dream decoding

nobody wants to be a symbol.

nobody wants to be your martyr. nobody wants to be your totem of revolution. nobody wants to have to ask you to call them a “survivor” instead of a “victim.” nobody wants some journalist to tell them they’re so resilient with eyebrows knitted in drippy, self conscious empathy.

we make others into martyrs for ourselves, not for them. the dead are gone and the suffering are busy surviving. we make it meaningful afterwards so we can live with it. we mourn for ourselves. we make meaning so we don’t go insane, but i’m not convinced that any of this objectively means anything.

the cubans i met weren’t talking about revolution. they were talking about how to feed a family when there’s no gas to get to work, or to the store, or to keep the chicken cold in the freezer if you can get it. an ambassador asked us if i thought the gringos would truly invade. a widow asked us how it would end. a father told me he’d go get his son out of the military barracks himself before he let him die for these people. a widow asked us when delta force was coming. everyone waited about 15 minutes, or until we were alone, or until it appeared nobody was listening, to ask us some version of when and how. a businessman licked his lips. a mother clutched her baby tighter and and said she didn’t really care how any more.

everyone was waiting. that’s something its always hard to translate to my fellow gringo audience. how good at waiting people from anywhere else can be.

i’ve been reading about consciousness and sleeping off the past few months and having sharp, thick dreams with weird cameos. in bed with a mutant version of an ex and the missile hits next door and he can’t hear it. in the field without my PPE. in the past and can’t remember how i got there. i’m back with adri laughing as we get stuck in a mini landslide in the avila and its funny but i’m secretly terrified this time. i dream over and over again that i’m finally forced to really pick a side on something instead of taking pictures. to be a participant instead of an observer and it always ends ugly. i dream i’m talking to the dead.

a soldier from ukraine who i thought was dead writes me very much alive. i ask him how its going on the front line and he says its terrible what would you expect. i hang my head over my phone with a shame he can’t see and try to say the right thing. im sorry. im glad you’re alive. please stay that way. i write a pitch mostly just hoping to get to see him the others.

i ask a friend in Havana what they thought about the aid convoy and they said “lots of noise, lots of instagram, everything stays the same.” i ask a friend who was on the aid convoy and they said it was more moving than expected, and also notes the optics were complicated and made them pretty uncomfortable. i ask a venezuelan friend how it feels in his barrio and he says hopeful. he asks if Trump is gonna help raise the minimum wage. i tell him, gently, to try to manage his hopes. he tells me not to talk like that, says he needs hope now. i say i wish i could lie to him but i don’t think that does any good. i hope so much that im wrong and he’s right.