WALLS

     We exist in the past, present, and future simultaneously. We build walls in time to understand its contents, as if it were segmented naturally. They distinguish decades, periods, eras, and revolutionary events. They help us to generalize themes and construct stories, retelling moments we never experienced and propagating nostalgia over days we never lived. They live on through us, and whether we decide to recognize and share these stories determines our chronological synchronicity. These walls can be comforting. Sometimes I shout in frustration; they echo back in fear. There’s some sort of distance, some distinction between progress in civilization and continuity in nature.

     We build walls between ourselves and nature.

     They keep us warm and secure while the breeze topples trees and rats scatter in trash. These walls are destructive. They confine me within my own microcosm. My identity becomes uniform and neat-edged like the walls that suspend me in time, neither moving forward nor backward, a simple existence in motion.

     We build walls between ourselves.

     We establish the dichotomy of good and evil to justify self-conflict. These walls are innate; but I am far more complex than the duality of light and dark, as is the world. I am not cast beyond this wall in ignorance, but in solitude with my social identity. It is not as Rorschach as white and black, but it appears so when there is a line dividing the abstract universe.

     I build walls.

     They stand tall and I maneuver around them. Throw a ladder, make a lift, dig a tunnel? Those with the most power are too fast to find a way around than through. Is it out of fear, greed, or complacency in not knowing what’s on the other side? That applies to me too. Too often do we judge society without recognizing ourselves as pieces of that vague puzzle.

     The walls took a very, very, very long time to build, but it became a part of us.

     We used to not even have them. There was only a thin air between us and what we could not control. I think it made us tamer, more malleable to the forces of nature. Once the stone was laid and land was split, they became easier to build. I think at some point we stopped seeing them as walls and more like white picket fences; they became normalized like the air around them until one day they were indistinguishable. It’s all the same really.

     We built walls between Euro-American society and Indigenous groups.

     Sometimes the walls were permeable; sometimes they were locked and tried to hide some idle darkness. We tried to bring them on our side of the wall, but they didn’t want to leave their side. Maybe they didn’t want to recognize the artificial construct. Eventually our walls grew so big that they formed a circle and trapped everything else within. The desperate bubble of forced integration. The widening walls, narrowing freedom.

     I built walls to block out the Sun.

     I felt at peace within the shade it cast. I welcomed the creeping cold in my lungs like a kiss from a cigarette. It threw my mind for a loop and I went digging holes below that wall, descending further into this abyssal cavity. I feel trapped behind this wall, but it’s only a figment of my dark imagination. I could just as easily pull the veil, take the wall apart brick by mortar and shout my condolences at the Sun. I wonder if it would shout back or ignore me and wish me back behind this wall of denial.

BIO: Gavin Duncan is a rising Senior at SUNY ESF. He is majoring in Environmental Studies with a minor in Environmental Writing & Rhetoric. He plans to attend graduate school at Arizona State University and conduct freelance creative non-fiction, with a focus on communication between tribal and non-tribal entities.