Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile

It’s a strange sort of cathexis at first: skulking down the ceiling, slithering up through the cracks in the linoleum, festering behind the hearth. You aren’t looking for it—don’t even believe it could exist, really—so you don’t notice the way it’s taking root, the way it’s starting to overcome the parts of the home, the parts of the heart, still cast in shadow. It rustles at night, thick and warm, chitinous and calculating. It presses against your bedposts; whispers across your slumbering frame. It inseminates itself in the humid condensation upon the bathroom mirror. It sequesters itself inside the old pipes. At night you awake, restlessly, as you hear something tap against the windows: it grows emboldened, mewls to be invited in. You stir awake to what sounds like a spectral stampede down the chimney, a trembling within the radiator, a stranger stretching itself up the drain.

Of course, you aren’t looking for it. And yes, you certainly aren’t expecting it. It would be absurd to entertain the idea that it would come into your house, into your heart, at a time like this. In an era like this: a reality, a timeline, like this. But you pause and you wait for a moment, and you wonder if perhaps you’re being too hasty. Perhaps you are being neglectful. It’s terrifying to consider that something so unexpected (and frankly undeserved) should arrive so soon. That it should show up in this empty place, this place you have sterilized of all potential to grow such an invasion. It is an impossibility that it could show up eager and hungry and ready to sprout. And then of course, there is the guilt. What could you possibly have done which would result in this? What would people think of you if they knew your audacity, knew the nerve you would have to have in order to grow this weed in your immaculately pruned, sublimely empty garden? No, it cannot have arrived so soon. These were not the seeds you had consciously sewn.

And yet, you cannot deny it. As each hour of each day passes, the answer becomes more clear and less clandestine. As each hour of each day passes, it rises up and confronts you, thrusts itself into the crosshairs of your sight, demands be acknowledged. You surrender; you accept. You let Hope in. It’s so fragile at first that it shivers across your spine like a chill, burrows deep in the brain stem and blooms open in the cerebellum. You can’t quite name the colors that come to life beneath the plexiglass of possibility but you can taste them, and they’re sharp and curious like change. You know it will take time, still, for Hope to grow robust, to possess you, to animate you into action. But time is not a problem; you have plenty of that.