A Crack in Space

In my college English class, we had to write an essay on an essay written by Wells Tower titled "Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?" It’s about people hunting elephants, and trying to come up with ways to justify killing them. In the end, the author concludes that he does not know what the right answer is, to kill or not to kill. Now let’s put aside the reasons they listed for killing them, like how they are destroying the environment by tearing down trees. At the end of the day, these hunters were killing for pleasure, not to make the world a better place. Here’s a quote from Wells Tower, “When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry.” These graceful, humanlike animals are roaming the Earth, and there are people that brag about knowing where to put the bullet. But I’m not surprised. I mean, we kill humans, right? We kill our own kind. So of course we will kill something that reminds us of ourselves. The best of all, they take pictures with their trophies, smiling like they were just reunited with an old friend. How weird would it be if we went to funerals and took a selfie with the dead body in the casket? Now what about showing up to the funeral of the person we murdered and taking a picture with them in their casket? “Oh man, instagram is gonna get a kick out of this.”

My grandfather died of Prostate Cancer. The day he died, I shrunk into a body I no longer recognized. I crouched in the corners of rooms, preferably the ones without light so nobody would notice me there. My grandfather was my biggest fan. He truly believed I could be anything I wanted to be. If I told him I was joining the MLB and I was going to be the next Mickey Mantle he would believe me and tell me to hit a homerun so he could put the ball on his mantle. There were no limits for my potential. Not the sky, not the stars, not the universe. So while he was alive, I found myself growing too big for my skin. I took up so much space in a room the phrase elephant in the room was created after me. But people hunt elephants. So whenever I found myself brave enough to stretch my skin somebody would use their shotgun tongue, turning me into their personal trophy. You can still find my blood splattered on the walls of classrooms and bedrooms and sidewalks with a high murder rate. My therapist told me I needed to take up more space again, like how I did when he was still with us. I told her I don’t know how to do that anymore. My skin is now a material I can no longer stretch, like obsidian. Sometimes cracks begin to form in my skin but then a hunter conveniently comes along and spackles them. I tried speeding up the process by making my own cracks with blades as sharp as their tongues were, hoping that I will spill out before anyone would notice. Instead, I would just end up locked inside of hospitals where they would tell me that I look for elephants in other people to compensate for the lack of size that I have. But I am no hunter, so I get stomped on until I am so flat I can finally slip through a crack, like the ones in grates leading to the sewer or between the bars on my window or the ones in sidewalks that break your mother’s back, but not my cracks 'cause now I’m too flat to make them. So I started swallowing pills and filling my lungs up with smoke hoping to die and leave behind a smoke signal that says, I just wasn’t small enough for them. But you know... I don’t want to be the elephant anymore. I don’t want to be Flat Stanley either. And it’s not my time to be ashes yet. I want to be the crack. I want to be the crack in the Universe that NASA found in the Milky Way where there are no corners to hide in, large enough to swallow dozens of solar systems, harbouring developing stars in its belly. Try to shotgun blast a crack in space, I’ll just swallow the bullets, birth them into balls of fire, and rain them across the sky for the people like me to wish on. I will turn your bullets into hope.