PR103 to MNL

They have put you in this box with me. A casualty of commons. Death by our own tax money.

They have put you in this box with me. Three walls of cement with one large glass pane so that we may watch the anthill world below us.

I wanted you to see this place. This less than perfect side of me. My anthill. Where the rules are only as firm as your will and where your tribe is the real law.

It is as dis/honest as it is un/flattering. You are here now. And this is the truth of it.

We have given everything to come here. Our tidy little home among the Angels has been rented by another hopeful couple. It was once an empty box, but we made it ours. May they treat those walls with as much love as we have. I hope they remember to water the plants. I hope they love our tree the way you and I did.

We have left everything and come here. Traded a nuptial bed for two pieces of paper marked 41F&G. That bed was the only thing I had to my name in the early days, besides that overused duffel with its broken strap which carried my whole life inside. You helped me build it, back when you were my first friend in a foreign country. I thought I would need a hammer and you laughed. Apparently everything in your country is built with an Allen wrench.

That bed followed me to every new box. Each time, we took it apart and rebuilt it together. It was there for us, at the end of every long day. As you were for me, whenever I felt the walls of that strange land closing in. Whenever I felt foreign and less than. You seemed, somehow, to understand, though you had never lived anywhere else but among the Angels.

I will never forget how it felt to take it apart, one last time.

Piece by piece it went, out the door, down the stairs (all three flights), out to the lobby and into the garbage. First the legs, which held us up for so many years. Then the frame. Then the headboard. As I carried it in my arms for the last time, I imagined your fingers gripping the edges, the way they did every night when we were finally alone again.

I wish I had kept a piece of it. One screw or splinter. I wish someone or something else could make its home in that bed. I suppose we left it for the flies and the worms in the landfill. Nothing ever really disappears. 

And now we are here. Come all this way. To live in a box in the sky. I wanted you to see this place, and I suppose that's my wish fulfilled. From this view, my anthill looks so different. It sprawls until it meets the horizon in every direction. Our greatest structures touch the sky and the neon billboards flash unyieldingly into the night. It looks grand. And terrifying. I watch you as you peer into the streets below, curious about life in this new world. And I wonder if we will ever really be a part of it.

My anthill can be a savage and unforgiving place. Once upon a time, you would have been welcomed here by a band of singing men and dancing ladies as we walked the carpet out of the airport. But today… today we are treated with sterility. Today we are carted off by strangers in hazmat suits, ushered hurriedly into a van and delivered to our box to await judgment. 

There was a time when you would have been seen as an Angel. A welcome visitor. And my people would bend over backwards to speak your language, accommodate your whims, treat you with kindness and offer you the best of our meager anthill.

Today you are a stranger, and carry with you a foreign scent that sends my people into a scramble. Today you are to be contained. Hence, the box.

They tried to take you from me. How have you come here, they asked you. Who are you with, in the rough tongue of my people. They can see that you are different, but they don't lend you the courtesy of speaking your language. That time has passed. I must translate. They resist, they are suspicious. They do not want you near me. I bear the mark of one of their own, but you do not. You are a threat and they place partitions between us. I must yell over the barrier. I must summon the will of my people that has lain dormant for years. I must assert my will over the rules.

No, I say. This one is with me. This one is my tribe. They are skeptical. I insist. They scramble to call a superior. And you… are terrified. You cannot understand our words, but know implicitly what authority looks like. It takes a strange new form here, doesn't it? We have all the right paperwork and yet somehow that does not matter. In the land of Angels, that's usually all that matters. Welcome to my anthill, darling, where one must wield their will and invoke the power of their tribe like a sword and shield, or in your parlance, a badge and gun. Here I am, your chthonic knight, come from under the earth to defend you. In your land, you would have resented me for it. I would have resented it myself. But here and now… it is necessary. Or else they will take you away.

They have put me in this box with you. The bed is not our bed. The walls have no love. We watch the man across the street with envy as he tends to his roof garden, missing our tree. But we are here. We have made it. And now you see this side of me and have begun to understand the first rules of this earthly place. I watch you as you stare out the window, too ashamed to touch you, to speak. I have brought you here. Have made you feel trapped, less-than, foreign.

You turn around and meet my gaze. I feel as though I have been caught watching you, and I turn away in shame, but you take my hand. Placing it on your chest, you smile and say, so this is what it's like.