Summoning The Selfish

Selfish.

The word for a life that has stopped taking dictation.

We arrive without consent

and spend the rest of our lives

being charged for the privilege.

A name.

A home.

Nine months of somebody's body.

Then years of being reminded what existence cost.

The account changes hands.

The balance doesn't.

"I gave you everything."

How quickly a gift learns to speak in the imperative.

You can spend thirty years

being somebody's answered prayer

and never once be asked what you were praying for.

We inherit lives like family silver:

too old to question,

too polished to use,

too precious to put down without being asked who we think we are.

Selfish.

The accusation arrives

when the plot someone wrote for you

loses its ending.

We learn to interrupt ourselves

before anyone else has to.

The dream crossed out

before it can become a quarrel.

The truth swallowed

until the throat forgets the shape of its refusal.

Years spent keeping peace

in rooms where nobody has thought to ask whose peace it is.

We keep the receipts.

In the pause before a favour.

In the little afterlife of 

"after all I've done for you".

In the gift that arrives open-handed

and leaves you holding the obligation.

We wanted to be good.

Then necessary.

Then so necessary

that leaving us would look like cruelty.

We made ourselves too good to abandon.

And called it love when they stayed out of guilt.

We became landlords of lives we never had to live.

Collected rent in obedience.

Called it heartbreak when the tenants left.

Imagine a world of selfish people.

People too occupied with the work of becoming

to supervise what others become.

People who could watch someone rise

without mistaking the height for an insult.

Who could lose

without needing someone else to lose more.

Who could be ordinary

without making a failure of somebody else's extraordinary.

That there was work enough in becoming themselves.

That someone else's becoming took nothing from their own.

Not people without tenderness.

People who knew 

that being loved did not 

make them the owner of the wound they healed.

People who could give

without making the gift a future tense.

Who could love someone

without putting their lives under oath.

Imagine how many lives might have escaped

the punishment of being made responsible

for somebody else's inadequacy.

And no, not every sacrifice is a trap.

Sometimes the last piece of bread is given away.

Sometimes a hand stays through the hours that offer nothing back.

No witness.

No secret hope

that the hand will be held

in the same way when its turn comes.

The hand opens.

That is all.

We keep asking

how much someone would surrender for us.

We rarely ask

when their surrender became our entitlement.

Selfish.

The word we reach for

when a person stops being the answer 

to a question we never had the right to ask.