Crumbling Of the Sandwich Generation by K.A. Wiggins

You are big and I am small and it’s time for my first dose.

It’s a time before memory, on the babbling cusp of speech, or before, even, and I can only guess later at whether it went down bitter or syrup sweet. Did I struggle? Did I cry? Did I scream at the scorching as poison seared my throat?

No, for I have mastered the art of weeping without a sound, for big silent tears brimming over, for almost-contained misery that can be pretended away, sourceless, meaningless, inconsequential.

You will later tell me I was born this way. Over, and again, throughout the years.

I won’t wonder if it’s true for years yet. Not until I look at the little ones taking their doses and wonder if the poison they are forced to eat still tastes the same. If there’s a memory after all, somewhere below thought and knowing, of yummy, not hurt, say bye-bye, please-and-thanks?

But perhaps that was never the poison at all? Just practice in swallowing the small lies that make the world go ’round: Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Be Polite.

Perhaps the first dose comes later? On the edge of memory, where it nestles and gnaws, when you are still big, but I am less small. Or woven throughout the days-months-years with such constancy that it becomes a background drone to the music of our lives, an untaste, a numbness. Perhaps it is your voice I am inoculated with, mithridatistic micro-dosing of every untruth I am expected to retell?

Perhaps that is unfair. Do I discount other modes and sources? Contact poison, absorbed through the skin on the playground? Airborne toxins inhaled through the open window of the media? Regular courses of injections in the classroom? They’re just like that. Stay away from them. We aren’t like those people. They made bad choices. Girls don’t, boys don’t. People from there, who look like that, who love like that, can’t. That was in the past. Things are getting better. You can be anything you want to be. If you do your best, you will be rewarded.

But now I am grown and starting to taste the toxins, even as they overflow. For a time, we synchronized, in perfect balance, a homeostasis of family and community and society. A perfect, full dose, carefully delivered, continuously maintained. All the -isms aligned, the Rules Based Order installed, local server and network edition.

And then I tasted the poison.

Am I leeching lies even now, denying that they had soured on my tongue and stung my skin for days-months-years before I knew what they were? That I closed my eyes and covered my ears and kept swallowing because already I had some hazy awareness of what it could mean to really begin to taste/see/hear? Worst of all, to feel? That the knowing would become a burden so crushing that I would long to put it down and yet be unable, in my poisoned state, to ever, fully rest or fully recover?

Or is that still claiming too much credit? Was it an accident, after all? A failure, some defect in my form or inoculation? A misunderstanding? We don’t say/think/do things like that—except about those people, apparently.

You are big and I am too now, but that doesn’t matter so much when you are angry. You are all angry. You are furious, when I spit out the poison. When I try to pull the spoon from your lips too, swat the needle from your arm, clear the air of the fog of lies.

And I know, now, that I have been swallowing poison—and spreading it—for as long as I can remember. Longer. For what else do we run on, and breathe in, and share? It is glue, and fuel—and napalm to our enemies. It is all things toxic, and yet there is sweetness, too. Warmth, as it burns. Yet I have placed myself where only the bitterness and scorching can touch me, and you will not join me here.

I practice saying things that do not burn, between the tears. This isn’t right. We all deserve more. They’re just like us. We’re stronger together. We can choose another path.

My voice is not loud. The tears make it hard to hear and easy to dismiss. Poison still wafts on my breath, leeches from my skin. But each lie I refuse, each truth I tell, even the quiet ones, makes me stronger. I feel the burning less.

Yet I still feel your anger. And I weep because you are still eating poison.

Soon you will no longer be big, but dwindling. Soon, the poison you have eaten will eat you alive. I taste the fumes as a great inescapable smog, wafting and heavy in the air I have no choice but to breathe. They want to take what you have earned. The past was better. You can have more if you take it from them. Those who suffer deserve it. You’ve just got to live your life. Those who can’t contribute should end themselves. There’s nothing you can do anyway. They’re too big to fail. Buy more.

I am afraid. I fear the poison you still swallow will eat you alive. I fear you will choose escape instead of truth. I fear I will let you.

I fear your ending will near, and I will open my mouth to the lies, and smile through the tears, and hold you close as you welcome that final dose of poison and call it sweet.