Make Me Afraid, and then Blame it on Me.

Chanel Dubofsky • Age 44

Writer, Brooklyn, New York

Tell me again how we’ve been here before, but also how it is different this time. Tell me how I am making it up, how talking about Jewish pain is a selfish distraction, how I am making excuses, how I am not a real feminist, a real anti-racist, a real anything. Tell me what words mean and what histories mean and what actually happened on that day, and on the other days before it, and what has happened since. Tell me that the best way for me to protect myself, for us to protect each other, is to be a little less, or is it a little more? Make me afraid, and then blame it on me.

Tell me to be brave, then tell me I’m dead to you. Tell me it’s fine to mourn the dead and the stolen, and then take that back. Tell me religion is an opiate, is a trap, is evil. (Tell me you don’t understand.) Tell me I have to forget the past, tell me I am the exception. Tell me I’m safe, but only here, and keep shifting the bar. Tell me what you posted that/tweeted, that I misunderstood it, and then a little later, tell me you meant it. Tell me you hoped I saw it.

Tell me how we manufacture trauma, how we deserve all this. Tell me it’s either this or that, and there is no middle, there is only one version, tell me to whom it belongs. Tell me about the intellectual contortions you went through in order to arrive here, the edits you’ve made, the exceptions, the erasures.

Or don’t tell me. Don’t say it to my face. Wear it on a t-shirt or write it on a sticker that you slap on the pole near the bus stop, in a code you think I can’t understand. Trust that I’m still shell-shocked and trembling, that I know the rules don’t apply to me anymore, if they ever did, if I believed in them.

Tell me I should repent, surrender, go back to where I came from, as if you know. Trust that I have only gone deeper into those books, those voices, those spaces, the ones you tell me I should be ashamed of, and I have no plans to surface.

Trust that while I’ve been quiet, I am untangling the knots. I am examining the circles, the jagged lines that are really straight, that always point back here, to this moment, to you.