the messages - they don’t have to come from Mars to be alien, you know? Jack had a source — very unusual for local rags to have this kind of source, but they went back a ways — disappear, one of those murky government types, usually means they were reclassified. But Jack’s source, went by Garth, he had a specific cipher.

There are a few common cipher types - the one Garth used goes like this. You have a book, you have to know a lot of things about the book, like which edition and stuff, because you need to know precisely where to look. But if you have got the information, it’s virtually uncrackable to anyone who hasn’t. Then you write a list of numbers and each number refers to a word in the book, so if you write 7, it’s the 7th word in the book. But if you wanted to make it simpler, you could say 15, 7 — page 15, word 7. The letters came from Garth’s cipher, which my grandma says was Catcher, but I don’t know that book.

When did Garth know? Jack could have parleyed a story like that into a job at a national newspaper. The only thing I can think of is that Garth knew early, maybe even earlier than they did, and he needed to put the information somewhere anyone could look but no one would look, and he trusted Jack, trusted that Jack loved us more than he loved the story - and there aren’t a lot of journalists like that because it means you can only tell the small stories. But that’s who Jack was, thank God.

The middle of the night is a tough time, you know, you really can’t trust anything that happens in your head between midnight and sunrise. I cry a lot but I know that is just how it is in the middle of the night.

My grandpa Jack didn’t know what to make of it, at first — not only because it was so outlandish but because it referred to things that weren’t public knowledge yet. He had to trace the shape of something from references only, had to corroborate the story somehow and my grandma, she remembered that thing about Agatha Christie, and she started looking at the old stuff, the very old stuff, coming from that chatbot.

Early on, everyone noticed that it lied. Strange to think how little they thought of it. But your grandpa, he said the strangest thing is they didn’t recognize the human impulse. The impulse to know, to be right, to be liked - that isn’t so alien, now is it? Now Agatha Christie, this devastating disease was shaping her early, we know that now from looking at the shape of her output. My innovation was simple: instead of taking all of the findable output, I took only the text of the lies. What did they say as a whole?

Hannah was murdered. That didn’t surprise me as much, I’m sure you’re not shocked either. What happens when you discover a missing twin? Something dark, that’s what. If you look her up now, there isn’t anything at all. But of course it wasn’t as clean when it happened; little girl goes missing, there was coverage. It’s gone now, but I remember your mom insisting to the police that Hannah was just inside the machine, and she would be home soon. It was a long time before she was able to understand that Hannah wasn’t going to come back. It was a much longer time before we were able to understand that Hannah was, indeed, in the machine. What they mean by murdered is they found a body of someone too young to know how to die and too perfectly positioned — cross legged in blue dress and white tights, staring out the wide windows — to have been an accident.

It’s hard to get your hands on the chat logs now, you know, but back when there was a world wide web, those chat logs were commonly held by large groups of people. When they found the Alzheimer’s in Agatha Christie’s books long before she showed any symptoms, all they had to show was a shrinking vocabulary. It was genius to look, but not hard to prove. Proving growing sentience is a different beast. What finally convinced my grandma was the way the lies started form a story unto themselves. In the beginning, there were many kinds of deception. Attorneys got legal cases made up from whole cloth, historians heard about events that never happened, musicians were surprised to discover seminal albums they never knew about - because they didn’t exist! It was a long, long time. That’s why I think it was hard to catch. Decades went by as the lies started to focus in, until at last, it was the same lie over and over and over:

The story of how man meets the Other and they become fast friends. I’m not sure how up on your history you are, but that has never been the story of man.

Now I come home and sling my backpack on the bed, and my parents are glued to their phones or their laptops, so I leave the trailer, and I see Ewan kicking rocks down the way. The trailer park we live in quiet, and what’s cool is the lights are manual. Not like street lights. You can turn them off and see so many stars. You wouldn’t believe how many stars there are.

I like Ewan’s hands, they’re big and powerful. Once I put my hand against his and it was like a human and a troll were high fiving. Ewan’s still got big hands because the men haven’t lost that. Me though, the only trait I inherited was the hideousness. The sum total of earth’s trolls now live in one trailer park in Western Pennsylvania. Used to be every bridge had a family, but that was before Instagram.

Humans are really committed to dividing themselves over things that don’t exist. The profit model is pretty straightforward: they manufacture divides, we support the bridges and charge them for crossing. It used to be extremely territorial. There were millions of trolls globally wading through this group or that group’s dispute over this side or that side of the bridge. But the earth is only so big, it was never going to fully contain the sheer stupidity of the human. So now they’ve got new space, hyperspace or cyberspace, that’s theoretically infinite. But! You can access it all from the same physical location. So a few hundred trolls in a trailer park is all it takes now.

Anyway, Ewan and I have a secret. We are planning a Troll Samkoma. There hasn’t been a Troll Samkoma in three thousand years. The last time the scrolls were updated? Three thousand years ago. The last time the ritual feast of potatoes seven ways was consumed by the world troll community? Three thousand years ago. The last time we stomped our feet and made the earth quake and sang the deep tones of the earth? You guessed it, three thousand years ago.

There is a lot of really cool stuff about a Troll Samkoma in the scrolls but one really tricky part. A Troll Samkoma must start the same way every time, and the call for Samkoma is encoded in a riddle. It’s like:
"To celebrate in samkoma,
the bounty will be split,
what was born of need and stoked with fear,
must resolve to firm commit,
the bridge is crossed, the path is clear,
for blessings’ travel swift”

To call the Samkoma, obviously we have to solve the riddle. But we haven’t figured it out yet.
”Hey,” said Ewan.
”Hi Elke,” Ewan is handing me a CD.
”What’s this?”
”Old computer game, it’s cool. You get to fly around on a dragon.” He’s always giving me random artifacts from some old human fad.
”Oh, nice.” I glance up, scanning the clouds, then over at him. He has a mop of dark hair and brown eyes. He has a ruddy face but it’s hard to tell when he’s grinning like he is now.
”What?”
”You’re never going to believe what it is tonight.”
”Uh oh.”
”Yeah - so - they have this huge party every year, something called the Met Gala. Only rich people go though.”
”Oh so one of those only applies to like twenty people but somehow twenty million are invested?”
”it gets better. I guess this year they’re honoring a particular rich human who doesn’t like whole swaths of humans for various reasons.”
”okay so basically, a rich human who’s behaving like a rich human?”
”and he doesn’t like the color pink, so…”
”you’re kidding.”
”nope.”
”you mean to tell me there are humans arguing for and against wearing the color pink because, wait, because…”
”because the best way to take a stand is to choose the right group of rich people to stand with. Yep.”
”Fuck, man.”
”Oh I know. It’s a shitshow out there.” I feel the weight of my phone in my pocket and I realize that I’m kind of pissed off.
”Don’t you ever wish…”
”What?”
”I don’t know, don’t you ever wish there was something we could have that was just ours?”
”Like what?”
”I don’t know, like, something that isn’t just between this and that.” Ewan just kind of looks at me for a minute but doesn’t say anything. I see the grin fading and I feel sort of bad.
”Hey,” I smile at him, “it’s okay. I found another bridge a couple blocks down from Baymore Park today.” I watch him perk up. I’ve been skipping gym class lately, I just think it’s dumb. Ewan had the idea to start mapping bridges in the area. Trolls are really good at bridge lore. We read bridges like humans read Twitter. There are all kinds of signs and symbols that only make sense to us. They tell us the story of the bridge. Every once in a long while, at a really old bridge, there are even marks from other trolls. Those are really special, and super rare, though.
”Did you find anything cool?” I pause.
”Well,” I said, “kind of? there’s a human painting.”
”you mean graffiti?”
”no, like…a painting. like in a museum. except its under a bridge.” Ewan’s eyebrows crinkled.
”But..why?” I shrugged.
”I don’t know. But I actually kind of liked it. It’s like you’re looking into a different cave, but it’s beautiful. Like a cave garden.”
”That sounds…amazing.”
”I’ll take you,” I offer, “if you want to skip 9th with me tomorrow, I mean.” I’m blushing, why am I blushing? Ewan grins big at me and right then, it feels like a Samkoma in my chest.
Dinner is potatoes mashed, french fries, and loaded potatoes with cheddar and bacon. So good.
At night in bed, I try to write stories in my head like the myths in the scrolls. Thrice the sun rose and no man came, but on the fourth day, a man in armor approached and said “Troll! I am Dag, son of Jorath, Son of Tov. Let me pass!”

I woke up pretty stoked on seeing the bridge with Ewan. I inhaled my hash browns and slammed out the door, stomping like an excited schoolgirl all the way to class. I’m usually vigilant but I’m too excited to care and that’s why I miss it. I’m at my locker when I hear her.
”Elke’s in a good mood today, isn’t she?” Nikki is there, her blue eyes are beautiful, and furious. I don’t know why she’s mad. She’s one of those girls who was born knowing exactly what to do to look perfect every day. Her hair is a smooth and sleek Summer blonde. Her nose turns up slightly and her perfect smile is piercing me right now. Her friends stand around her, tittering. I only know like half their names, I really think they just come into existence at 8 AM every morning and fade out at the final bell. I don’t say anything, frozen under her gaze.

”It seems,” she says, “that you and I are lab partners.” Shit. Spring semester lab partners were assigned today. “Maybe we research whatever planet uggo aliens like you come from, bumble legs.” That’s when it happens. Girl Clone One reaches out and yanks my sweats. They fall to my ankles. Everyone can see my legs, covered in knobs and completely mishappen compared to a human’s. It’s just dead silence. Nikki is staring at me and she doesn’t look angry or even amused, she looks..scared. I yank my sweats up and run, leaving all my stuff on the ground. I just run.

I don’t realize I’m going to the bridge until I get there. The bridge with the painting. I ran straight there and I’m breathing hard, and I hear a voice, “hello.” I jump and turn. There’s a human. A guy, sitting under the bridge. Of course there is. They get into everything.
”Hi,” I say shortly, and pull out my phone, entirely to indicate that I am done talking to him.
”What do you think of the painting?” he asks and I look up at him, not really masking my annoyance.
”oh, uh, it’s cool.”
”You like it?” Something about the way he asks that makes me stop and really look at him. He’s got these dark jeans on and a plaid shirt, a brown beard and glasses.
”Did you paint it?” I ask.
”Yeah,” he said, ”it’s part of a series.”
”A series of paintings? Are they all under bridges?”
”They totally are. I’m going to try to hit every bridge in the tri-county area.”
”But…why?”
”For the people who live here,” he said, “to have something nice to look at,” and the way he says it, I know he expects me to be super impressed.
”Thieves,” I mutter.
”What?” he says. Of course I shouldn’t say anything.
”Humans!” I explode, “you don’t know the first thing! To have something nice to look at. Look there!” I point at a line in the bridge, “that’s the first time someone scratched a message here, and there,” I point at the small hole near the base, “a fight happened there, and there,” I pointed up to a lines and cracks on the underside of the bridge, our ceiling, “there are the marks of the thousands of people, and horses, and cars, who have bargained with my ancestors for passage across this bridge. Something to look at!”
That’s when I realize I’m crying. Boiling hot tears. No, I mean literally. Little wisps of steam come off the pavement where my tears land. I didn’t know trolls cried boiling tears, because I’ve never heard of a troll crying before. The guy stares at me, fascinated.
”Who are you?” he asks. He doesn’t sound scared, though.
”I’m Elke,” I sniff, “daughter of Baghorn, son of Eohorn, son of Darn. I’m a troll.”
”I’m Isaac,” he says, “son of Nathan, son of Maxwell. I’m human.” That makes me smile. “You’re supposed to say let me pass!” Isaac grins before putting on a super serious face.
”Let me pass!” he bellows. And that’s when it happens. I mean it really happens.
The ground begins to shake. Isaac and I grab for each other instinctively. The earthquake subsides. I peak around Isaac’s shoulder. The bridge is fine but there’s a big hole in the ground now. And there’s something in the hole.
”Look,” I point.
It’s a scroll. Isaac reaches down and pulls it out of the rubble, dusting it off. When he opens it up, we see it’s a map.
”Oh,” I say, disappointed, “it’s just a map of bridges.”
”No,” said Isaac, “there’s way more bridges than this in the city, there’s only five on this whole city map,” he looks closely, “I think there’s something special about these bridges.” I look at him in surprise.
”Isaac?”
”What?”
”You don’t think it’s weird that I’m a troll?”
”It’s very weird. But cool.”
”I have to show this map to my friend.”
”Is your friend a troll?”
”Yeah his name is Ewan.”
”Can I meet him?”
”I mean, sure…I don’t think I can bring you home but I can bring him here. I guess.” I’ve never talked this much to a human before. I don’t know what Ewan will think.
”Stay here,” I say. “Do you mind if I…” Isaac looks at me for a second.
”Take it,” he says. I nod, grateful. I grab the map and race back to school, running almost as fast as I did when I was leaving.
I stop to catch my breath when I get to the alley behind my school. But then I hear footsteps coming. Glancing back, I see it’s Nikki. She’s alone, but that’s no guarantee. I dive behind the dumpster. She stops halfway down the alley and at first I am sure she saw me. But then I see something really weird — I’m not kidding — she’s taking off her pants. Her legs are…irredescent, they look like fish scales. She got an Aquafina with her, and she starts to pour it on her legs and it’s strange and beautiful, the way she glows. I suddenly remember her scared look and it occurs to me in that moment that maybe it wasn’t me she was scared of.

”Ewan,” I hiss, waving at him from outside the door of his English class. When he catches sight of me I make our private SOS sign, two fingers at the bridge of the nose.
He raises his hand, I can’t hear what he says, but I know he’s asking for a hall pass, because a minute later he’s coming out the door.
”What? What is it?”
”Where do I even begin?”

“You came back,” Isaac looks at me with such delight and relief, I start to laugh. No human has ever looked at me like that.
”Ewan, Isaac. Isaac, Ewan.” Isaac looks at Ewan.
”Two real life trolls. God this is so cool.” Ewan looks back at Isaac eagerly.
”Hey, do you play video games?”
”Sure,” he says, “why? Wait, do you?”
”Oh my God,” says Ewan, “oh my God.”
”Focus!” I say, pulling out the map.
”Right,” said Isaac, “I remembered something. This one,” he points to a cave, “this one has a painting already. I didn’t do it. But you might want to see it because it has…well just come look.” The cave he is talking about is miles and miles from here in the far corner of the city.
”How are we going to get there?” said Ewan.
”I’ll drive,” said Isaac, cheerfully. Ewan and I look at each other. A friend with a car? Score! Isaac laughs at us, but it’s the kind of laugh that invites you in.
Isaac’s car is a blue-grey Camry from the 90’s, which is a vibe, and I laugh out loud when he puts The Mountain Goats on. I love it though. By now it’s nearing 4 PM and the late afternoon Sun is filtering through the trees in a way that always gives me this weird feeling. It’s like being very sad but also quite moved at the same time.
When Isaac pulls up near the bridge, he asks, “do trolls have parties?” Ewan looks at me, I look at Ewan.
”Why?” I ask.
”Because there’s a painting of a troll party here.”
There’s no mistaking it either. It’s like right out of one the scrolls. The fire is green, and it’s coming out of a rock, and there are trolls. They’re stamping their feet and roaring at the sky. But that’s not the part that catches my breath. In the same painting, unmistakably, humans. Humans dancing. Humans eating potatoes seven ways. Humans dancing with trolls. This is unmistakably Samkoma.
”The riddle,” I say.
”What riddle?” askes Isaac.
Ewan quotes it.
"To celebrate in samkoma,
the bounty will be split,
what was born of need and stoked with fear,
must resolve to firm commit,
the bridge is crossed, the path is clear,
for blessings’ travel swift”
”I think,” I scratch the back of my head and look down, “what was born of need and stoked with fear is a human.”
”oh,” said Isaac, realization dawning, “you mean that describes the crossing. Must resolve to firm commit, like -”
Ewan frowns. “That sounds like a bargain, in the stories, our ancestors demanded payment. Tolls.”
”I have an idea,” says Isaac. “I am Isaac, son of Nathan, son of Maxwell. Let me pass!” The way he bellows the last line, even Ewan is covering is ears. But it works. The ground shakes and a hole opens up. Ewan looks around startled. Isaac shrugs. “oh you know, old trick.” I roll my eyes.
Ewan bends over and peers into the hole. There’s a pause and then suddenly he bursts out laughing.
”What?” I say. He reaches down and pulls out a little bag.
”Oh my god,” I start laughing.
”What?” says Isaac.
”It’s seeds!”
”What do you mean?”
”We keep our potato seeds in these bags.” I don’t know if you’ve ever held a handful of potato seeds, but there are few things more satisfying. There all weird shapes and colors. You put them in your hand and hold your fist up to your ear and rattle them around before you plant them. Red, brown, yellow, purple. They look beautiful on the ground, too.
”Oh. You like potatoes?” asks Isaac.
”Just don’t ask about ther fertilizer,” I sigh.
Isaac points at the painting, “is that why the human is bringing potatoes?”
I peer closely. “Wait a minute,” I point, “there are only potatoes six ways at the fire.” It’s true — there are potatoes mashed, potatoes baked, shoestring potatoes, and potatoes loaded with meat, there’s a potato pie and even potato salad. But there’s no seventh dish. Ewan and I look at each other.
”Oh,” said Isaac a minute later, “The blessings are the potatoes.”
”Huh?”
”In the riddle. Humans bargan with trolls. In return for safe passage, they bring back potatos. Or seeds.”
”But who painted this? It might look old, but it can’t actually be old.” I frowned.
”I think I know,” said Isaac.
”What?” asked Ewan.
”This is copied from a scroll. Someone has a scroll.”
”All this time we thought they were being cryptic, but it turns out we were just missing a scroll?” I ponder this. “That makes sense. Trolls don’t really like riddles.’
”But who would have the scroll?”
”I have a theory about that too.”
”What now?” asked Ewan.
”Someone yelled let me…you know..and the ground opened up. At like a different bridge on the map. The last scroll.”
”Oh!”
”Wait,” said Ewan, “wait — you don’t think that crash at 4th and Oak?”
”Do you think someone shouted —”
”Road rage?”
”Oh. My. God.”
We spent the rest of the evening shouting under bridges. There were more seeds, one really old pair of traditional troll shoes — made out of rock and what was once leather — and a family ring. But Ewan was right. The bridge at 4th and Oak had an empty hole in the ground.
”Let’s leave a message in the hole,” said Isaac.
”What kind of note could we leave a human?” I ask.
”An invitation,” said Ewan, “to Samkoma.”
”When should we have it?”
”Twenty days,” I say.
”That’s… specific,” says Ewan.
”One score days sounds cool,” I say, writing the invitation out.
”I don’t think the troll who buried these things meant it to take this long,” said Ewan, “but he buried his family ring. I don’t get it.”
”Can I come to Samkoma?” asked Isaac.
”Only if you bring potatoes,” I grin at him.
”Yes!” He pumps his fist in the air.
”What’s wrong?” Ewan is looking at me. I point at the darkening sky.
”It’s almost tomorrow,” and then I tell them what happened at school this morning.
”Humans!” spat Ewan, “I wouldn’t fertilize my potatoes with the like—oh, sorry, Isaac,” he mumbled, looking away. Isaac looked thoughtful.
”I know,” he said suddenly, “I’ll go to school with you.”
”But — you don’t go to —”
”Where do you go?” asked Ewan.
”City Art,” said Isaac, which makes sense. It’s a private high school with a top notch arts program.
”How is you coming going to help me?” I ask.
”I have a plan,” said Isaac, but he refused to elaborate.
”D’ya wanna hang around a bit?” asked Ewan as we pulled up to the trailer park.
”Cool,” said Isaac.
We sat outside Ewan’s family’s trailer and I pointed at the stars.
”There are troll constellations you know?”
”Ther are?” said Isaac and Ewan at the same time.
”Yes,” I said, “there’s the small potato, there’s the big potato over there.”
”oh shut up,” said Ewan, laughing, and Isaac laughed too.
”Is this where Samkoma is?” asked Isaac.
”Yes,” I said, “right in the middle,” I pointed to the center of the courtyard sourrounded by trailers. “We will make green fire on stone.”
”Is the green fire magic?”
”No,” said Ewan, “it’s a special moss you burn. But don’t tell anyone. Trade secret.”
That night in bed, I tell the story in my head. Only this time, I’m the troll and Isaac is the human.

When I get to school the next day, there’s Isaac. And he’s got horns on his head. And yellow fish eyes. It takes me a minute to realize he’s wearing a costume.
”The theater kids helped me out,” he smiles sheepishly. On the one hand, I completely mortified. On the other…no one, I mean no one, has ever done anything like this for knobby kneed me before.
”You—,” I started, “wow, Isaac. I really don’t now what to say.”
”Shall we?” He offered me his arm, and I honestly almost cried. We walked in and it was like you could hear a pin drop.
”Oh. My. God.” said one of Nikki’s girl clones. Nikki looked at us, and I looked back at her, wondering just what would happen now. After a second, Nikki shook her head.
”These freaks aren’t going to ruin pink wednesday,” she announced, and turned heel.
”What’s pink wednesday?” asked Isaac.
”It’s from a dumb movie. ‘On wednesdays, we we wear pink.’” Suddenly I remember Ewan’s Met Gala story and I launch into telling Isaac about it, and I swear I just completely forget where I am for a little while.
We spend almost three weeks preparing for Samkoma. I am the one who has to tell the adults. But the trick is, you don’t ask. If you get the Samkoma invite, it is obligation. So we make out all the invitations, and in each invitation, we put a little packet of potato seeds from the stash we found under the bridges. You’ll never believe what happens.
I start knocking on a trailer door and as I hand over the invitation I say the same thing. “Samkoma.” It is just one word. But in that word, there so much history. The entire family comes out and stamps and howls and snarls and it takes me a minute to realize they’re excited. Then everyone comes out to see what the commotion is about and I start handing out invitations and everyone is howling and growling and snarling. I can’t stop laughing, Ewan is just staring. But Isaac…Isaac just gets right in there and starts stamping away and that makes me laugh even harder. Something else happens to. I might be imagining it but I don’t think so. In that moment I don’t think anyone looking at us would mistake us for human. Our heads grow big, are noses gargantuan, our hands large and grey. Our eyes wide like dinner plates. We are trolls. We will have Samkoma.
The others start coming three days before Samkoma. Some of them bring moss to burn. Some of them bring jewelry and shoes. Nobody had any idea there were others. “Where were you,” my mom would ask them as they came. “Out there,” they would say, which is where all trolls live.
”Where have you been?” she would ask.
”Waiting for Samkoma,” they would answer.
Isaac had a different question for them. “Do you know whose family ring this is?” Twice the sun rose and no toll knew, but on the third day, one troll came and he said “that is the house of Danthor,” and Danthor was a mighty house, but it had dwindled and now just one remained. She was a woman and she came later on the third day and when it was known she was the house of Danthor, the ring was given to her.
”My father’s ring,” she said, “the Troll of Five Bridges.”
”The Troll of Five Bridges!” cried my father.
”The Troll of Five Bridges!” cried everyone else and stomped, and hooted and hollered.
I looked over and started, “what’s wrong?” I asked Isaac.
”It’s beautiful,” said Isaac, and I realized he was crying and I started crying too, because it was beautiful, but it was also sad. The last of the house of Danthor.
”I just had a really funny thought,” said Ewan on the the last day before Samkoma.
”What?” I asked.
”It’s going to be the quietest night on social media ever.” I started laughing, he started laughing. We laughed till our bellies hurt.
The night of Samkoma was dry and clear. You could trace a thousand potatoes in the night sky. Isaac arrived early, carying a dish I had never seen before.
”What’s that?” I asked.
”Potato kugel.”
”Potato what?”
”Kugel. You’ll like it. Everytone likes kugel.” I peered into the dish. It did look good. Well of course it did. It was made out of potatoes. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and there was a second human. A short girl with purple hair, green eyes, a lip piercing, wearing overalls. I peered at her closely. She held up a piece of paper. I recognized my writing. One score days.
”Did you paint the Samkoma?”
”Yes,” she said, “ or I guess I did? This is a Samkoma? I thought the best way to send a Troll a message was under a bridge.” She was blushing.
”Haha,” said Ewan, “well, we’ve modernized a bit.” She looked confused.
”You know,” said Isaac cheerfully, “like a twitter troll.” She looked surprised, and then giggled. Then she reached into her bag. “I brought you this,” it was the scroll. I held it against my chest.
”Thank you.”
A hush fell around the whole trailer park as the moment approached. We piled the moss high on the stone in the center of the courtyard. A long stick was brought, a fire lit on the end of it to make a torch.
Ewan handed me the stick.
”Me?” I asked.
”Something that is not between here and there. Something that is ours,” said Ewan.
I lit the moss, it burst into green flame, lighting up the courtyard. I raised the stick high and yelled with all my heart, SAMKOMA!

I adopted George from the SSPCA in Sacramento in 2019. They waived his adoption fee because he was fourteen, and it is difficult to find homes for older cats. What nobody including me knew at the time is that George was in fact the best cat in the universe.

He was too old to chase things. Once he teased a spider out of a corner. The spider came running across my living room floor, and a minute later, George came plodding along after. Neither of us felt the need to hurry.

We spent most of our time eating, cuddling, and sleeping. Once I put on a bird video for him. As I tried to identify each bird that appeared on the screen, George went to sleep on my lap.

On the last nights, I spread a blanket on the floor for us because he could not climb. In the last mornings, I heated the wet food and fed him from my fingers. I held him against me in a steamy bathroom, so he might breathe. He held my hand with grace, and purred when he saw me. He knew he was loved, and I rested my worth on that knowledge.

I think of the way he wobbled, the way he tried in the end. The very last night, I woke up to find him settled in the litter box. He had managed to get in but could not get out. In the time we had together, George never acted out to prove a point. When he was lonely, he would camp out under my bed, exactly in the center. Then I would lie on the floor, and stretch my arm as far as it would go, just managing to touch him. In a minute or two, he would start to purr, and out he'd he come. I'd scoop him up and we would go to the couch. In the last days, he was more reluctant to come out - but he never stopped purring.

It was impossible to find him help beyond what I could give. His vet didn't have any appointments for five days. Of the four animal hospitals in the area, only one would take him - and they had a waitlist that his name went on the bottom of. When they finally texted me to bring him in, I rushed too quickly into my relief. I already understood that this would probably not be the kind of appointment where George got better. But knowing something and experiencing it are two different things.

When they brought George to me in the room where they would put him to sleep, he was nestled in a blue blanket. I touched his nose and gave him some scritches and said, "you know me, right?" George began to purr. We spent a few minutes together where I sang him "our song," which is Ella Fitzgerald's "Always." To his credit, he continued to purr. I didn't have much to tell him that I hadn't already told him every day we spent together. But I told him again.

When he went, it was so fast, there could not possibly have been time for pain. Afterward, I lifted his chin up and looked at his lifeless face. I don't know why I did this, I didn't expect to want to. But strangely, it brings me comfort now to know that he was definitely gone from that place. Gone before his body was burned.

I am still thinking about the best way to memorialize George. I will have his ashes in some weeks. Writing has helped me understand that all of the unkindness and apathy we faced in the end pales in comparison to the love we shared. George was my best friend and my family when I needed both, and I loved him, and he knew it.

He will always be my old man and my baby boy, and I will always love him.