trevor’s encyclopedia of lost and beautiful things

As a writer, I try to hold COMPASSION and JUSTICE in a kind of tension. 

I write of the world as it is, and I try to suffer with it.

I try to climb into its skin and walk around, as Atticus Finch counseled Scout to do in To Kill A Mockingbird. 

I try to simply become more human. 

I also write of the world as it could be, and I try to bring justice to it. 

I try to put myself in spaces of injustice and fight against it with stories. 

I try to simply build a more human world.  

If I have a super power, it is the ability to walk around in other people's shoes. 

I become their laughter. 

I become their tears. 

I knew I had this power from the time I started knowing.

I spend my days trying to develop it. 

Maybe it's the greatest superpower of all, for the greatest evil of all seems to be our inability to have empathy for each other. 

Tears drop from eyes, and I tenderly kiss those tears.

 I taste the salt of those tears.

In this moment, I am me - who I am and who I want to be.   

It is in this tenderness and tasting that I write - of the immigrant child, the homeless neighbor, the lonely migrant, the LGBTQ person, the frightened kid, the human being. 

And in this moment I am me, too - who I am and who I want to be. 

That is my super power.