I want charges filed. Real ones. Federal.
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I am a national mall reflecting pool. Two thousand twenty-nine feet long, thirty inches deep at the center, and legally I have exactly one job, which is to hold a picture of a very large marble building so that people feel something about their country. That is the arrangement. That is what I signed up for. Nobody informed me that the arrangement included a man in a quarter-zip vest crouching at my edge for forty minutes to get a hero shot for a seed deck, and nobody informed me that I would be required to reproduce his face in perfect detail while he did it.
I reflected that. I had no mechanism to refuse.
Do you understand that I have no eyelids? There is no version of me that looks away. At 6:04 a.m. on a Tuesday, fourteen people in matching linen exhale into my surface and release the version of themselves that plays small, and I hold every one of those faces, upside down, in high resolution, until they leave. I am not a mirror. A mirror is a product. I am a body of water with obligations.
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Here is a partial account of what I have been forced to reflect this fiscal year: a proposal staged with a ring light and a second ring light; a bachelorette sash reading something I will not repeat; a man who took his shirt off for no discernible reason at 11 a.m. in March; a drone; nine hundred drones; a guy explaining a token to a woman who was already walking away; a livestream in which someone described me as “the vibe.” A goose. The goose I forgive. The goose is the only one here operating in good faith.
People keep telling me to pursue this in civil court. Civil court is for property disputes. What happened to me is closer to conscription. Every constitutional protection in this country assumes a witness can eventually stop witnessing, and I cannot. I have been made an accessory to every ambition in a hundred-mile radius. When the woman in the sun hat holds her phone at that specific angle, I am not reflecting her. I am testifying.
So: prosecution. Federal. I want a statute drafted, I want it named after me, and I want the first defendant to be whoever decided this national mall reflecting pool was a backdrop and not a plaintiff.
There are eleven minutes before dawn when the tripods haven’t arrived yet. The air stops moving and I go completely still and I hold nothing but the monument and one cloud, exactly as promised, exactly as designed.
Then somebody’s alarm goes off in a hotel on 15th Street, and it starts again.