even our memories they have stolen
As slaves under capitalism, we are being robbed of our very lives. I try thinking about what I've done, what has happened to me, over the past few months. The days and weeks all blur and bleed together. The quotidian is lost in a dry, formless river of tasks that I don't care about, meaningless hours spent enriching someone else. For a moment just now, I forget whether today is Monday or Tuesday. I seem to have a recent memory of thinking, "Soon my work day will be over and I will get to go home." I can't remember if that was yesterday or earlier today. It was earlier today, because today is Monday, but it could just as easily have been any day, any week.
When I try to distill meaning and magic and import from my life, I hone in on very particular moments, ribbons of joy and beauty, times I was not at work, times I was with my loved ones in nature or doing something we enjoyed. The fact is that there are not very many of these moments that I can look to as landmarks or signposts stippling the chronology of my life, telling me where I was or what the world meant to me. There are so precious few meaningful experiences that have happened to me in recent months that I keep circling back to the same several memories: going to a desert campsite with friends and my partner; moving into a new place with my partner, the first place we have officially shared together with both of our names on the lease; spending New Year's in the desert with a large group of friends; going hiking in locations of sublime beauty on two days off that I had and no other times that I can remember for months prior to that because I was too busy; a seven year old girl I mentor wanting to be held in my arms and caressing my back while I carried her.
These are the things that stand out to me over the course of almost half a year. Clearly, many, many more things happened to me, I lived through many more moments than these, but with the passage of time, little of it mattered, the majority being devoured and subsumed by the endless agony of this fettered existence under capitalism. Gone are countless fresh mornings, sultry afternoons of dappled sunlight. I have lost an intolerable amount of my life being forced to work upon threat of death. This is the social agreement we accept for ourselves as a capitalist society.
How much more will we allow to be stolen from us before we coalesce into an entity strong enough to demand something else? Aren't you tired of watching your life bleed out from you? At the end of our lives, we will hardly even have memories, having spent the vast majority of our days doing useless things to enrich our enemies and our enslavers...