The Dark Knight Trilogy brought forth a darker set of superhero movies. It brings up questions about justice, about morality, about truth, about society and about ourselves. Christopher Nolan is an amazing director that does a few things to Batman that are truly worth noting.

The first is the moral ambiguity. In series such as The Lord of the Rings, you know who’s good and who’s evil: everything is in black and white. But Batman shows the shades of grey. You don’t know who’s in the right. And that is what makes the villains so…seductive. They have seemingly plausible solutions to the problems of corruption, poverty, injustice and hierarchy. Though, as seen in The Dark Knight Rises, anarchy, when achieved, doesn’t work. Societies need structures. Which leads to the second point.

In the Batman series, there are three prominent groups: the government and its police force, the antagonist with the anti-structural solutions to solve problems, and the vigilante who defies the structure to protect it.

 The antagonist and Batman are the two sides of the same coin — they both recognize that the system doesn’t work. However, Batman chooses the government because society needs it. In anarchy, there is only chaos. Yes, the system is flawed, a point that is repeated throughout the movies, however, it is worth protecting because it can be improved. That’s why Batman is the hero in the movie, because he knows the balance between order and disobedience.
The reason why Batman is favored more than other superheroes is because he lacks superpowers. It allows for him to be the common man, the person turned into a symbol, in actuality, an ideology. While in other movies, superheroes are shunned because of their powers, Batman is cast away because of his unknowable nature. People fear him because they know they could be him, or worse, that they aren’t him. People pushed away the Batman in Gotham City because they didn’t want to deal with their own ability to be great. They don’t want to realize that they have their own power that can be used. That there’s potential to do great good or great evil.

And that leads to the most important thing The Dark Knight Trilogy brings up: the civilians. People are not the innocent bystanders that run and hide while the supernatural heroes and villains fight. No, they are involved and they are decisive. In The Dark Knight, the Joker lets the people to choose whether to blow up the other boat or not. The movies allow the citizens to fight for their lives, to decide for themselves what their future holds. They end up showing that they’re worth protecting, that freedom and choice are ideals worth protecting. Because in order to justify fighting for structure and society, people have to prove that they deserve it.
After coming out of the theater a few hours ago, plot-wise, I was emotionally everywhere. But as I was walking down the street, I realized that my city could be Gotham. That everything in the trilogy is not only possible but could be probable. We’re moving to ideological extremes and to moral ambiguity. And if my hometown could be Gotham City, then I could be Batman. But I’m not. Because the Dark Knight isn’t a person, he’s an idea. He’s a symbol of sacrifice and heroism. Batman is an idea worth believing in, an idea worth rising.

And as we say goodbye to a complex and epic trilogy, all I have to say is:
I believe in the Batman.

I will admit, I once called the Earth my home. Demeter and I would loom above the ground, singing the trees alive. But my heart shuddered for adventure. Life was too stable for the frolicking heart of mine. I will admit, the Doors of Death echoed me still. They were enchanting windows to a new world. I told myself it was worth the fear of suffocation. And I so, so, so love pomegranates. Hades was never cruel — but he was aggressive in his love. I do not think he knows what love is. His gold laced fingers reached over my body, his lips took mine without asking, his romances relentless. Demeter’s call was somewhat of a relief. My independence could never let me be owned. Not by Hades…not even by my mother. I may have had returned to the Earth, but only for a human’s life. One year, I visited the Ocean to escape my mother’s pleas. She saw the bruises Hades left me when I had to leave him. She demanded to call me for eternity, but her own affection was thorns. I assumed I could swim, but my visits to mermaid coves were puddles compared to the Ocean. He saved me. He rose from the water, just speeding by, and with a sudden movement, he became my savior. I never was one for lofty beings, but I immediately — and irrevocably — fell in love with Poseidon.

He, unfortunately, was married, but he, unfortunately, was caught in nets of lovers. I knew I could never catch his attention, so I was simply aloof, sometimes witty, and always grotesquely in need of his presence. Besides, I was gone for half of forever. I kept visiting him when mother did not notice I was gone. He was easily distracted, but he was beautiful in his fortified heart, his wandering soul, and his shadowed laugh. It has been forty decades since I met him, and nothing has changed. We may have fought the world apart sevenfold, he may have noticed my love and rejected it, and he may have forgotten that nothing has changed, but his eyes still are every chapter of my endless novel. When I tell him I must leave — Hades was waiting — he nods easily and returns to his Queen. I deeply considered drowning myself, but there would be no use. Immortality was the curse, but water never seemed that bad of a suffocation

You skip and you promenade and I find your footprints all over my heart. I have seen your smiles and I have seen your tears, so when you pull your strings to the ground, caging yourself in your world of insults, I break. You prize beauty but you have forgotten your own worth. I don’t know what to tell you, how do I make you believe that the skin is not a soul, and that your blemishes are not your flaws? I could tell you that your eyes’ earnest and your lips’ gentleness will let go of all your threads and free you. I could tell you it all but how much will you hear and how much will you listen? When every moment you have been cascaded with the demons and the devils and the ones that believed in revenge not forgiveness? I will be here for you through the torrent and the thunder and the sound of your own mind driving you insane. I will ask you to stay a while, you, the girl with the stolen smile. You call me heartbroken but I find you soul broken. I am afraid you have forgotten the little girl you were, and I want you to rid yourself of all your expectations, for they have been nothing but poison. So recover your composure, this time of the world has been the Dark Days, but you have overcome and you will overcome, and when the time comes, you can be a hero or you can be a coward, and I can’t help but want to save you, the girl who will save the world.

I saw you picking flowers as you crouched under the weight of your own expectations. You hug the days that past all those months ago, and looking at you, I knew that time looped with cruelty in mind. I knock on your little house and you open and you laugh in tune with our melody, but I see you lost in your treasured desires. You make lists of everything you want, you, the end and the beginning of the universe. I smear my soul on my canvased walls, and you picked the lines of all our future bets. You try to balance between two trees, spreading yourself between where you are and where you want to be, and I want to make the connections that will save you from your decisions. I spill my layers of secrets to you, thinking you’d find some security but you flew away from your comfort zone. Composing the world out of thin air, when did you become so wise, the only child who never belonged? I will miss you as you fling yourself at your enemies and become the destroyer of all your sins. Maybe I’ll meet you one day, under the star drunk moon, and I’ll collect all my winnings, for I have bet on your happiness and your love. You became the cornerstone of all the memories, you’re the dreamer fighting to stay alive, and I have never felt so close to you as I did when we fell twelve feet from the sky.

I see you once more, after months of not seeing you at all. You rise from your slumber; you’re a powerful queen, and you rose so swiftly to your throne, but what will you do when the world falls around you? What will you say to all your subjects, the ones who have adored and the ones who have obeyed? I will stand in the crowd that begs on their knees; they will meet you and I will meet you, and the power you hold will fall. They missed your elegance, and they yearn for your punishment, if only you’d free them, but instead you call on your sleeping songbirds, the dancers of comfort, the bringers of escape. I thought you could free me, I thought you could release me. But now I am standing among everyone whom you have granted distance. I thought we could veer off to the edges of this world we built, but then everything fell. Why did everything fall? What ruined us, what destroyed us all? Now you try to avoid the blame for your crimes, but a queen without a heart is just power without a throne. I would swear my allegiance, but you took my chance and you took my soul. I thought we were the halves of feathers, the birds beating the abyss and reaching the heavens. I am left with all I have broken, and now I am just trying to repair what can never be fixed. I thought I could trace the fall of empires, but this, I don’t know what this is. This is nothing, you have broken nothing, and now the queendom has fallen and there is no word for what I have done.

She walks pass everyone, she walks without anyone. She lives in a different world, one of snow and one of slopes. She never committed to anything, she was a girl who hanged nooses, not a girl who tied bracelets. She wanted to climb past all the versions of her that she discarded with every year. She tried so hard to be better than her mistakes, the girl who kept raising the stakes. Blaring the music loud enough to overcome all the words, all the hatred. So much noise, she could handle so much noise, she had to handle so much noise. She yells at me for my lopsided directions, but her every step takes her to different destinations. She found love on battleships, she made destruction on sunken ships. She wanted everything, she wanted the world, she wanted it all dead. Everyone became a target of her ambivalent arrows, of her tantalizing bows. She wanted to be the queen, she wanted groveling bows. She wanted to please, she wanted to be appeased. This was the girl who didn’t care at all. She didn’t have time for love, she didn’t have time for hatred. She trembled with her fingers on buttons she made of lies. The destroyer on her death star. She released the cannons and she released the arrows, the girl out for the end, the girl out for revenge. She made use of her noose, she cut off the strands that kept her from her fantasy. She shot them all, they all fell, all the versions of her. They cried and they pleaded, they hit their heads trying to bow down to the queen, but she was the girl of destruction, and they had no hope, they had no mercy. And she just walked away, passed all the sunken ships she drowned on her battleship.

 

Like a lottery, I am stuck on numbers, I am struck by perfection. I could count the stars, I could count the waves, I could count the leaves, but for some reason, I choose to count you. My first number your smile, the second your tears, the third your wishes, the fourth your promises, the fifth your laugh, the sixth your love. And if I win, please let me win, it would be no coincidence. You are the stars, you are the waves, the leaves, the heavens, the truth. If I should be stuck on numbers, may it be you, if I am struck by perfection, I know it to be you. Like a lottery, I am betting against chance, I am playing with luck. What are the odds of winning you? I could close my eyes and spin on the wheel of fortune. I could pick, the blind girl wishing on perfection. I never was good at probability, I never was good as being good, so why am I betting on this? Why am I making mistakes on rising stakes? Maybe this is useless, maybe this is silly, but I have nothing else, I have nothing to lose, like I said, I am still stuck on numbers. I don’t have you, I don’t have you. But I have a chance, I have a lottery ticket, I have six numbers and I have the hopes of everything, from your smile to your love. This could work, this could fail. Lke a bottle at sea, I wasn’t sure yet if I believed in coincidence, but I knew that in the end, fate was perfection, and you, you were always perfect.

They tell me to have patience, but honestly, I have none. I have black paint and I have blue skies, but I don’t have lists, I don’t have time. I stacked all my desires on the corners of my heart, I thought they would scream, I thought they would shout. I thought they were bullets and I was strong enough to pull the trigger. I thought I could hold a gun, but my arms are trembling, my breathing is faster than any shot. I am collapsing under the weight of everything I haven’t done, of all the places I haven’t been, of all the people I haven’t met. I don’t have life but rather the absence of it. I know I am young, but isn’t youth short-lived? Shouldn’t I be out there, spilling light onto darkness? Shouldn’t I be something by now? I am waiting for a sign maybe, I am looking to be found maybe. Why doesn’t anyone take notice of the girl without lists, the girl without time? The girl who can’t hold a gun, the girl’s whose heart has holes inside? They tell me to have patience, but honestly, I don’t belong here. Why am I the different one, the lonely one, the broken one? Maybe I am the chosen one, maybe this is a good thing, maybe the world is waiting for me, holding out my desires, holding out people that care, people who can’t shoot. I may not have patience but I have time to learn. Maybe I am young, but I am ready, I’m waiting.

I used to be a girl who was so used to things ending. I said goodbyes so many times, but I never knew they never meant anything. I remember spending every day preparing for my recital, but they pulled me out just before I was about to walk into the concert hall. I remember taking that one last dive into the pool before my mother pulled me out and swore never to return. I remember playing in my basement; we were just messing around, I didn’t mean for her to get hurt, I swear I didn’t. I was only a kid, but I had to say goodbye anyways. I remember packing houses and crossing borders being the hallmarks of my childhood. Friendships went out so fast, you could believe the candle was never lit. We fought so much…we were too young to know what anything meant. Now I know what goodbye means — it’s the double dutch ropes without people jumping from left to right, it’s the haunted house of friendships that you still know so well but can’t unlock the door anymore, it’s the chalked lines on the wall as you count the days since you last heard them say your name. I thought when my strings fell apart, I would slip to the ground. But instead, I stay as just a memory. I thought I could be more than the sum of my parts, but I am only pieces without anything to hold on to anymore. I became the girl who made things end. I would try so hard to ruin what I thought would burn to ashes. I became a haunted house myself, remembering the creaks and the trapdoors, but not trusting myself to enter. And when I am not paying attention, my hand waves to the remains of my fabricated shadows — the ghosts of all the people and things my heart still holds on to.

I thought the world fantasized about me. I thought the world was waiting for its Messiah. I thought it stood at the edge of the curb, next to the bus stop, looking at the passengers stepping off, waiting eagerly for my arrival. For the savior, for their savior. I knew not my journey but I recognized my destiny. Arrive — and be loved. Save them — and be immortalized. Strike — strike them before they ache in their bones and tell themselves that you do not exist. Contrary to fact, there is no context for this. I have been sent, and I have been beckoned. Wait for me! Wait for me when love has no name, wait for me when you’re alone in this world, and wait for me when you’re about to step off the cliff. Be my echo, and I will find you tolerable, I will find you pleasant. Noise will creak and silence will commit suicide. And I will be all alone: the Messiah eternal, the Messiah of the Gods, the Messiah unavenged. They will try to flee, but they will fall, and they will miss the one who could have saved them all.

If it’s true that birthmarks tell me where I died in my past lives, shouldn’t they be called deathmarks? And what will happen in my millionth life? Will I be flesh or will I be just scattered spots of all my sufferings? And when I see a baby born without ridges or dents, is that a first birth? A first life? But when I examine myself, I cannot remember what I was born with and what had piled on over the years. How many birthmarks can I have before I die infinitely? How can our battered bodies endure so many deaths? Can a babe be older than the two hundred year old? I think so, if they’ve been through so many reincarnations that they cannot count them all. Is there where wisdom comes from? The ends and the beginnings? And what happens when your birthmarks become your deathscars? Does your soul get ripped apart by the echoes of your last breath? Maybe this is where cynicism and sadness comes from — from the bullet wounds and the hanged nooses, from the broken hearts and the sounds of jutted starts. My hands trace my body and try to count all my breaths. How many parents and children have I had? How many mistakes have ruined the world for me? Was I someone famous? Or was I the beggar on the streets? How many people have I loved and how many people have I lost?And the only mark on me is in my mind, as I ask the same question over and over again: how can our battered souls endure so many lives?

I used my heartbeat as a countdown as I waited with frozen breath for the freefall. I felt like everyone was watching with me — waiting for the world to collapse on itself and let us out, like air out of a bag. I grew up afraid of vertigo as much as I was afraid of heights; I caught flies in my fears and never felt as alone as I did looking up at the clouds. They all jumped up there — the dancing dreamers and the kids who could make shapes out of nothing. I shuddered at the incessant whispers and I promised myself to make evanescence out of permanence. People fall like it’s nothing, but I have been so used to traversing sideways, the person who never knew anything but the horizon. They thrown down ropes and they tease me with their swinging, but I could never leave the ground. And now they’re breaking barriers and now they’re visiting the moon and now I am addicted to loathing my fears. They’re pulling me like crisp leaves, painting metaphors of a sort of autumn in my mind. I wanted to look up so badly but my eyes seek the ground. Oh how I hate the voices in my head. The world watches me with frozen heartbeats and I let go of my last breath and I let go of the ropes and I became the dancing dreamer that never woke up.

January was never the beginning; it was always the end. January collapsed innocence; it exposed secrets. January did not sink like a stone; it did not float like a flower. January thundered in storm-clad and naked-bare; it thought it ran like clouds despite its rainless catastrophe. January was a liar; it promised resolutions and well-held wishes. January, instead, was boring; it lacked drama and interest and intrigue. January exhausted me; it killed me. January was wrought with misinterpretation and falsified vulnerability; it pulled up memories of forgotten winter. January ran away in its cowardice; it chased the sun from the sky and ruined my well cut lawn; it ravaged the streets and shook the gangs from the alleys. January was the reason I had to take down my Christmas lights; it turned our hearts cold and said monotonously, “Happy New Year.”

Years fold over, in pieces and torn sheets, crumpling under the weight of everything that came before. And this is how the world breathes history. Getting old feels like a fever, succumbing to heaviness and decay. Intrepidity seems centuries away, lost in a foreign land, in a distant mythology. To stray is striken down as cowardice, as if the path was always clear, breaking power cables from the shine of the undiluted neon. But maps are only given to those who already know where they’re going, not to hitchhikers who are trying to find home, not just the way to get there. And so, we ask everyone who they are and what they want and where they came from, hoping to bleed the same DNA, hoping to match someone, anyone. I think it’s easy to sneer and scoff at this unfettered assail, but don’t you hear the desperation in our voices? Because even if our larynxes don’t sound so pretty, don’t echo quite pleasant, at lease they have a sound. But what use is a voice if no one pays attention? Whoever came up with the idea of a tree falling in a forest with no one around must have been surrounded by people that never listened. It may be sadder to think that way, but I’m sad enough to think that way. On the highway alone, each step plays the teeter-totter of getting and not quite getting there. Your left foot revives your resolves while your right shrinks your aspirations right back down. You are supposed to be getting wiser as you get older, but the pages have been glued together, wrenched and nailed shut, ripped into silence. So when the tiny sapling falls, the redwood forest doesn’t bend down low enough to notice. The roots disperse away, because quite frankly, no one was paying attention at all.

Something lies, something lies in between the accents of what if and almost, almost as if there wasn’t such thing as perfection. But if that was true, then reality was a bit more distant than I could allow it to be. It didn’t hint of glamour or gloss. Rather, everything was just matte, everything just fell flat. If I could, I would, you know that I would. But to be is to try; let me dare to prove Yoda wrong, because when you’re different, you don’t have to worry about perfection. How can they quantify the optimal when there’s just a sample size of one? To be unique is to not worry about the competition. So no, I don’t think Yoda thought about that at all. To play the game of effortlessness took too much effort to even bother. You had to be careful to avoid being careless when you’re out to prove that you couldn’t care less. It was always easy to find the spectacular in the now — they shone fantasy on the mundane backdrop of reality. Talent always was supposed to trump dedication, or so they told me. In actuality, talent rotted, rude and bitter, in the lines of what if and almost, too stuck in the imaginary to recognize that potential energy was always theoretical and never counted, not really, not where it matters. Someone needs to pull back the curtains, rip the bandage that praised valor over value. Perfection is only found in the consistency it takes to whittle away wood, to refine marble, to turn another page. Let the heroes take the stage — they’re always in danger of falling off the edge anyway.

I know that blue bleeds all over your artwork because I have nightmares of your favorite memory. But how do you remember the right hue of the ocean water when you lean into her lips? I know you notice the red that bleeds all over mine, but you never asked why. Would you believe I never noticed the blood that drenched us when you slit my throat? I was too focused on you to be anything but blind. Damn, I’m intoxicated off these infusions. I’ve drunk imagination and memories to the point where I slur purple when they ask me my favorite color. I only thought in black and white before I met you; your presence became the full spectrum ablaze in fireworks. Tell me — how far away is she from me in your mind? Let me know if you ever blur us in your dreams; do I ever confuse you into colorblindness? I know you’re known for selective coloring, and the Devil’s black has darkened your aura. At times, you made me the Aurora, but I’m becoming quantum since your distance (our pigments should never be this far apart). She’s the universe, she’s becoming all you can see; my shade is getting so hard to paint, dust is all I’ll ever be.

Regret is the injury of nostalgia, as we reclaim our identities by the passing years, and forget where we came from, and what we used to believe in. Our current passions override the old, and it’s easy to disregard the desires of your previous versions. Age threatens to erase our ghosts into invisibility. How easy do we make it to forget everything? I have learned to forgive myself for the things I have done, if only to recognize that in that moment, it was what I truly truly wanted. Or else, it was the only option I could take. Experience has made me weary, and my bones threaten to break as they shake, while I wait for wisdom to take over me. But wisdom doesn’t take on the mirage of age, but rather envelopes itself in the pull of children’s thoughts. I thought my refinement made me better, as I put more footprints on the earth. Yet, true evocation found me when I was barely passed five, and still too worldly to be fearful of the dark. The mirror stage is what we yearn for in all of our endeavors; we ache to return through our hallucinations, through our art, through our spirituality, to the unity between us and the ground we touch. We have learned the hierarchy of the body, and nothing has been quite the same since then. And in that order, our memories rule in forthright, and so we return to the viciousity that lives in spinning in circles. Time elapses and relapses, but in the end, it’s my bones who collapse.

 

Anxiety gets thrown out reckless, proven in social science to be nothing but a lie. Yet, I find myself jittery on every level, all my electrons are spinning in the wrong direction. This is what I have become from you. I walked down every street, giving away walkie talkies to anyone with eyes and a heartbeat, leaving with promises of quick calls. They all said they would let me know if they saw you. My stresses turn to paranoia, and I’ve have taken to wrapping gauze on the folds of my eyelids. When I was warned that it would keep me from seeing the sunset, I, instead, mummified every path in my way. To keep you at a distance, I have learned to remove myself from the crowds. I only leave the safety of my bedroom when someone calls me and lets me know you walked by. I can only live in the places you just visited — being your shadow keeps you from being mine. I try not to reek of double exposure, but I can’t help but notice that my passport has been stamped at all our memories, as you take her where you took me. I never found you to be original, in the way artists are original — not at all, but at least, not pretending to — but this, this threw me over the lines of sanity. I swam towards moving on, and got lost at how; I missed the exit of get over it, and kept returning to the dead end that didn’t even announce itself as that. Instead, it just said, happily ever after: this way here.

You are my adversity; you are everywhere, all the time. You are my disaster. You have brought me to life. You lit fireworks in my heart, and I am still burning. I am still in the sky, and it is so far from you. I did not believe in love at first sight, but maybe now I do. Maybe I just didn’t believe in living, because I was asleep before I met you. You became an addiction, and I was a user that was just pulled closer. It wasn’t happy, it was everything. It was anger, and sadness, and faith, and despair, and depression, and joy, and frustration. It was love, wasn’t it? With you, I am on that high. I am alive with you. Without you, everything is less. No wonder I became addicted. You were hero of my heroin. I put myself in rehab, but the system is corrupt, and we ran to each other over and over again. I ruined my world when you weren’t there to illuminate it. I am trying to be better now, but you make it so hard for anything to be neutral. I need to make my own fireworks, you can’t always be the fuel to set me ablaze. But I have learned so much from you. I am a better person because of you. The world is more vivid and worth living in. I will make my peace with your existence; I just don’t know if you still will be there in that balancing act.

Time never feels as much of an illusion as when you’re roaring away on an airplane, racing the sunset to your destination. You get lost in your own cyclic metronome, finding exhaustion has nothing to do with when the shopkeepers turn over the signs and lock the doors. Sometimes, I wondered, if you went fast enough, maybe you could beat your own mistakes. Your younger selves will look into these weary eyes and make promises to never end up like how you are now. Lids that cannot keep open, a head that won’t stop throbbing — how unfortunate it is that we sleep at all. I have been meaning to go to a sleep clinic, if only to rid myself of the nightmares that wake everyone up in the early mornings. But my resolve wavers in the very real worry, that if I lose these nightmares, I will lose you entirely. Their phone number is written in smeared pen marks on the back of my hand, but every time I shower, I make sure to rub it all off. While drying in my towel shaped hair and body, I scribble it back on again. These trips are making me too bold. I am starting to feel as if I have all the time in the world to change.