Our communion has always been two things at once,
a genuine shared joy in the comfort of each other’s embrace,
and yet also a reprisal of petty attempts to entrench our worth.
To the unstable is a return to brief and vague references.
To the forever anxious is a casting of a darker shadow.
To the self-assured is a veiled calm exclamation of ease.
Though we would like to think otherwise, are truly nothing special.
In our collective failed duties as informed citizens,
we all reach for shorthands and binaries in order to simplify,
and atrocities not only become normalized, they are forgiven.
As the smells of our collective homes become ever staler,
as our meals become more economized,
we forget that we are time’s exception.
After our beers I was set off back into the domain of here and now,
standing in front of an elevator where the cries of the wheelchair-bound pierced my calm,
“Please, do not kill my brothers”
pleaded a woman in her late nineties mistaking me for a British soldier.
“Please protect me from these (an unrecognizable and dated racial slur) and Bolsheviks”
said another a week later.
“I am leaving here for good and will never resurface once I reach Poland”
astonished at her eloquence behind her physically mangled jaw I saw eyes that were stuck eighty years in the past as they looked at me with hatred.
So now weeks later as we once again share a pitcher of beer,
I cannot help but wonder what repeated traumas will resurface for you,
my dear friends.
I wonder what our cries will be when our reality becomes a faded canvas,
as we try to make sense of the constant bombardment of stimulation,
with only our faded memories as our eroded paintbrushes.