The Space Between the Horror and the Horizon

A dispatch from the far edge of the fireline.

I haven’t written in a while. Not because I ran out of words, but because the words I had felt trivial, whittled splinters scraping against a leviathan collapse. Language became insultingly inadequate, a tool built for civility, trying to map the anatomy of a mauling.

A few months ago, I found myself in another country. The one my wife and I will soon call home. A brunch, a resort, at a table with a stranger linked only by ex-pat gossip and the polite scaffolding of introductions passed through family like hand-me-downs. I didn’t speak the language of anyone outside that table. I didn’t know the city. The traffic snarled like a system having a stroke. The air vibrated, overcrowded, overcooked, the kind of urban entropy that usually makes me itch.

But I didn’t itch. I felt peace. Not the soft-focus serenity sold in yoga studios, but a visceral, feral quiet. A hush in the bones. The kind of stillness you only notice after years of being hunted.

Eventually, the conversation turned, as it always does now, to the United States. The decaying freakshow. The slow-motion autopsy of a once-mythic republic. Someone said “Trump,” and I nodded as if I wasn’t listening. But something deep inside me ruptured.

I cried.

Not theatrically. Not for the table. Just a quiet, uncontrollable surge of tears that arrived like muscle memory. I hadn’t summoned them. I barely noticed them. They were the body’s revolt, not the mind’s.

They weren’t only tears of sorrow. Though sorrow was there, baked into every cell. They were tears of recognition. Of grief. Of catastrophic awareness. But most of all, they were tears of relief. Because for the first time in years, I was seated in a place where the horrors we discussed weren’t happening in real time. They were distant. They were there. I was not.

That distance, geographic, psychic, moral, was sacred. A buffer between myself and the inferno. A reminder that peace still existed in the world, even if it had long since fled my country.

And then I stopped writing.

Because what else is there to say?

The people. That’s always been the thing, hasn’t it? The people are why we’re all here on Substack, clinging to the last vestiges of unmanipulated thought. But the people are also why we are “Here” and why none of this can be fixed.

There wasn’t a coup, at least there wasn’t a successful one. It wasn’t an occupation. It was a choice. The people chose this. A convicted felon. A rapist. A bankrupt pathetic conman with a partial spray-tanned thirst for cruelty. The most powerful man in the world, again. Not because he outwitted the system, he tried to overthrow it and failed. No, he was restored to power because tens of millions of Americans, with full awareness and sober minds, handed him the keys.

America was never perfect. Dateline Reality: Nowhere is. But I used to think I was lucky. I was born on the incredible side of an imaginary line, an accident of geography and genetics that placed me in the ideal position to succeed in this rigged machine. I was calibrated for it. My relentlessness, my ability to dissect, to create, to endure, I was made for this country’s logic, for success here.

Drop me in a hunter-gatherer society, and I’m dead within the year. Or worse: I become the village mystic, babbling visions into the fire. No in-between. Thirty percent odds of survival, tops.

But I wasn’t born into a forest. I was born into empire, and for most of my life, I believed that empire, despite its blood-soaked foundations and baroque hypocrisies, might still be capable of redemption.

It is not.

The American people, each of them born into staggering, unearned fortune, could not even recognize their own privilege, much less protect it. They are too gluttonous to preserve it, too stupid to question it, too cowardly to share it. So they turned it over to a conman who weaponized their apathy and gave their worst instincts a crown.

We didn’t lose the country to war or catastrophe. We threw it away. We set it on fire because the arsonist made us laugh and told us the flames were someone else’s fault.

He told them they were strong, even as they knelt. Told them they were wise, even as they swallowed poison. Told them they were victims, even as they cheered the cages, the camps, the cruelty. They believed it. They still believe it.

So no, I don’t think of solutions. There aren’t any. Not here. Not now. Not until it fails entirely. Because the problem isn’t a man.

It’s the people who made him possible.

I didn’t stop writing because I lost hope. I stopped because writing felt fraudulent, like scribbling a sonnet while the sky pours ash. Like asking a match to rebuild a forest.

This is not a manifesto. Not a sermon. Not a plea.

It’s a dispatch from the far edge of the fireline.

I’ve breathed air that didn’t taste like smoke. I’ve heard silence that wasn’t loaded with menace. I’ve sat at a table and wept, not from fear, but from the recognition that peace still flickers somewhere, beyond the reach of the machine.

I know now what exists between the horror and the horizon.

And I’m not letting that go.

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