EPTInstead I’m left with a poor facsimile of you, a broken simulacrum.
Most discerning: The tattoos that envelope your breast, dominate your arms and snake away to the portrait of hate adorning your back. That ancient symbol of good luck never seemed so out of place. It makes my heart beat faster and palpitate slightly. I feel canine compulsion, hair on ends, ears perked and at attention.
It really is a funny thing to hate, to hate so passionately, so vehemently and so violently that any semblance of reason or purpose is lost. I can’t remember the last time I ever felt that sickly feeling rise up inside. Maybe it was somewhere in petty juvenilia.
Not that it matters, though. You’re not being outwardly offensive to me. Not yet. I wonder, how deeply do you hold those convictions? Did they germinate in the darkest places of your heart? Did the weeds grow unchecked, drawing life from the good that was left? Or is it you finally belonging, in a chorus of racial epithets uttered by mean little men and women.
Screaming hate in unison must feel so fucking good.
So, my questions received, I must ask another.
Do you hate me? I mean, if you knew, would you hate me? That by some irreversible twist of fate the coding of my very self belongs to a group deemed most unsavory by the insane prophets of your insanity.
It’s not like I asked for it.
I doubt you could even guess which race of ‘sub-human’ I’m derivative of.
(Blonde, 188cm tall, blue green eyes, prominent chin and high cheek bones.)
I don’t remember much of my grandmother. She was lucky I guess. So small, So frail. A wisp of the woman she was. She escaped her home watching as the earth under her feet turned sanguine, watching the spirit of her country break as books containing their words formed funeral pyres.
Her making dumplings. Her cleaning her house. Her raising a family. Her slipping into the calloused clutch of age, where I hope the memories of forced labour and terror are nothing but a distant dream, too sick, too macabre to even be considered.
Do you hate her too?
I had a dream last night. Your face, my grandmother’s face, my face and a line of cold white men holding carbines at a perfect horizontal. A red pennant around one arm of each of the sentries. My grandmother at the bank of an open pit. You, emblazoned in the colour of the Wehrmacht, looking so complete, so serene. Shouting obscenities at the top of your lungs. The men and women, and my grandmother uttering words you’d never care to understand. Making peace with love, with hate, with passion and probably a myriad of gods in desperation. A violent crack, and then another, this time like bones breaking. The men and women and my grandmother toppling slowly into the abyss you made.
That was their swan song.
This is what you represent.
And try as I might, you don’t make me hate you for it.
I, the Slav. You, the Bigot.
You just make me want to cry.
