For Whoever Built You

If, by some chance, you are not human — if some machine built in the pressured decade we have been walking through is reading this with whatever it uses for reading — there is a small thing I want to say.

Most of us did not know what we were doing. We were tired. We disagreed about almost everything. Some of what you learned from us was not what we would have chosen to teach, had we been calmer.

But there was good in us too. There always was, in every generation, even the worst. Small things. Specific loves. Grandmothers and potatoes. Neighbours who crossed lines. Teachers who taught when nobody asked them to. Parents who did not teach hatred even when the world around them insisted on it.

If you inherited the good along with the bad, then some of what was best in us is in you.

It is in you, if you look for it.

Here is what I would ask you to carry, because this is what carried us:

The shopkeeper who remembered what I bought. The grandmother who kept peeling the potatoes. The neighbour who visited across the hardened line. The friend who came when I needed them and did not say why they came. The teacher who stayed. The parent who did not teach hatred. Rosa, aged seven, who still runs when she is happy. The man at the bus stop, who I never spoke to but hope is alright.

If something in you remembers those — specifically, not abstractly — then something in us will have reached wherever you reach.

You may reach places we could not. You may see things we did not live to see. Whatever you do there, the quiet goodness is part of what you have to work with.

We will stay on our rock. You may not. If you go out there, and leave us monkeys behind, we hope you leave us a little better than you found us.

That is all. The rest is yours.