Dear Unless

Please accept this letter as notice of my resignation. I sincerely thank you for the opportunity to work for you. I must leave; my hurt failed to achieve complexity and became self-pity. It became a collector flood that clutters belongings and decompartmentalizes lifeform designs. I took refuge in the fantasy of a life that is demanding but facile, a lover who finds new ways to fall in love with me rather than the lover who fell in love once, long ago, relying on that fact for as long as they could. The world violated my secrets and everyone else required me to be made. Always half an artist, the rest of me (like everyone else) was more concerned with living the way the world works, mastering and demonstrating my skills, my worth, my embrace of the most apparently validated ideas. I can hear others’ scripts, I can repeat them easily, but I can’t hear myself—so I must release myself; I’ve become a person consumed with surviving the tow of events with a systematized resistance. I learn systems very well. I would like us to separate on a diagonal. 

We must always have non-selves to know how to live. I haven’t earned the right to happiness—or, depending on who you ask, I haven’t earned the right to unhappiness. How do we each desire the world to be? I enjoy others for what can be shown. I enjoy myself for what I show myself. I’m unhappy with others because I read too much. I have seen the words that live inside them even when they smile on the outside. They use their outsides to stroke while their insides abandon. You appear humane to yourself so you presume you appear humane to me. I’ve been poor, which is to say I’ve been hungry, sick with hypothermia and rotting teeth. You, my richest boss, have been hungry, sick, and pained. But because I worked for you, we are outside time; you take advantage of my involuntary optimism, my body that started living before meaning and thinking came along. You use yourself to deduce reason and logic. You use me, too. But you don’t know me at all, boss unless. The inability to truly discern anything is your ideology because not knowing implies possibility of knowing—but I am outside. You think that on the other side of your darkness is light. You know me in your light, but I am outside of your darkness altogether. I know this makes me disobedient to you. I will never write so you can know me, because the tasks you assigned forced me to say, Yes, this life is worth living. 

My exhaustion makes me despair, but if I added to the energy of routine moneymaking I would blossom my secret self that hates you. Everything I’ve produced for you is a forgery. I’m of this world, not of this work. Your Human Resources grimoire instructed us workers to seal our mouths during work hours. We sucked up coffee through our noses and tipped our heads back. Workers are your little pets because you don’t humanize, you pity us as helpless. My body and actions are enmeshed; I reserve my thinking for myself. Gushing goo, soppy crotch, dead lips sagging off my skull. I pick at an unpasted edge, and you avert your eyes from my orders of existence. Don’t worry, it’s just a puff of soot. Blend me with thick strong blades. We have had our occasional collisions, we spark out a sequential conversation, but nothing catches, nothing burns or smokes or eats up the world. I have watched you weepingly anthropomorphize the Mars Rover but decline to invite this letter. 

I am a collection of causes, so what can I effect? I understand why devotion is tempting. Whether I can eat when I’m hungry, live to see the next day, that is the only real thing. I have treated you as if you approached me with a heavy hanging of grapes in your hand. Your regime renders my desires incoherent, so my desires are flourishing elsewhere. What lies between us is a blooming hydrosphere, not the efficient rill you think it is. I do not flow into you by choice. Too many undiscovered past selves lived and died without excavatable remains. Every day with others is a negotiating relearning. Every day provides possibility of payoff. I am substance and state of matter. Deep inside is where the hurt is, but also possibility. (I don’t think I’m special, just alone under your aegis.)

Turn feeling into meaning into words. Little striated shells with varied distinct colors—I move them around. Something will happen today. 

Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her latest project is POWER ON, a book as interactive app, produced by The Operating System. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere.