Jamie Broker

I live in the United States. We’re not completely through the first month of the year, and it feels like we’ve been reeling from one thing after another, a new horror day after day after day. My heart is heavy and my head is spinning.

The evil that has come seeping (crashing?) in over the past two days — a pure, black evil, unapologetic, stomach-turning, real, and raw — is so widespread and so horrific, it seems to have sucked all the sunlight out of the air. I feel small and hopeless and helpless. I live hours and hours and hours from where the main conflicts are taking place. I’ve donated some to mutual aid and plan to donate more throughout the coming months. I know it’s not enough. What can one unpublished author do?

I see folks on social media telling artists to be loud and proud about their art, be the comfort that keeps us all going through the tough times. I often worry that my story will only make people feel worse; one, it’s got a lot of Catholicism in it, and two, the stories I write always — always — have happy endings. I think it’s just part of me, a desire for happy endings, and something that has yet to be beaten completely out of me by the world. But I’ve got a track record longer than my height of times when I’ve misread the room. Who’s to say that this isn’t one of those times? And what a horrible time it would be to misread the room, too.

But the central story of my childhood years was one with a cosmically happy ending: love conquers all fear and hatred, and shatters even death; the battle is over and the victory has already been won. That story is an old one. Maybe it’s just naïveté. Maybe it’s the truth. Maybe it doesn’t matter what it is, and the struggle forward towards a decent tomorrow for ev.er.y.bo.dy. needs to have everybody doing lots of different things, including facilitating some brief breaks from the “real world” before getting back in the fight.

I have a friend who believes — truly, deeply, enough to permanently commit his entire life to the Church. He is a fan of the concept of “no such thing as an accident.” The idea that we are born for the time we live in. I can’t help it; whenever I hear that, I think of Garrus Vakarian and Commander Shepard. But the story there was also overwhelming darkness, incredibly powerful enemies, and horrible odds. Those two didn’t know if they’d win any more than we do — but they did, in the end. In the end, a grandfather held his grandchild’s hand and told a story of heroes in the stars. In the end, the breeze will blow sweet and clean over the new grass, and all of this horror will be no more. Someday, there will be an ending. Somehow, I hope it will be a happy one.

May we all have the strength to do whatever part it is we were born to do in our time.