Handmaid's Tale

You sit there and you think about all the pieces that went missing. Like strings, the parts of the past connect back. Raise one hand and a million are caught on the delicate hairs of your arm. Spider's web.

Every day something is left behind. Even if it's just skin cells, or a chance of excitement, or an opportunity missed. Then the chances one takes leaves others unchosen, and those are webs, too. Until your skin droops and eyes grow weary and mind numb. Until you grow old and there is no part of you not weighed down by the sheer number of strings. All the choices and chances, conscious or otherwise, make a person old. Everyone grows old. That's why I don't believe in vampires. Vampires couldn't exist because they don't grow old, meaning they have no webs to weigh them down.

Then the web grows closer the tighter you shut your lips. The words gather up, build there, where no one can see. People walk around with secrets on their tongues like bittersweet candy. Some love it; love the thought that they know things no one else does. Some hate it, and spill the words on the ground like a wave of knowledge and gossip and secrets. The words sink in there. The earth eats them and where they encounter human skin, people eat them too. We live on words.

That's why censorship never works. People want to know. People always want to know, whether it's something damning or liberating or superfluous. Every bit of info is hoarded or discarded like bits of nuts packed away for winter. Only the best stick, because only the best weave their webs around us. We can't help what we hear. And what we hear draws strings, more strings. We want those strings, though they make us older and cynical or hurt. Because occasionally, the strings are pure. They hum a pleasant tune, a familiar song, in our ears when we think of them. While censorship saves us from the hard things, it keeps us from the good. So much nonsense to sift through, but it's all worth it to find one gorgeous golden strand and wrap it close around ourselves.

I couldn't live without speaking. Being able to speak and write make me more important than someone who cannot communicate, because I can contribute and we are judged by what we give and do. No vegetable was ever great. No procrastinator, no slacker, because the great ones always communicate the ideas and thoughts that strike us as great. The golden threads or the black ones, the pure that hum and hum in our minds or the evil ones that squeeze us tight. They affect us, the two, which is why we have beloved leaders and hated tyrants. They wrap webs around us of their making and our own.

Handmaid's Tale for Offred, who found a voice even when the web around her dragged her down. We live by what we do with what we've got.