My doctor’s office could not see me before the following week, so I made a virtual appointment, described my symptoms, and got some meds. Except for the Wordle and the Strands, I could not solve any of my usual puzzles. The Quordle and Octordle, the Daily Waffle and the Deluxe, the Word Search were all failures. I don’t have winning streaks just as I never did succeed in perfect attendance records in elementary or middle schools, and I have had to make my peace with them. I don’t know if everyone presents these little challenges to themselves, setting themselves up for unnecessary measures for failure, but I have a lot of those.

Trying to avoid stepping on cracks, beating invisible buzzers, timing myself on all manner of activities, watching the clock for certain times while also hoping I catch them spontaneously. I’m walking the house and the world, making paintings and plans and writing, feeling the buzz of the antibiotics trying to fight off any and everything I have stuffed down into my lungs.

In TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), the lungs are associated with sadness and grief and are linked with emotional release and letting go. The Po, corporeal soul, associated with instinctual and physical sensations and physical vitality, is believed to be housed in the lungs. I have prided myself for most of my life of never letting any cold or illness bury itself into the pockets of my lungs, even tell the tale of going sledding with the girls when they were small and suddenly feeling so ill as I climbed back up the hill that I went straight home and got in the bed, spiking a fever (which I am also not prone to) and falling deep into a fever dream that took me across dimensions. I had bronchitis that time. Weathered it caring for those two who never ended up with it.

I am on a course of antibiotics with the promise of a return visit if I do not clear it all, potentially needing an inhaler, and certainly more rest, but my pup is not quite interested in shorter walks. Anyone on our trail will hear me say,

Come on, man!

at least five to six times on our journey as Ivan, tries to rank in order the most spectacular pee spots on our route, trying to identify which of his friends has marked a particular blade of grass, and where the rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, and foxes are leaving their scat. Come on, man!

I am frustrated because I am winded and don’t feel like myself. His pulling and my exhaustion showing me that I am not quite well.

I took a driving tour through Rochester with my cousin, Kelley, my ace, and considered the place that my uncle and his family called home. I’d only visited once during his lifetime, only remembered that one of the first and only things people ever said about it was that it was cold. The seasons are changing, so there were some cold mornings, but it was not so bad all things considered. Though my uncle Tommy was the eldest in his family, he’d married and had children last, so my cousins are much younger than I.

I am the oldest cousin on that side of the family, a title that is important in the linear sense. There is zero and then there is number one. I have never quite been a powerful number one. I don’t know if my Capricorn nature allows it, and I am more a believer in consensus. I tend to be more vigilant and introspective, but when called to task, I can usually muster some guidance. I am a lead-from-the-back kind of girl.

My uncle was described as soft-spoken and humble, gifted and talented truly beyond measure. He was an exceptional man with academic and professional accolades, a vascular surgeon whose heart had begun to give out on him, was beloved by his community and his family, and was one of my father’s best friends. My dad loved this man with his whole being. When I FaceTimed with my uncle and two of my cousins just days before his passing, I asked him,

Who all in the room there with you? Lemme see.

He answered,

Stevie, (a pause), David, Hallie, some others.

Stevie was my dad, gone nearly five years now, back in the room. When I need to speak something out loud, I am still talking to him, mostly on the long walks with Ivan, sometimes in the house where I imagine it sounds like I am talking to myself. I feel him back in the room. I am becoming a crazy, old lady.

I feel him IN the room when he was not often during this lifetime together. I don’t know when it was that he started pushing me so hard out of the frame. There was always some tension, but there was a moment when we could not turn back, when like a secret love, he’d be kind to me in private, open, and then cruel in public, relentlessly shaming. When I am with my family, I remember this place, see the faces of the witnesses, hold on still to our line, recognizing that our lives have been and will be a spiral, that we will come back again and again.

I am finishing this on the last day of my antibiotics course. I have slept in a space capsule, taking off nearly the moment I close my eyes into outer space and other planetary systems. My dad has been distant, showing my uncle around, but sometimes they pop up. When he first passed, I’d asked my friend, a wonderful psychic why he hadn’t come immediately to see me when I’d told him nearly all my life with him that I’d be open to a visit.

He’s exploring! she’d said. He’s really curious and awestruck at the moment.

I’ve been thinking about what a marvelous tour guide he must be for the brother he loves so much.

I’d brought a pendulum with me to my uncle’s house; I often carry one and took it with me into one of the bedrooms. I’d asked if he was there and the pendulum swung what I understand to be ‘no’ and was surprised. I asked if anyone was there and the pendulum swung a wild ‘yes.’ I later learned that that room had been left as it had been when my auntie passed and that my uncle had moved himself to another room these past five years. In the room where he’d moved, there was also a distinct ‘no’ and I thought it might be too soon for him to return. I shared this only with a cousin, knowing that the spiritual conversations aren’t easy or comfortable for many and I don’t want to/didn’t want to upset anyone. The way we talk about and experience one another in life and death are often so difficult to discuss or acknowledge.

My cough still lingers even after seven days of antibiotics though there has been much improvement. It is a struggle to feel myself weakened and tired. These past few weeks have been humbling and have left me lingering in the in-betweens. My body vibrates and my ears pop, my thoughts race me to sleep. I don’t even attempt to keep my head up.

There is what is said and what is unsaid, time pushing us, heart strings pulling, places where I feel I can rest despite the weariness and others where I simply cannot find safety or a cool side to the pillow.

My lungs are clearing and this morning I burst into tears at the sight of my dad in a photo sitting at his kitchen table with my girls. What I feel now is a pressure in my ears and a tickle at the back of my throat that makes a spasmodic cough that sounds like a bark and sometimes clears. The inhales are deep, like I am revving up to breathe, restarting an engine that had been denied movement on the open road.

The flight into Rochester was an hour and ten minutes. We were warned by the pilot before we even took off that there would be some pretty violent turbulence and I, sitting by the window, pulled down the shade. My cousin was next to me and had given me the window seat because she is gracious and kind and good and didn’t care one way or the other where she sat.

When I saw her working on her needlepoint project, I realized she’d need more light and opened it more than 1/2 way, because I was grateful to be at the window and because I love her. She went with me to see my father as he was dying. I’d asked her because I was afraid to go alone and because I knew her loved her. He’d always found it easier to love her, the daughter of his big sister, than he had me. I was always the twisted knot of what he could not bear about himself and the little scraps of my mother’s snobbishness, and the pride of the first-born daughter who’d learned more than he’d expected at his knee. I loved her all the same. Loved her differently than my own siblings who were part of our family mythology replete with fated and doomed connections and behaviors, whispers and machinations.

My father’s family did not have that, something that has always been a source of pride for all the others, the way they love, the bond, the connection. There I am again, hacking up my lungs in the church, pressing the grief back into the tissues passed out by the pastor.

After walking the dog, I curled in next to my daughter, rubbing my feet on hers, already warm from a nighttime of cuddles. She’d never spent the night alone in the house and I was proud of her and wanted to spoon her but did not want to cough in her ear. We touched our toes and I turned over to sleep, she too, both of us able to settle into the comfort of being each other’s.

She’s come to check on me in the early morning hours when my cough won’t subside. Has left water for me at my bedside. I’ve gotten up to make her something she loves for breakfast even if it’s too early and I still feel poorly. I must get better for our trip next weekend to see her sister in Italy. We’ll sit side by side and I’ll allow her to pick the better seat.

Of the five siblings, my father and my Uncle Tommy are the only two gone and the thought of their reunion gives me peace.

I may ask for an oral steroid if this does not clear soon. I want to cuddle my girls when we are together; don’t want to cough in their ears, whispering even more grief into their lives. I want to feel like myself.

I’ve been falling asleep before 9 pm. If I take anything for the cough it’s even earlier, and my daughter will lock up and tuck me in. I know because I wake up wrapped in my blankets and the house is dark and still. It’s been a week since I’ve returned, a few days shy since I began my antibiotics, a few days more until we leave. I am breathing more steadily today, clearing and cleaning, resting until our next journey, however and whenever we make it.

“I didn’t know they were doing construction so close to the school,” I’d thought.

“Maybe someone had run the light. I hope no one was hit.”

There was a lot of traffic, kids walking to and from school, noise. I was listening to a conversation about Ukraine’s bombing of the Russian data centers and the effect that had on the bot farms that have been tainting discourse around just about everything in American life.

As I looked to my left, I saw three “police” with their hands on a young man, about 18-20 years old, holding on like those contests where if you let go you won’t win the brand new car, and they were all masked. I couldn’t place their uniforms or their faces. Most of the police officers in our community are well known, serving at many functions and cruising the familiar streets usually with a head nod or at least just familiarity with the place.

Their uniforms weren’t blue. They had no shields. Their body language was off. There were so many of them.

There was something about the look on the boy’s face and the way the woman’s gloves seemed out of place in this altercation, that it began to dawn on me. I began shaking immediately, my body wanting to do something other than drive the car forward, my need to engage enough to threaten my equilibrium.

I fumbled for my phone, could only pull up my group thread, so left a message:

You guys, I am on (street name redacted) and (street name redacted). ICE has a young man out of the car. There are six of them, can’t tell who else is in the truck. The kid is in a white truck. I can’t get to the response number. I am driving and can’t call from my phone. Someone please. Please.

I made it to the grocery store parking lot and just started crying. Should I walk back? Should I start recording? These people at the Stop and Shop were going about their business, having no idea what was happening just a few hundred feet away.

I wanted to tell someone and I wanted to do more. My group thread had sprung into action and had done everything they could do from where they were. And for all of us, it didn’t feel enough. The rest of the day, parenting, packing to travel for a funeral, was a blur. I just felt sick, could not get that boy’s face out of my mind. I wondered if anyone had stopped, had raged, had advocated, had cared about what was happening.

By early evening I wanted to lie down but needed to get my work done before leaving. I was weepy. I was ashamed.

“We are forever changed. We don’t come back from this. The cruelty, the humiliation, the isolation has to be the point. This is a horror.”

From another friend, I learned that the woman I had seen in the studio window also witnessed the moment, so I messaged her. We were both numb, chilled by what we’d seen, the ordinariness of the altercation. The stillness in the air, everything suspended, hovering in front of us like frozen in the Matrix.

We continue to check in with one another throughout the day, one last time before bed. She said she was grateful to hug her boys, and I desperately extended my hand to my child who still lived with me and the other studying abroad.

I don’t know if I have much more to say about it right now other than that, my heart broke at our inhumanity and about how little we have come to consider one another. I know we won’t all like each other and that we will not despite so many good intentions heal ourselves if we won’t look at the trauma that feeds our pain and some of the most horrific actions. It seems as though we have come to a place of pride and how terribly we can treat one another and equal equally how easily we can dissociate from witnessing the torture and torment of others.

I see myself in everyone’s pain. It just seems to be the way that I am built. I want to believe that I would welcome all souls who are lost or scared or hurt or targeted into my safe place. Not being able to do so nearly broke my heart, and I am still sitting with it.

I want to believe we are better than this. I hope we are better than this. I don’t know that all of us want to be better than this.

My father’s cancer had returned, and he and my mother were scheduled for a cruise, which would be their last, when word of a growing pandemic began. I still look at the picture of the two of them dressed in their matching oranges, lanyards around their necks, smiles broad. I’d thought they might cancel. In the end, glad they did not.

When we locked in, I’d wanted to have a roller-skating party for my 50th, but it would never materialize. What first looked like ‘two weeks while we assess the severity of this crisis,’ became years of living inside a jewel box of my own creation, a place I’d hoped to keep safe my children from the things that terrified me. They didn’t know yet what of what to be mortally terrified. We’d not begun the conversations about mortality and existential crisis. We’d not had all the deaths.

I’d had deaths. Not many in my family but Michael Jackson had died the day we were moving out of our Upper West Side apartment, shipping our things to Barbados, and moving in with my parents for a few months until it arrived. It was a marker, one that pulls me back into the darkness of New York City’s dawn as our cab driver whisks us to the airport and I pass the familiar streets I’d called home for ten years. ‘You are not alone’ plays and he tells me of his boyhood loving Michael Jackson, and I know I will feel from this moment forward a loneliness that would take me back to my childhood bedroom where the accordion mirrors showed an infinite number of ‘me’s,’ none of them real, all of them the same, doing high kicks and making funny faces, checking my teeth and gums and arms, looking out at myself, but never acknowledging the source me. I was standing right there but couldn’t see myself.

When we locked in, the only adult in the room was me. The me who had lost Bowie and Prince, whose marriage had crumbled like termite-eaten wood, and had gone sideways. The me whose father was sick and whose mother, for whatever reason or another, was distant and could still not see herself but for the high kicks and teeth and arms in the multiple universes of the accordion mirror. I made for us a cocoon where I’d have felt safe, and made myself available to them in ways that, for whatever reason or another, my own mother had not been able to be for me. I didn’t want them to believe that whatever reason or another was because they too did not quite exist.

Our home became a labyrinthine settlement where we created and lounged and make Tik Toks and bread and let the dog I’d sworn would never, on the bed and into all things. I pretended safety until they believed it thoroughly, but I went to bed like I had in that room upstairs to the left of the stairway, in the corner, wallpapered clouds on the ceiling. Where I’d continue to do high kicks like a chorus line of Stephanie Rockettes and marvel at the back of my head, something I’d not much looked at.

My father got sick again when the marvelous cocktail of treatments began to fail him. We Zoomed and FaceTimed with everyone we knew. The girls graduated in their pajamas, everyone could watch on screen as their names were called. We likely walked miles with the dog after that, a motley crew of bandits. Everyone was out walking then too.

I have returned slowly to my shamanic practice, participating in healing work, doing some of my own, allowing my intuition and guidance to speak to me quietly as it once did in that room upstairs where I mostly thought I was just weird, not for everyone/anyone, where I did high kicks and also lay in the floor and woke to thousands of me standing up.

There is an online theory that we all died during Covid, and we are living in the bardo, hovering in the in-between, and that the dark energies held at bay by the smoke and mirrors of our most charmed selves, were unleashed by our fears and unresolved grievances.

Recently, dreams have begun unravelling some of the fleeting moments of that time. I wake up with the sensation that I’ve had deep, rapturous conversations with someone during my sleep, that there is something unsettled. It may be middle age. My youngest is finishing high school this year and we have together been holding space for one another as she transitions to a young woman on her own in the world and I too become a woman on my own in the world. Mirrors repeating endless high kicks and frowns and twisted smiles.

The house still reminds me of the tent city from then, though it is now open and decorated with more sophisticated accoutrements and paintings of my own and of other artists I enjoy. It became a place that held us all with grace and safety as we each tried to walk on wobbly legs. Watching them pass the same mile markers that for me left scars and welts, has me holding my breath, and also bearing witness to other pains for which I’d been unprepared. I reckoned with my wounds and the expectation that they might suffer the same, and the hope they would not, by asking myself the questions from a recent meditation about reciprocity, entitlement, and expectation.

To what do I feel entitled? Where do I give too much and where have I received more than I have given, maybe even more than I believe I have deserved. I once had a therapist who said, though she understood it to be a relatively cruel statement, that no one really deserved anything. It was a philosophical charge, something very challenging to consider at that moment in my life. Why did we feel we deserved better or more, that our wants and desires had to be met, that it was our right to make such demands of a god or universe.

Listening to an interview with the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times, I was struck by a comment she made. Paraphrasing, she wondered why it is that there is a shame in dreaming of and working towards a global peace. She asked how it is that this level of extreme violence has come to dominate how we navigate and perceive success in the world, that dominance over has caused us to abandon the desire to insist upon basic human rights for us all that the same rights be given no matter the region of the world. Sitting with this interview and my meditation, I have asked myself if I expect that this all be easier for me, for my community than any other. I have sat quietly with our collective suffering and remembered how I gripped and rung my hands during those years trapped inside.

I believe we are all just realizing how profound the experience the global lockdown was on our psyches, and perhaps the impact, in general, that isolation, unhealed trauma, and old wounds denied have on a human being. For some reason, we have allowed those who self-congratulate themselves for their cruelty and their absolute disconnection from a sense of humanity, mankind, and collective good, to not only thrive, but to be celebrated for choosing their own individual wins and achievements rather than a collective good.

Sitting with where I have taken more than I have given, where I have believed in my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a construct, while also recognizing that there are plenty of others who do not have even the chance to dream it, has humbled me. Those nights during the pandemic, after putting the girls to bed, after cleaning the kitchen, and wiping down surfaces and door handles, I’d walk through our tent city turning off twinkle lights and straightening pillows and thank god, thank everything that had a hand in our blessings, no more deserved, no less than anyone else’s. I’d cry to myself about how we’d arrived here, the three of us and the dog, without their father, his having left on a note so sour I knew we’d never be a family again.

Sometime after all that, after everyone started to die and we numbed ourselves to the deaths or just couldn’t catch our breaths and had no exhales left and we couldn’t breathe or regulate and had too few safe places to return that weren’t projections, we started grasping for the ground. I see my selves in the flat planes of the accordion, and I believe they are somehow different from me and from one another.

When the world had stirrings of waking up, I collapsed our tents. We were slowly given permission to walk in both directions up and down the aisles at the grocery store, stopped wearing our masks everywhere, choosing to do so at our discretion.

I had a shorter fuse for dishonesty and inauthentic communication, didn’t care to entertain mind games or frivolous social chatter. I walk through the house still, as though the tapestries and lights are still hanging, as though it is our sacred camp where I might hide for just a while longer.

In the healing meditation on entitlement, I closed my eyes and went deep into the center of my heart as directed. With incantations, songs, and tobacco, the healer cleared and blew tobacco into the places where I had broken, where I had opened, where I was fractured into reflections in the accordion mirror in my childhood bedroom.

I recently found a photo of myself in my childhood bedroom and was completely struck by how lovely I was. I’d never known. There was the ceiling with the wallpapered clouds, the cut outs from the fashion magazines layered on the walls, a poster of Dolph Lundgren who had beat Rocky’s ass and killed Apollo Creed. I was equal parts afraid and thrilled by him. There is still so much to unpack.

To feel entitled to something always meant to me that someone else would suffer because I’d received it. I’ve believed love too to be that way. When everything went sideways during the pandemic, I’d close my eyes at night with no idea what would become of morning. I expect nothing and anything still. Know that the world will either end or continue. I give more to my children than anyone else on earth. I take as little as I can, so much so that I don’t even know what I want or need anymore.

We’d make lists in the first days of lockdown, contacted food vendors about huge shipments for our neighbors and friends. We’d stockpile certain foods and others would be luxuries. I’d keep my eye on the cupboard and pantry and either ask a neighbor to go or would go myself and get more of the staples than the things that could go bad. I’d hold my breath and wipe everything down and the girls would receive me at the door with relief.

As we unpacked, we’d talk about all the things we were going to make, might settle down with some chips or they with candy I’d bought even though they hadn’t asked. I’d see myself doing high kicks in the accordion mirror, precision dancing, completely in sync with myself, and then I’d look down at my body and touch my stomach, my arms, my chest, my neck and draw the exhale from my lungs.

Years passed. My father died and pulled the rip cord on our family’s parachute which released itself into the sky as we fell to the ground. I kept chatting with him on my long walks anyway, more than when he was alive, and I told him. There is no more air in the air. I reckoned with, continue to reckon with all the lost time, still grasping for the parts still lost in purgatory. The girls went back to school, found their friends and their footing. Their dad moved out. And without my realizing it, I have gone back to the room with the clouds on the ceiling, the tent city, the twinkle lights and secret passages I’ve constructed to pretend safety. I am still struck by how lovely. I am.

I admit I like this weather change. Wearing a tank top under my threadbare sweater that will likely turn to gauze on my body before I get rid of it, the sharp sensation of cold on my hands and my clammy skin, I feel myself more as weary bones and skin than taut muscle, as I’d have once described myself. I pass the neighbor that I believe went mad for two weeks who is walking with her dog who is completely mental and usually hyper, jumping from sidewalk to just over my head in seconds, but who today is subdued. Perhaps the chill is too much for her.

My earbuds seem to be broken, so I am not able to walk with them in, listening to my book (Hamnet, A Novel of the Plague, by Maggie O’Farrell read by Jessie Buckley who won the Oscar for playing Agnes in the movie), so instead crane my neck so that my ear reaches more to the sky to hear what these birds are saying. For the first time in a while, the squawk of the geese catches my attention, and I look up see their familiar formation. I wonder if this means that this is the one true autumn, if they are really leaving, or if we will have another week of too warm days, hot even, where I debate the air conditioning and the heat in the course of a few hours. I hear a few others, robins, catbirds, crows, and bluejays, and make note that I am not really a bird lady because I can’t yet tell whose call is whose.

I scour the grass for feathers, holding out for another hawk, happy for a bluejay, would come undone for another cardinal or goldfinch. I take our usual loop and then go a little further because I still have more thinking to do. Where the deer lay dead in the grass for the last day or two, there are now mushrooms growing. The other deer has been nowhere to be found. I worry about her every morning and then again at night when I take the longer walk. Are the mushrooms marking the spot? A halo of spores where there was once a vibrant life?

When I am listening to my book, I am sometimes inspired by the way the words have been written and start thinking my own lines and then discover I’ve missed something; the two threads, the story and my own stirring thoughts, weave into a nonsense where I catch one line of the book and then a few beats from myself, and then the sound of the birds or an airplane, then find myself startled back, wondering what I’ve missed. And I do always circle back. I want to know what I have missed, what I may have ignored, seek a message or meaning.

This is what everything feels like every day, trying to follow all the threads, noticing the changes, mourning the fallen, looking for their mothers, looking for my mother, looking for my family, my girls, my dog, my baby daddy, and my friends. It is rewriting, the retelling of the narrative where I am locked in amber as the girl I was when I was being brought up, and then the quiet leitmotif of my daily reminders that there is something more, that I have not quite put my finger on, but is just there, just there, and now explaining to myself, realizing that yes, I have always been some other way, some other girl than I’d been believed to be, the spores encircling me, the fungi connecting me to the other secret creatures poorly described or accounted for.

My friend said,

Steph, y’all are in your fifties, like damn.

And she isn’t wrong, who wants to walk in that circle ad infinitum.

Autumn is my favorite season. I like sweatpants and flip flops and windbreakers and beanies and shorts and leg warmers and tank tops under threadbare sweaters. I like cleaning out the closet of the things never worn in summer, of the clothes that no longer suit this hidden mushroom of a girl. Catching sight of myself, I see the ‘Fisher King’1 in a blackberry lipstick and realize that this has always been my look. I am a wandering madwoman with a cute hidden figure under all of it. I like the fall because I can wear protection.

I want to be outside longer if I need in cozy comfort, to eat hardy soups and make apple crisps and carve pumpkins. Though it can feel like the beginning of the end, all of the restorative efforts happen at this time, the preparation for something new, for hibernating into rebirth, for hunkering down, preparing for the continued bitterness of the winters of our discontent, I want it.

I look at the gas station sign to see that gas is still 4.47 a gallon for regular cash, 4.57 on a card. Pickleballs are ping-ping-ponging back and forth, the thwap of basketballs on palms and then the swoosh of the net or the ricochet of the backboard for the same two young men who come early in the morning. I think one might be unhoused. He will stay for hours as he does every day. There are men in cars and on bikes who cruise up slowly behind me until they realize that I am an older woman, a woman and not in girl in my leopard print coat and black tie-dyed sweats and high tops. I am not to be toyed with, nor do I have the energy or interest in playing with them. There are the landscapers and handymen in their trucks and vans, the same ones occasionally targeted by ICE on mornings as crisp and blue as this one. And there is news, there are reports and stories on my phone that I might see but not listen to because my earbuds aren’t working.

I want only the sound of the birds I cannot quite name and the remembered sound of me muttering to myself like I have since I was a girl, walking to a friend’s house, trying not to step on cracks, zipping up my windbreaker lined with some cotton panel so the plastic didn’t touch my skin directly. It seems like overnight I arrived in the fall of my life.

Each turn around the park I remember every person for whom I’ve been a disappointment, wondering if they ever wondered if they disappointed me. Too much sparing with the past’s shadows and hanging branches that hit my face when I bend down to pick up Ivan’s shit or the gnats that fight me for peace. They will be gone come winter; they will likely be gone in the next week or two as it cools down. I promise myself with every swat of my hand that I will not let the gnats get to me, that they are a test. That I will let Ivan linger and smell every single blade of grass because it is a test. I will pay attention to the low hanging branches so they don’t hit me in the face and also look ahead to see them coming before they nearly poke my eye out because they are a test. Every turn around the park, Miss Dashwood2, a test, an opportunity to prepare for my winter, where I will lock in and sleep, preparing myself for another spring.

The problem is I cannot and have not ever been able to remember. I know it to be so because of the witnesses and the gossip, yet despite years of therapy and shamanic healing, reiki and meditation, trips on mushrooms and acid, aura scrubbing, dry brushing, all sorts of punishments, I cannot recall. I read these articles that matter-of-factly describe a seven-hour sexual assault with multiple assailants, a victim with no possibility of consenting, letters of apology as punishment (letters of apology!) and my blood boils hot and thick and I need a turn around the neighborhood to build up the energy to take a full breath.

I remember my two-toned green Esprit de Corps jacket and khaki shorts and being so tired from staying up all night with my campers at the day camp where I worked at the time. I remember being hurt or angry about something which is one of the reasons I drank too much. Then I remember nothing.

I don’t know that I will ever settle. In. Or down. I cannot and have not seemed to be able to find comfort inside of my skin unless I am dancing, giving myself permission to leave and come back at will. I cannot recall when the journeying and leaving my body began; I’d been able to do it for much of my childhood. But I’d not done it with desperation until then. I couldn’t get away from myself fast enough.

My vigilance is now legendary. A quick perusal of a room, confirmation of all exits, determining who might come to my aid with a wink or a nod, ensuring that I or any other woman is not left alone with people that make my hair stand on end, and late-night calls and location searches of my daughters wherever they are in the world are standard. When other parents remind me that I must let them make their own way in the world, that I will make myself crazy keeping track, I know how and why it is harder for me to do so without giving them all manner of warning and preparation. I make no apology.

It is concerning that it is my hypervigilance is what surprises, rather than the recognition that boys and men are socialized to care less about us, to consider us differently, to experience us as singularly dimensional. That some do not is the surprise, not that so many do. Years later, I learned that one is a dentist (isn’t that great!?) and the other went into business of some kind, never heard word of the last. I remember smiling and grimacing through the small talk when I decided never to see any of those people again.

In her senior year of high school, my eldest daughter was clearly slipped something in her drink. I got a frantic call from her friends asking me to come immediately to get her. I’d assumed she’d simply had too much to drink as she was an inexperienced drinker and drove to meet her. Her friends met me at the door of a home of a family I’d never met, looking terrified, and sent me upstairs to a room where my girl was vomiting, her eyes completely bugged out, her head rolling, everyone looking at me for guidance. I carried her to the bathroom where she continued to vomit and tried to put the pieces together. Her friends swore she’d had so little to drink and then suddenly said she didn’t feel right and went down.

I carried her, soiled and filthy, down the stairs and put her in the car, drove her home, carried her inside and stripped her so that I could wash her in the tub. I called her father to come help me. Once she was tucked in her bed, moaning and speaking words I could not understand, clutching her stuffie, I broke into shards. I could not stop shaking, couldn’t speak, every attempt at a spoken word I’d inhale it all back down my throat and into my stomach. I thought I might throw up. Went back to her. Caressed her face, kissed her forehead, watched her drift, then went to clean up the mess in the wake.

Her friends had never lost sight of her, never let her go. She’d been with no one, but them and this fact spared me my soul. I said the things to myself that we say, better it was me, I can handle this better, I am made of steel, she could not survive this. When her father left, I got into the bed with her and held her close. She was so small. She still is a tiny peanut; I am hardly bigger than she, but I have convinced myself that I am a big enough shield for others; I have been the only shield for myself. As she slept, I tossed and turned with images and light flashing before my eyes both when closed and open. A horrific taste in my throat kept rising to the back of my tongue and I held my heart and my belly to steady myself.

I can’t name the boys who assaulted me but not because I don’t know their names. I do. I hadn’t thought of them for years, decades even, had cleared myself with so much energy work, so much healing and soul retrieval. There are moments that remind me, often in cinema or television. Most recently on the Hulu series, Furious, a crime thriller about a female serial killer who’d been sex trafficked as a girl and the FBI agent with her own history of trauma trying to catch her.

In the spectacular work of genius, I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s writing, direction, and performance took me to my knees. It may be one of the most extraordinary, moving series I have ever experienced. There were episodes that left me numbed to my core, where I found myself on the floor either wailing or so silent I feared I might be cracking up. That the story centered a dark-skinned Black woman, someone funny, intelligent, eccentric, lovely, and amazing who, in a sudden turn of events, doubted her very sanity, feared she would never again be whole, while also trying to build it back in secrecy was too on the nose.

I knew that no one would take me seriously as a flirtatious, funny, and exuberant Black girl in a town full of white teenagers. I hadn’t felt relevant or of import. Everyone was always watching; no one was looking. I’d been catcalled by older boys as a prepubescent, gawked at by teachers and men at the convenience store when I went in with my parents, but I had no real understanding of how vulnerable I might be, was not as guarded as I am now.

The mistake we make is saying things like, ‘we all have a story, some worse than others’ which prevents us all from telling our stories out loud. It may be true that each of us carries some shame that isn’t ours to hold, that we may spend lifetimes turning images and sounds over in our minds, hoping that something takes shape, hoping that it doesn’t, despite ourselves. We feel it in our core, like the hidden pea in our princess’s comfy bed that never allows us rest, and we realize that no one gives a shit about the princess or the girl or the woman tangled in those sheets, lying on the floor, head lolling to the side, eyes rolled. She will get to carry that ache, that absence of time, that feeling under her skin with no words to articulate it.

I never told my parents, would not have dared after all their disappointments in me as a girl, their girl who was difficult and frustrated and defiant, alone in a white, suburban world where even just explaining how different it was than their own upbringings created a chasm made them anxious and annoyed them, especially given the promise assimilation led us all to believe. My brother was a little boy, so he’d never have known and my sister was there. She’d been at this party.

I know I woke in someone’s bed; someone had brought me there; someone had been concerned I suppose. I am not sure at what point in my assault this came to be. I never learned how I got there. I do remember the damage control I began doing as soon as I threw up and found my things. I started making calls, asking if anyone knew what had happened to me, who it was. I’d asked if I’d had sex because I’d been a virgin and ‘didn’t want my first time to be something like this.’ I’d been assured that I had not, that they had not raped me, we’d not had intercourse, but all manner of things had been done to my body.

People named names and everyone was so casual about it, and I felt this embarrassment and fear that the ‘whole school’ was going to know. I thought that I’d be called to the principal’s office, feared some parent would call my own, worried that I’d never get a boyfriend after this, that I was tainted, that people would know. I reached out to the boy I liked who did not like me back and he told me not to worry about it, that everyone would forget about it and that I just had to give it a few days.

I gave it a few days. I kept my head down. I racked my brain. I touched my body trying to figure it out, to see if any traces could be found. I figured I should hurt somewhere, be bruised, but I wasn’t. For a while no one looked me in the eye, and I didn’t lift my head. I listened to music on my Walkman and dreamed myself outside of my body. I swore off tequila. Didn’t drink it for another 25 years.

I’d learned that one in four women would be sexually assaulted and thought, well, I got that out of the way. Maybe I will be the one in a group of my friends and that by magical thinking I had somehow ‘spared them.’ I was a child, despite the pretense to the contrary. Like so many teenagers, I wanted the world to hurry up and invite me into the whirlwind, without realizing I hadn’t the tools to weather it, hadn’t learned how cruel and unusual some could be and that they may go unpunished, unaccused, unidentified.

I learned that a girl could become a woman with a secret that other predators could sense. I learned that too many would learn the secret and be quick to change the subject, that many would stay friends with assailants, that many would need more information, would hover in the gray, create gray areas where they could safely doubt me, using my still standing there as proof that it could not have been quite so bad.

The just-world fallacy posits that the world is inherently fair and presumes that if something bad happens to someone, then it must be morally deserved. It is a cognitive bias that allows us to justify or blame victims for their suffering, even at the hands of others committing egregious, heinous acts, due to some assigned failing.

I feel a panic right now that feels like a tightening of a belt rather than a kick in the gut, a slow constriction that restricts my breathing. I don’t feel like running, as I usually do, but like falling to the floor and disintegrating. I feel that I may have all those years ago and have just now, as a mother of daughters, begun to pull my pieces back together.

It starts by saying these horrific parts out loud and naming them,

Matthew Ingalls

Jonathan Newell

Gillio Lopes

Diego Sarabia

Scott Norris

Scott Kretzschmar

every man on that thread, every man in that house, every woman that led that young woman to that frat house knowing full well that something wicked was coming.

Speaking their names out loud, calling their demons to claim them, and I believe they will be. I believed it then. I do still.

My prayers are for this young woman who endured hours, hours of brutality, denied humanity, grace, compassion, decency. And for all of the rest of us who have believed it better to keep it to ourselves, who rebuilt, who stand watch over strangers in parks, on streets, in clubs, and all-inclusive resorts. For the girls and women who sit vigilant watch over one another, and for the men who would have called the police or come in busting heads. I swear I hope there are more of you.

Speak it out loud. Rage.

You know I had to do it. It’s all a mess and I wake every morning before clearing the space and energies that may have stagnated around me and ask,

What fresh hell awaits? then take a peek at the headlines and, you know the rest, shake my head whispering, What a shitshow!

But ladies and gentlemen, here I am not referring to hyperbole or metaphor. not to the current state of global crisis that has all the ‘Mr. Burnses’ of the world doing everything possible to turn the planet into a hateful wasteland devoid of life, love, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Here I am not just painting a picture as it were. Here, I am talking about Joanna Wietrzyk and her poopy diaper, hold the diaper, and let that shit run down her legs.

What a perfect representation of the new ‘Love thy neighbor’ ethos, one where personal achievement and success trumps respect or consideration of others, one where there is actually no love, where personal bests and high achieving individuality allows absolute abandon of manners, courtesy, and decency.

I have heard today that the athlete in question, Ms. Wietrzyk and the host of the games, Hyrox, have issued apologies, and that Ms. Wietrzyk has forfeited her win and the points she earned affecting her standing and position is future competitions. I have only glanced at these because to my mind, we have already gone a bridge too far. Too many people had to stand in the presence of, follow behind a competitor, inhale, handle, and feel fecal matter in a closed course where every one of them had either paid to participate or was there doing a job, photographer, monitor, etc. It is my understanding that though it was evident, with feces running down Wietrzyk’s legs, no one said a word. Simply continued on, business as usual.

One thing I believe we all know about feces is that that shit stinks! When my first child was born, my husband and I would take pictures of that ochre-yellow sludge and marvel at the stench coming from that cute little bottom. Changing diapers for years during the space race for potty-training and a lifetime of stomach bugs and ailments has me all too familiar with the visceral reaction coming into close contact with the feces of people I love (including myself, damn) and the mental gymnastics one has to play to ignore and disconnect from one’s senses.

Consider the turned heads and pinched noses when the odor begins to permeate, the gag at the sight of excrement on the sidewalk, in the crack of the tighty whiteys, even in the diaper where we know it’s going to be as we train our littles to use the bathroom in safe, contained, closed spaces. I know there are accidents. Dare I admit I have had them in my life and ran for the hills. I still laugh to myself about a moment running from the 86th Street station on the Upper East Side trying to get home to my apartment between 1st and 2nd Avenues, coaching myself, whispering to myself, begging myself, willing myself to make it home, goddamn it, and making it just to the part where the key is inserted in the door.

Faced with the decision to drop out of the competition after the unfortunate bowel incident, Ms. Wietrzyk elected to continue and competitors in her wake were forced to either work through the affected areas, turning their heads to avoid inhaling or looking at the excrement streaming down her legs. Never did a representative of the governing body step in and declare Ms. Wietrzyk disqualified or unfit to continue.

I have read countless commentary and opinion pieces on the event. Have heard that there are penalties for spitting or blowing one’s nose on the course which involves running, heavy lifting, and other extreme activities catering to the extreme sports athletes that this type of event attracts. These are folks whose focus is on personal achievement and pushing themselves beyond what we all believe to be human capabilities.

We hear this during the Olympics and World Games where athletes who have maximized their bodies’ abilities to perform have just a few chances to exhibit their prowess on a world stage. And there have been examples during other competitions where one might vomit or urinate or bleed, even defecate during competition. But those were events that took place outdoors and did not require other athletes be expected to maneuver through a potential biohazard to reach their own goals. It was not demanded that others walk and climb and burpee through another person’s shit because they were one-track focused on their own success.

Here we are. So many of us are on this course. As competitors, no longer even considering or alluding to community, unity, or peace, we are running a race that puts us in direct contact with or in the wake of someone uncontrollably shitting on us with no consideration or even acknowledgement of their responsibility to a greater good. We are witnessing in real time the myopic vision of people who celebrate themselves for feats of individual success, herald themselves as masters of their own universes in which they are the sun, and everything and anyone is else space dust. Nothing is meant to stand in their way; everything is an obstacle to be defeated. What they leave behind will be someone else’s problem.

Projections on our climate are terrifying and the plea to consider the future for our children seem to fall on deaf ears. Destruction of environmental protections, rising fascism, and policies that cripple any concept of evolution, equity, inclusion, or acceptance of the diversity of humanity and mankind. We are running forward, too many not considering the fetid trail of feces and slop in our wake that our children will have to wade through.

I have presumed like too many that grace and decorum and manners would ultimately guide us, would have us demand of ourselves that we consider others and their well-being before we comfortably settled into our own reclining chairs, that we would not imagine that we could isolate our work, our drive, our perspectives in a vacuum, refusing to consider the experiences and lives of others in our pursuit, and I know now that I would be wrong. There were no rules on the books that explicitly stated that defecating on the course would require removal, likely because no one could imagine the impossible scenario, nor that the contender would continue on course literally trailing shit from her ass, but here we are. Have we no shame?

I don’t believe the intention here was cruelty and cannot imagine a drive so focused, I lose track of everything but my own victory, but I have watched while fighting my own battles, while scaling my own heights, that those who have never had to consider others, who have started the climb from a place of privilege at worst and ignorance at best, will run that race, eyes forward, leaving a trail of shit for everyone else to consider or clean up. At some point we will have to concede that we belong to one another and that our individual pursuits, even the exceptional do not and cannot happen in a vacuum. That it should not have to be written in the rules and regulations that one not shit on the trail where breadcrumbs are laid, in the path on which all others attempting to achieve their goals will follow. Were it so we might know better than to selfishly continue on this path, disregarding anything that demands out empathy, our generosity, our grace, and the recognition of everyone’s humanity.

I cannot recall the make of my phone, but I know that to text I needed to hit the number pads to spell out the words and I paid per text or character; I really can’t remember. The messages weren’t sending. Nothing was sending, so I would run back to the apartment to learn what was happening, stare in disbelief, try to call from the landline, then go back out to the street.

Back outside the second time, there was a queue forming. I waited and we all looked at one another but had no words. Some were crying, shaking. My trembling took place below the surface of my skin. The tiny hairs on my body stood up; the air was electric. When I went out a third time to call, the line was too long. No one could dial out at home, so we went outside, afraid to be outside, but we all wanted to reassure anyone who’d ever known us that we were safe. I wanted to reach my friend Tina who I knew worked in the first tower.

She was in my acting class at HB Studios, and we’d ride the train uptown together at the end of class each week. We learned about one another on these rides. I loved her sense of humor and the dry delivery of her wit. The line wouldn’t connect. Never even heard it ring. I called obsessively until it became an involuntary action. I’d just dial and dial and dial. And the towers fell.

Blue skies. Nothing but blue skies. That’s what I remember and the bright, hot sun, and that my stomach was twisted from the family conversation the night before that had my father sleeping in the guest bedroom at my parents’ home, hurt and angry, and that in my regression, I’d become a child afraid I’d destroyed my family by sharing a painful secret that had nearly ruined me, but had now wounded our patriarch, and I’d begun to apologize profusely for not trusting him with my pain and consoling him for this wound.

#
I messaged the two friends with whom I spent those first hours, locked in my apartment, staring at one another. One needed to get to Metro North to get home and the other downtown, but the trains were not yet running. I’d bought a six-pack but none of us was able to drink. He was newly sober and she and I were too stunned to take in anything. We were wide-eyed and shellshocked, hypervigilant, reacting to every sound, awaiting any word or promise of our safety. In those first hours, it seemed the landmarks of every major city were possible targets, and we were all too afraid to be outside lest another building be targeted.

When my parents came to the city weeks later, my mother and I went to Ground Zero, as it was then called, and stood in line with so many others to bear witness. My father could not bear it. I realize now that he was always more sensitive than I’d allowed. He’d locked in his hurt and zipped it with a grimace and let it ricochet off of everything he’d bottled up until the pieces lodged in his organs.

I think many of us have a tendency to do this because to release our anguish is to acknowledge that we are disintegrating and don’t know what form to which we may return, or if we will forever feel shattered.

No matter how hard one tries to maintain one’s sense of form and definition, the world is going to change us into something unrecognizable for a time. To be so raw and vulnerable in the place I had not only called home, but the place that I’d dreamed of calling home since living on its outskirts as a girl, where everyone else was also torn open, terrified, angry, inconsolable was a collective vibration I still feel in my soul. I love New York.

#
And because we can never forget this sensation, because it is with us, buried deep in the manipura chakra,1 we may find ourselves feeling insecure and withholding, manipulative because we are afraid of that loss of power and internal strength. Many have buried the mantra, never forget deep inside this chakra, letting the roots twist deeper, wind tighter where it feeds the hurt and anguish of their own individual experiences, so that they feel the need to protect only their own open wounds, to never allow again their own feelings of this torment, this anguish, this vulnerability, rather than work towards the prevention of such violence and atrocity on any and every other soul.

But never again was meant to create in us a resilience and a resistance, to help us form community around the promise that we understood we were meant to prevent all of humanity from enduring the horrors of that day. It was meant to inspire in us a compassion for our interconnectedness and our fragility. It was to remind us of our shared humanity, those hours, days, weeks, months when we held onto each other, and everyone said, I am a New Yorker.

Blue skies mean hope, an optimistic outcome, brighter days, and that such suffering was executed and endured on a beautiful day like that day was creates such dissonance. There are the sense memories of the sun on my skin, its brightness causing me to squint at the sky, the warmth of the day making promises it would not be able to keep. There is also my breath, deep, stuttered, panicked, then shallow. I could feel it in my ears and at the back of my throat.

My ears never stopped ringing. Not for days. I lived alone and kept coming outside to be sure there were other people still in the world, to see them, to be amongst them, simply to know we’d all looked up at the blue skies and then the ringing began and never stopped.

I’d only seen the grey ash and sparkling glass clouds on television because I was all the way uptown. When my friends left that night and I was alone, I became attuned to the sounds, the smells, the electric feeling in the air. Where I stood the putrid smell only made its way in the early morning hours. In total darkness.

The city that never sleeps was eerily quiet and stiflingly still and I heard my own sobs as I fell asleep. There were helicopters and Army planes overhead, the beeping and buzzing of indeterminate machinery. There was the smell of burning rubber, electricity, jet fuel, other materials and chemicals wafting in the air. It was still hot, that early September heat, and I didn’t want to keep my windows opened because ash was beginning to drift over the boroughs. I was worried about what was in the air, and more so about the caravan of souls hovering above the city they loved with nowhere to go.

I had terrible dreams. Felt them all hovering, asking questions, feeling this profound loss, feeling terrified out of my wits. Prone to dissociation, I could not escape my body this time. I was so tethered to the moment, was so vigilant, wound so tight. There were reports that no one was allowed on or off the island and all night I tossed and turned. I was trembling, could not regulate, lay down on the floor, didn’t so much pray as offer myself completely on the altar of the floor. Tears streamed and wet my hair and my ears. I wondered if we’d all wake to see the day.

The UES was fancy, but I lived in a part less so. The high-end stores and doorman-watched buildings of Madison and Fifth Avenues were quiet, and we walked them sidewalks peering in, wondering what would happen to our city. A no-fly zone was enforced across the country; soldiers walked the streets and F-18s flew overhead. I saw a submarine rise up in the East River when I was out for one of my walks, and no one was allowed below 14th Street. Not until much later.

The clouds of ash and dust became more pervasive and there were flyers everywhere, pictures of loved ones, the only ones smiling on the block, looking back at us, knowing we were not going to find them, knowing before we were able to believe. To grieve my family, my city, my home, my life at once nearly broke me. And I felt ashamed to say so for all these years when so many others suffered worse, endured more than most of us could bear. Never again, a plea, please end this suffering.

#
My brother and I were talking this morning, as we’d been that morning twenty-five years ago, when I asked if he’d remembered the call we’d had then. We have our own histories and our own tales that shape us, and though we’d been on that call together, though we’d talked nearly all night on September 10, 2001, I wondered if he’d recalled the events of that fateful night as I had.

Do I remember? he’d asked. I was on the phone with you when the first plane hit the first tower! We were talking. I was trying to hold space for the moment and then it all went to hell. I didn’t know what would happen!

That day, twenty-five years ago everything changed for all of us, and I tucked away my own tragedy to mourn with our city and our country. It lay in wait in my solar plexus threatening to prevent me from finding my own strength. My brother saying he remembered brought me a measure of peace.

The skies look surprisingly like they did that day and it seems we have learned all too little about how to take care of one another; we still cannot seem to consider that we will none of us get out of here alive, and that the where and the when is not our decision. We are no longer just in crisis. I think we might consider that we are in peril despite our pretense to the contrary.

Before I knew what I was looking at, I watched scenes of horror on the tv screen. I didn’t have to see to know what I was witnessing and turned my head out of respect rather than denial. What has broken my heart is the casual way in which we have come to see the end of a life. It has become so commonplace, so expected that the most atrocious crimes against us feel like the price to pay for our perceived safety. We have chosen to alienate one another using tropes and cultural mythologies, refusing to consider our own natures and roles in unfolding tragedies because we are too traumatized by own shadow selves and the twisted rot at our centers.

I speak its name every time I see a sky so blue,

It’s just like it was that Tuesday, September 11, 2001. It was just like this. And then it wasn’t.

These are just the rambling thoughts and impressions of that day. I don’t know how much sense they make. They are just moments and impressions that have been left on me since that fateful day. God bless the souls of all we lost and all of us still here. Blue skies bring hope, at least that’s what I am offering today.

I came upon the birders staring up at a huge pine tree with uneven, spotty branches.

What are we looking at? I asked. And one of the dads said,

It’s just a bunch of bluejays, then told one of the kiddos to pass the binoculars to the other.

There was an older gentleman with them who seemed to be their guide, and he had the kids enthralled. They were little littles, short, tiny legs, more knees than anything, tiny windbreakers over t-shirts on this late summer morning, small hands that struggled to hold the binoculars up to their faces and keep their balance. I spoke in a hushed tone to signal that I knew they were serious watchers, then winked at the two dads as I went on my way.

The first walk of the morning is a remembering, and this morning was glorious. If my eldest had been on campus here in the States, I might not have messaged, but I knew it was midday for her as she is studying in Italy and that distance feels especially taut in my early morning under a clear blue sky, shivering slightly at fall’s attempted arrival. By the afternoon it will still be summer hot and humid, and I will have to turn on the air conditioning.

Italy, like much of Europe, like much of the world, is still struggling under stifling heat, and she is in the mountains of Tuscany with a fan pointed directly at her when she finds herself in her room. With the other students in the dance program, she currently resides in a spacious villa overlooking extraordinary scenery as she takes her first unsteady steps into the world.

If sending her off to college felt like encouraging a baby bird to use its own wings, watching her walk towards TSA and her gate without me, across the world, to do what she loves and what moves her into her own destiny is recognizing the extraordinary span of her wings, her aptitude for flight, her prowess in the sky. With each phone call and FaceTime, I see a young woman who looks so like a girl I used to walk with on those same paths I walked this morning.

Our dog is still alive, now well outside the prognosis window we were given, 9 to 14 months after chemotherapy (almost at 17 months), and each morning as we start, I beg of him to live long enough for her to return home and love him. Now that it is cooler, we walk a little further, and he comes home to eat and attempts to engage me in an endless game of ‘throw the toys to me but I won’t bring them back so that they are scattered all over the house.’ I play for as long as I can.

A couple of years ago on a morning walk, a shadow came over the sun, and I looked up nearly blinding myself, to see the gorgeous wingspan of a bald eagle flying overhead. There is an eagle at our local zoo that I once had the horrifying experience of watching devour a small rabbit on a visit with my children and some friends (diverted the gaze of the littles in the nick of time), but I had never seen one in the wild until that moment. I could feel its weight in the sky as it passed over me, so powerful and self-assured this epic bird is. Its full chest leaning into the sky, its wings broad and dynamic, cooly cutting sharp slashes in the sky.

I followed it, took a miserable looking recording, and nearly startled a woman out walking her dog to death when I lunged toward her with excitement to show her too, to ask her to bear witness. (She came to realize I came in peace but her first reaction was not the same ‘awe’ I was experiencing.) I joke with many of my friends that as we have reached a certain age, we have become ‘bird ladies,’ reporting to one another about the comings and goings of all manner of birds that just a few years ago we could not name. We send pictures and announce nests and flight patterns, recognizing the mating seasons, hatching seasons, nesting seasons, and migration patterns. We say things like,

You should be careful walking over near the pond. Those red-winged blackbirds have babies in that nest, and they will swoop down on you. You know the males protect those nests and they are aggressive! or

I am sure this climate change is confusing for these guys! They aren’t sure when it’s time to fly South!

On the thread this morning where the parents of the students on the study abroad to Italy share insights and travel tips, we discussed the kids’ weekend plans that include a trip to the beach. It’s meant to rain for much of the weekend, but all agreed the place is a beauty to visit, rain or shine. None of us has mentioned this to the girls, as the trip is theirs to plan, requiring no input from their parents still wanting to protect the nest. We are all watching via social media posts and their faces in our FaceTime videos just how our baby birds are faring. They look at once brand new and suddenly wiser, older.

Before she left, I packed my girl a new umbrella and matching windbreaker/rain jacket with a hood. It is there if she wants it in the color she has always loved. Pink. I will wait to hear from her and record a message on my next morning walk. Like every morning, I’ll describe the weather and the clouds and the places our pup stops to mark and pee. And as inevitably happens with every message, I will make note of whatever birds come to say hello as we make our way down the path. I’ll interrupt my train of thought to tell her about everything I’ve seen, every sensation and feeling, missing her and being so moved by her journey, letting myself verge on tears but not erupt, and then we will both recede into our own skies, peeling off, doing back dives in the air, never needing binoculars to see one another up close because we alright know.

Black people don’t play about Dolly Parton. I learned about her passing on my cousin thread where the video announcement by her nephew Bryan Seaver told us what none of us were prepared to hear, and I sat still stunned for more than a few minutes. What I’d loved about Dolly Parton ever since I was a girl was that despite being the butt of some jokes and lots of teasing, she was so good hearted and good natured. She’d sung songs that were just part of the way we existed, I cannot even say that I heard most of them on the radio, but the ones I did always brought me to a place where despite heartache and hurt, she’d paved a way for sweetness, tenderness and goodness. I believed she had love in her heart for everyone and that she exercised that muscle so much that even when she was angry or tired of defending herself, she was able to love.

I’ve been trying to write about love for the past week. After talking with an artist friend of mine, both of us Black and having grown up in the same class of Black folks, we lamented the fact that love, the expressions of love, romantic and brotherly, the kind of love that shifts paradigms and expands hearts, excites creativity and growth has been lost. I’ve been feeling that loss as I watch our country disintegrate, each morning bringing a more debased punishment, ghastly cruelty expressed as disconnection and dissociation, a belief that if something doesn’t affect us personally then it cannot possibly be painful, that we are not somehow responsible to at least bear witness.

The deep groove of this space, the curve of it is depression. I am heartbroken for us all. How could I not be? I am just now coming to terms with how deeply sensitive I am and have been all my life and meet it with compassion rather than the reflexive need to hide it, force it back down into the jack-in-the-box. For every morning the news is worse than the previous and the pins that hold up righteousness, goodness, and kindness are leaving this place and all reason and compassion seems to have left with them.

Considering Dolly’s poverty, helped me understand that of my father and his family as they grew up. The circumstances were different of course, but I recognized the similarities in character and familial connection and a decency that I often equated with small country living until I was set straight by the virulent, racist vitriol of poor whites and their betters as they removed their clutched faces and purses and let their true nature fly at the sight of Black people doing anything. Humble beginnings, they have been called and they are truly humbling.

Rural churches and community, shared crops and sharecropping, watering holes, and respecting one’s elders. Saying ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘yes, sir’ and meaning that with your full chest. Finding joy in small moments because sometimes that was all you had, leaning on those closest to you, knowing you could trust them because you’d only ever had one another. Curiosity and a belief that you should and could and must will yourself into a different, maybe better life, or live the one like the rest of the folks around you, small, humble, slight. But if you are/were a dynamic person with dreams bigger than that wide, night sky could hold, you’d need a little hope and faith to get you out.

I didn’t get that sense from many in my New Jersey suburb and felt strangely ‘country’ comparatively though we’d never lived down South. My parents, however, both Southerners, were strangers in this strange land, having never grown up with or around white people, and their foundational garments showed beneath their Sunday bests. They were learning as they went along, much like Dolly, suddenly finding themselves with more than anyone they’d ever known, and not always being quite sure how to receive it and release the self-judgement and punishment for their financial success after growing up believing there was something inherently troubling about the wealthy.

I messaged my mother, who is on a thread with my siblings and me, with whom I have a rather casual relationship devoid of much connection or shared language, one where I often blithely drop innocuous conversation starters, aware that we have never had a deep relationship, and said,

I remember you loved ‘Islands in the Stream. I was singing it at the top of my lungs, harmonizing and carrying on like you used to do when you drove us places.

In the places where there is loss, I sometimes find myself still reaching for a mother.

I did, she’d responded. That was that.

I cannot explain why Dolly’s passing hit me as it did. I’ll say that I remember as a girl finding it adorable that she had dimples, always associating them with precociousness and a cuteness that I did not possess. I hated that more often than not, someone would mention her measurements and the scale of her proportions first, as if to somehow diminish her because she was ‘a looker’ and hyperfeminine, frothy and blonde, before heaping her with accolades and praise.

She always seemed to be ‘in on the joke,’ but the idea that she had to be, just because of the way she was made always made me uncomfortable. She reminded me of some of the sweet church ladies in my family’s Virginia town, deep in the valley, that refused to speak ill of folks even when they’d been slighted or treated abominably, and who were God-fearing and God-loving, who always found a way to ‘turn the other cheek’ despite Jim Crow threatening to poison their wells and bruise their souls. I did not know that from the suburban community in which I was raised. I knew that a lot of the world lived by the premise of ‘every man for himself’ or ‘an eye for an eye’ but only if they’d been slighted, not the other way around.

I rewatched Nine to Five while writing this and was struck by how poignant and witty and irreverent it was. So much of it had gone over my head as a child, or at least I missed much of the nuance. Dolly was fantastic, starring with some real heavy hitters, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Danby Coleman. And I found myself singing the title song on repeat as I walked the dog or drove anywhere. I was in fact, listening to much of her catalogue and being surprised by some of the work I was not familiar with and stunned at the incredible timbre and vibrato of her voice. It wasn’t just that she could sing, but that she was so clean, so in the pocket all the time that there was no arguing she was exactly where she was meant to be, despite humble beginnings, sexism, and misogyny.

She kept pushing on, nose to the grind, and still walked in high stilettos or platforms, puffed up her hair, pulled the belt on her dress, and handled her business and personal life in private. She supported communities and individuals without needing the accolades in the way I was taught good Christians were required. I knew she’d have candy in her purse and that when a baby was put in her arms, she’d know how to turn it over her shoulder and put it at ease.

It is lore, that on the same day this powerhouse wrote Jolene, she also wrote the now ubiquitous, I Will Always Love You, and donated the royalties from the cover by the late Whitney Houston to supporting a Black community in Nashville. I am embarrassed to say that I am surprised and moved whenever a white person who does not outwardly appear to have ‘skin in the game,’ who can choose to engage with, communicate with, love and nurture within my community, or not, chooses to do so. So scarred have I been by the selfishness of white supremacist delusion1 that I have little expectation of altruistic action. That the song seeped into the collective consciousness and symbolized a heart-wrenching farewell offered with gratitude and grace and had a chokehold on the world.

Listening to both Dolly’s and Whitney’s versions of the song, I feel the generous offering of a woman who aches with knowing she must go forward on her own with lessons learned, armor fallen, heart wide open, into her own destiny. There hasn’t been a moment while listening that I have not cried, grounded firmly in myself, mourning what I have known needed to end. Like watching a movie I’ve seen dozens of times, the opening notes already prepare me for the journey on which I am about to embark again.

This timeline has been brutal. I don’t wake up surprised at death or cruelty or injustice, but I have not become numb to it, instead I am reminded of our fragility, that we are not promised anything, that we are not defined by how we begin, rather by how we choose to live and allow others to do the same.

I live for the artists, the creators, the writers, musicians, actors, painters, people who live and breathe art into their daily lives. I have listened to Dolly while painting, cried while telling stories on canvas, prayed for our souls, prayed. For our souls.

There is something to say, if this is your belief system, about all the souls crossing over, a funnel of light beings, known and unknown, untethering from the earthly coil. The impact of this loss is felt in so many ways, and for some of us who can feel a ripple in the ether as delicate as the brush of lips or fingertips, that might unsettle us and leave us weeping, that might kick us in the gut and make us ill, those of us who want or wanted one more goodbye or a warning or a message, are thrown.

When my father died, I sat on the bed with him and told him the things I needed to despite my heart beating in my throat. We had weathered a relationship fraught with love and misunderstanding, and I have refused to continue that kind of emotional trauma on the people I love. But I wanted him to know before we were unable to speak another word out loud to one another that I had loved and respected our journey, told him it could not have been any other way. I sure wish it had.

I’m listening to the entire catalog little by little and taking in the genius of her songwriting and her delivery. But right now, I am stuck here, where we all remain, still marching through it all. Above all this, I wish you love.

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you’ve dreamed of
And I wish you joy and happiness
But above all this, I wish you love

And I will always love you
I will always love you
I will always love you
I will always love you
I will always love you2

I have been unable to stop thinking about the final days of Cambridge professor Jason Arday. In much the same way that as a young girl, I’d stare at the bodies of Black men and women with horrifying lashes at their backs or burned to ash in a pyre in front of crowds of preening and smiling whites, I cannot shake the nausea and angst heating my blood and pounding my heart. I have been discomfited, as though these horrors are only mine to carry, but most especially when people around me and worse, the faceless, shameless intellectualizing, emotionally decapitated posters online that have lost the muthaf-cking plot and are completely flip about the fact that a young, Black man chose death over this torment. I have felt this Kafkaesque abandonment, confusion, and communal gaslighting for so long that it takes a loss like this to remind me just how much it sometimes/always hurts to be in the presence of this cultural psychopathy.

That so easily one’s mistakes, bad decisions are weighed, a thumb pressed to the scale, that no matter how one tries to step back to regroup and reframe, the pack is too heavy as one reaches the edge of all reason and sanity; even more heavily than for those who chased that someone to the brink and left him with little choice but to jump. I know it is because despite all denial to the contrary, the humanity of Black people is disbelieved. Full stop. I know that there is a certain smug joy in watching us struggle in the straight jacket of the racist Western narrative of expansion and dominance that invites this hunting for sport.

I studied fine art and painting when I was an undergraduate student at a prominent New England university. Mine was one of the most diverse classes the fine art school had known in all its years with a number of Black students admitted in painting, acting, and music. The course of study was rigorous and the expectations were high, not only for the classes that required continued practice and mastery of materials, drawing, sculpture, painting, and graphic design, but in the absorption of the Western canon of art.

We were required to take an English writing class at least one semester and at least one liberal arts course for the remainder of the semesters. Though my papers always scored highest in my writing class, I was endlessly harassed by a student named Mike who felt it necessary to ‘remind’ me that it was Affirmative Action that got me in the door. While providing critical analysis of the writings of Sir Thomas Paine, one of our Founding Fathers, and then being asked to create our own pieces in his style and scoring high marks and accolades, this guy continued to torment me. In the end, he transferred from the school, finding both the academics and studio portion of the curriculum too strenuous. I was relieved to see him go.

One of the things that happens for us, is that we hold ourselves to a standard so high that until near perfection is reached, we become frozen with inaction, certain that our work, research, perspective will be scrutinized and that it will completely disarm us. That professor Arday was able to rise above that block, that hinderance and be that offering in the world is extraordinary, and ‘extraordinary Blackness’ disrupts the narrative that will most certainly take down the experiment of human life on earth.

I have written all my life. First in diaries, then journals, then blogs, always with the aim of writing a book. Shadowing my every word, every entry here is the haunting taunt, ‘Who cares what you have to say? What is this exercise?’ So, though I enjoy a turn of phrase, storytelling, remembering, and reminding, I wonder who in my life will turn its pages and attempt to tear down my recollections, my memories, my truths.

No, I am not an academic so supposedly the measures are different here, but I believe all understand the societal ostracization and teardown that comes when someone reveals a vulnerable soft spot or spills tiny drops of blood in the water. The sharks begin to circle, some fully aware and others unconscious to their bias and need to witness a flogging or public humiliation to feel alive. Add to that blatant or covert racism and the vampiric taste for blood overcomes all reason. Who would want to admit to themselves that they meet psychological and emotional violence with glee? That they are blood thirsty and misaligned? How many still tell me about the ‘good people,’ their parents, friends, and neighbors, professors, colleagues, and mentors who, other than their pretty racist views are ‘very nice to me/pretty cool/actually kind of fun/wicked smart.’

What has caused me to turn in, harden my back and lift my shoulders for impact, protecting my center, is the blame game. How many times are we to be told that the way we are in the world, the way we exist, that we exist causes such a reaction that better we be prepared for the assault and also the responsibility of the ricocheting vibration of the other’s hand after they’ve slapped our cheek. It all reeks of ‘look what you made me do’ and a total refusal to allow that leading, pushing, harassing someone to their death, breaking them, hoping to, expecting to, wanting does not mean that one’s hands are clean.

There is so much intellectualizing about intention and the nature of scrutiny, academic or otherwise, implications that one simply cannot handle the rigors of being ‘at the top’ or cannot stand the heat in the kitchen. But whenever we get too close, we start to look like meat to be cooked well-done, thrown in the fire. The impulsive, emotional rage behind the beady, squinting eyes and then the ‘I told you so’ is not just criminal, but wicked. Wickedness has grown in the shadows and halls; the dark magic cult wrings its hands with delight at the exposed neck and throbbing veins of the living.

I have come to believe that for some, for too many, it is enjoyable. Think pieces absolving racists and fascists of their targeted aggression are self-congratulatory and offer forgiveness in the churches of true dark arts. You lie to yourself when you believe there is a place among the decent and the forgiving and the kind when your mouth is still foaming, inhaling a vengeance upon others for being fallible, for committing errors egregious or mundane. We see your rotting faces, smell your putrid breath, see your Dorian Gray’ though you continue to insist that you are more beautiful, more intelligent, more celebrated, honored, blessed, deserving of accolades because you’ve created a divine hierarchy that puts you and your whiteness at the top of a food pyramid where you eat the flesh of everything and we call you master (race).

I don’t dare call it unbelievable. It absolutely is. Believable. It was Lucifer himself who was adored by his god, who saddled up close to Him and then believed himself to be more than He was, more than everything and everyone, who was cast out due to pride and ambition. It is impossible to look upon oneself when one sees oneself as he truly is in his darkness. Better to find a scapegoat, someone else to bear the weight of self-doubt and loathing. Better to convince oneself that hellfire is comforting and surround oneself with the others clicked in at the back of the head to the matrix, happy to dine on the illusion.

I kept reading and rereading the headline, the pronouncement that Professor Arday had died and wanted to scream! He didn’t just die. We have become so incredibly flip about life and death. Numb, casual, whatever and keep going. We are living in a death cult, whether excited or simply complacent to the death of everything all around us, we are bearing witness to the blood lust and sacrifices of horrific people who look so much like people we know and love that only a few can recognize the Edgar suit.

I believe this and hold space for this truth, despite my broken heart,

“I would take a thread and a needle, and I’d interweave love into our society. That’s what I would do. I think the absence of love in our society is absolutely palpable. I feel like the empathy we have for one another, the tolerance that we have-it’s completely eroded.” —Jason Arday

This is not a man for whom the level of vitriol and ire by racist eugenicists, complicit journalists and large media outlets seems warranted. It is impossible for me to allow that I must accept the wicked and their wily ways as par. We have moved so far from the Garden; I fear that those who followed Lucifier to his underworld lair have clawed their way back to relevance and dominance using the tools of oppression, nationalism, anti-Blackness, and hate to ensure we never see light.

And so, I sit with another life lost and wonder what could have been. His was a face that felt like one I know. Melanated, shiny, and bright-eyed. Curious, shy, inquisitive. A culture that struggles to understand the needs of those on the autism spectrum, those with invisible disabilities and learning styles/disorders will most certainly misinterpret and misread those very signals in Black and brown people. The indirect gaze and histories that seem impossible to believe will be met with skepticism and disbelief, and the punishment will be swift and violent.

I have often feared sharing my own stories and truths for fear that someone less vigilant, less invested, less sympathetic might raise their voice to deny my experience for whatever reason. I offer no suggestion that there is no possibility of exaggeration in Mr. Arday’s telling of his own story. I have been known to hyperbole at times in the excitement of sharing, but it has been proved again and again that accusations of plagiarism in his academic work are unfounded. I do know that Black joy, Black success, Black achievement, and Black experience often cause the collective racist structure of white insecurity to go into violent overdrive. And let’s be clear, it is violence.

No matter that watching the world burn from our beds and living rooms keeps us shielded from the taste of blood, there is no denying that the air is becoming harder to breathe and the water impossible to drink, and the earth scorched because of our nihilism and self-destruction. I believe in love. And the right of each of us to live in peace. I do not believe this means that those who celebrate their kills, congratulate themselves for the destruction of another or another’s culture, who say with pride, even with glee, the most unhinged, myopic shit imaginable and then shrug their shoulders or smile that end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it smirk.

There are already those who are writing off this horror show as an anomaly, forgiving the perpetrators, and blaming the dead for how he crumbled under scrutiny that white scholars and writers actually found guilty of deception, plagiarism were not forced to endure. There are those who point at all the wrong players to continue to include themselves in the Ven diagram of blessed, right, and correct. And there are those of us who know that each slash with the sword to our throats will cause us all to bleed, even if your skin is so thick with sun damage and tissue you don’t yet feel it.

I am heartbroken. I feel this hurt in my core. May he rest in peace, dear Jason Arday, for the crimes committed against him. May we find ways to weave love into the fabric of our torn humanity and cut off the frayed edges of hate than threaten us all.

There is an older Asian couple that I pass every morning as I round the corner past my house to the park where Ivan, my faithful dog, likes to walk. He says hello every time. She never does. They wear athletic clothes and HOKA sneakers that make them look like matching Marvin the Martians. They have the forward lean of the aged that is both postural and tense with determination, and their focus is mainly on the sidewalk in front of them.

On the path near the ballfield surrounded by the large maple trees, I encounter the older Indian couple, she in sari and walking shoes, he always in a colorful polo shirt and slacks, who always stop to greet me. We have met many times on the path, though fewer than I have had with the Asian couple, but have shared a word or two, and even wave to one another when we are too far to catch up for a quick hello.

Kathy and Diana walk their respective dogs on routes that intersect and overlap with mine. Kathy also works the polls, and I have ‘known’ her for years since I vote in every election, long before our dogs played and she began plying Ivan with morning treats from her pocket. She sometimes walks with her sister who is blind and uses a walking stick, and who has come to know me by sound. She says hello when she hears me. Diana has two sweet dogs, and she too gives Ivan treats and even gave him some special dog food when she’d learned Ivan had cancer.

Sometimes we meet Lisa and her pup and chat about art and writing; we had an immediate, easy exchange, and are planning a photoshoot with the girls and Ivan before the summer ends.

I stop and gab with all of these women if I run into them on our walks. Kathy told me once, as though I might not have surmised, that she is gay and Irish Catholic and often feels ostracized by her family. Diana and her husband raised their kids in our town and aren’t quite ready to leave yet but spend summers at the shore.

We spend just a few minutes. Sometimes others join the group with their dogs as Kathy and Diana are well known in these parts for carrying treats. We wish one another a good day and keep on.

There are camp counselors and parents dropping off kids, folks being dropped or walking to the train station, gardeners and landscapers tending to lawns, a contracting team working on a project in the middle of the park with whom I exchange morning greetings every day. I have a special nod to the Black dog owners, and they for me, as dominant culture told us long ago that Black people didn’t love dogs or their pets the same as they did. (This comes from the witnessing of Black people in terror at dogs that were used to control and threaten them during enslavement, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Era as if anyone against whom animals had been used as weapons would not react in terror, but I digress.)

There is magic in this community coming to life in the morning, every movement and gesture creating high vibrations, hope, expectation, intention. Even when the mostly white passersby don’t say good morning or make eye contact, my heart is lifted with the sounds of all of nature waking up.

Ever since leaving my childhood home, I have walked to find my peace. In Boston, Atlanta, NYC, Barbados, every vacation site, every visit to a new place, finding peace and my breath in the landscape put me at ease and recentered me. That Ivan too loves a good long walk has made going out bearable when the weather is challenging.

And on the same streets that I walk every day to find my peace, on the first left after leaving my driveway, ICE grabbed a man off the street. That weekend there were four men taken. Men who have been part of our community for as long as, if not longer than I. People with families and teachers and coaches and neighbors. People I might see on my walk or at the store or in Home Depot (a favor place to steal people because so many are getting supplies for contracting work).

Talking with a neighbor about this, she mentioned that her cleaning lady was stopped just a month ago and is now being held in Delaney Hall in Newark. That many in the community have rallied around her and her family, that this is happening by degrees of separation for so many of us not only breaks my heart, but makes me so mad I could spit (thank my grandma and them for that turn of phrase).

Y’all, seriously. Are we going about our business? There are Go Fund Me’s and community groups collecting gift cards and food and medical supplies, feminine products, and diapers and I appreciate every effort. And I also wonder how we’ve allowed this to be our normal. Casually moving through our lives, most never assuming the arrest or seizure will be theirs or anyone they know or care about or love.

When I don’t see these people on my walks for a while I begin to wonder, spend extra time, linger longer on my routes hoping we see each other. I’ve asked after the nanny, Miss Shirley, when her young charge moved on to kindergarten and she no longer made regular trips to the playground. She’d hold my hands and face like a mother or auntie and tell me how beautiful I was, how beautiful the girls are, what a good mother I am. She would stare at me with delight, and I would hug her back so tightly, a woman I’d just met on my dog walk.

She is fine, simply has no need to be at the playground without a child in her care. The others are moving on ‘summer time’ and come and go differently. I am walking towards the people who feel with me the depths of this depravity, the depths of this hostility, who are moved to action, however small, at the sheer violence of denying another’s humanity.

The other evening, I saw the Indian man walking alone on one of our paths. He was in the distance but facing Ivan and me, and he waved. I walked with a quicker step to catch him without running upon him and asked after his wife.

‘Oh, she’s coming along there. She wanted to walk more slowly but I can still see her.’

‘Oh, good,’ I said. ‘Be safe.’

‘And you,’ he said.

I’ve seen them a few times since. The summer is winding down. May we continue to look out for one another on our path and notice when another is gone.

I haven’t had it in me to say a thing. Because I have been squared up internally while facing the world with a poker face. I know I don’t need to RSVP to every fight to which I’ve been invited and that every interaction is not a confrontation but damn. The primary dynamic of our existence right now feels combative and confrontational, everyone on the defensive, even those committing atrocious offenses daily, endlessly, intentionally, many choosing to ‘stay in their lane’ which means turning a blind eye to all others’ suffering and experience, unless there is judgment to be passed. There is bottled up discontent misdirected and misguided at the closest, easiest targets, and the top-down violence and aggression continues.

Everyone is not David fighting against a Goliath, nor are they Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo evading the Stormtroopers. Some are thrilled with the prospect of anonymous, armored power, no longer collectively interested in human existential concerns or philosophies, no longer seeking wisdom, discovering wonders, engaging with nature’s magic. There are too many who choose this willingly, eagerly and with the expectation, insistence actually, that no one be allowed to choose any other path.

I was not, am still not, a huge Star Wars or comic book fan, but not because I do not recognize their messaging and philosophy, the exploration of social and societal constructs and larger themes. To this end, I do enjoy the idea of these offerings, but my aesthetic preference is just different. I’ve always leaned towards stories of lonely heroes, lost children, those who step out of the shadows in some mythic way and discover their destinies but without the bustling metropolis or techno futuristic setting. I sought the quiet, observational position, gravitate towards ‘character-driven’ stories. Wanted to know what others are doing with their ‘one precious life.’

I understood too well the secret longings of a fallible human being, discovered myself outside of the system in which I was born, wherein I learned I was low in class in the hierarchy. I was a small, dark-skinned, Black girl in a world that favored none of these, and I was a challenging mind and personality. I’d never stood a chance against my father or my sister for different reasons. He, because he was the head of household who chose a strong hand for discipline and order. Because he was strict with himself and self-flagellating when he found himself in error, he avoided that pain by extending it to his subjects. There was a push and pull to his dominance and when he pulled us in like the tide reaching and receding from the sea, I felt that in my chest and in my gut. Powerless to the force. For most of my childhood and early adult life, I believed I had no choice but to move as he commanded whether he spoke the commands aloud or in the seeds he’d planted early with the rules and expectations, and I nearly drowned.

My relationship with my sister is more complicated, fraught with too much unspoken. Even now I hesitate to write what I have lived for most of my life. Even now I fear her reprisal. We are close in age, and like girls of that time who were close in age, we were dressed alike, called as one long name, a combination of our two, sat together, roomed together, punished together. Though my mother and her sister were not close, my father’s sisters and his mother and her sister had been thick as thieves, best friends, and the expectation was that this was a ready-made partnership.

We are so different, the two of us, but I am the oldest and it is often assumed that the oldest by nature of our hierarchical family dynamics in Western culture would be the likely dominant force in this situation. I am a lead-from-the-back Capricorn and she was a by-any-means-necessary second born. She had the chance to learn the power structure in our home and aligned herself accordingly. Where I was strange and artistic and angry, she was the fun one, life of the party, all in, down for whatever. And she laughed easily and heartily, felt more familiar to my father, made him more comfortable than I ever would.

We were pitted against each other while also being forced together, as siblings in emotionally tenuous families often are, because there was not enough attention or love to be given in our home, very little mirroring or modeling of healthy connections, heavy on the expected roles and hush your mouth. I realized early on that there would be no rescue, no mediation, and that a thumb would be placed on the scale to remind me that as the oldest I should figure it out, expect some level of push back from the younger siblings as it was, indeed not their fault that I’d been born first which came with certain ‘privileges.’

My defenses became internalized corrections. Choosing my battles meant going inside. I knew that fighting back would get me in trouble, that my arguments would fall on deaf ears, that whatever truth it was I represented was somehow offensive. When I consider how hard it was for my father and I to heal our relationship, not until the moment he died really, I cannot ignore the family constellation that shaped every aspect of my becoming.

I learned that we don’t hit, challenge, argue, debate, eviscerate. We don’t explain, insist, choose reason or balance when confronted with stonewalls and those completely committed to their narrative and their perspective. I have learned that anyone upholding a system of beliefs that protect a very small selection of humankind, and certainly those who have only the foresight to consider themselves and their immediate needs and ‘safety’ are not worth the breath I’d need to muster to persuade. Not only will I be unsuccessful, but I will hurt myself in the process. I choose instead to witness and to work through other channels. I know when it is expected that I shut the fuck up.

I don’t argue with people who don’t recognize their blind spots, don’t go tit for tat like a ping pong match about the rights of us all to dignity, humanity, and respect. There is a tell for those who are prepared to dig in their heels, fold their arms across their chests and pout, and that is not my signal to meet them toe to toe. It becomes easy to read people with fixed rates on perspective, to tell who is not going to think globally, consider a larger picture that is inclusive, open, and ripe with potential for collective success. I know immediately those who seek ‘power over’ as the only route to safety, all others be damned.

II.

We live in a two-family home, and my neighbors have just moved out. While cleaning out the other place, the building manager messaged to tell me my landlord was moving the patio furniture I’d put out this summer so we could lounge and read and watch people walk to and from the park, in the garage. Though we would share the porch as I had with all the other previous tenants, he preferred that any prospective tenants would not have evidence of our habitation in these parts. I am not talking about a table and chair, rather a full outdoor couch with ottoman, two chairs, a side table, and solar-powered string lights to give the area ambiance when the sun set.

Because our home abuts a creek that has been known to overflow during torrential summer downpours, I no longer put valuable furniture in the back, nor do I store it in the garage which immediately takes on water during these storms. Though I found the request ludicrous and insulting, I asked if we might instead store the furniture in the basement of the house until the unit was rented in order that no damage occurred. He refused.

The building manager could hear the disappointment and the hurt in my voice as I asked him what this man expected me to do. I grabbed my phone and fired off a voice message, tempered in its delivery but not in its intent. He responded, locked into his position and no amount of pleading would move him. I exhaled my ‘ok’ and watched the team try to arrange the furniture in the garage a few feet off the ground so that it would not be damaged in the next storm.

The next hours after that exchange left me so angry and so frustrated because I could feel in my bones my invisibility, the complete disregard for me and my family in that moment. I saw that in wanting to rent the place below us, we needed to agree not to exist, to hide ourselves with the promise that once they’d gotten what they needed, we might be privy to return to our lives as they’d already existed or perhaps would have to give it all up for someone else’s comfort. And the worse is that without my explaining it, they would be none the wiser, would never know that we’d been asked to sacrifice so that their home, their world could be built on top of, in place of, ours. I chose not to belabor the issue, protecting us from future backlash, reminding myself of the imbalance of power and my disadvantage.

III.

There were nights when I was a girl, that I’d sit in my room trying to, what I now know, to regulate. Life in my childhood home was largely dysfunctional and left most of us dysregulated, but we did not have the vocabulary for it. It was normal for us to genuflect to my father, cater to his whims and moods, focus our attention on him seated at the head of the table. This is the way of the nuclear family, rooted in patriarchy, tinged with misogyny and paternalism, where the top of the food chain recognizes all below him only in how they might serve. I don’t know that my own father could have existed any other way. He’d given more and done more than his own father was ever able so to his mind it should have been enough.

His was the first and last word, which is how it made sense never to argue. No one was allowed to raise their voice in joy or anger. There were no challenges to the status quo, nor conversations in which another might dominate, lead, or explain (despite perhaps knowing more on a particular subject) and it was assumed we would all share the same beliefs, ideals, and ideology. There was some jockeying for position, proximity to power, but I realized as soon as my sister was born, cuter, rounder, easier that I’d likely not survive the match up, and did not for most of my life. That she received the backing of a strong man behind her slings and arrows taught me I’d need to change my tactics if I were going to survive. I would not throw myself as a hail Mary knowing I’d no chance of winning.

Where I believed/believe that we are each endowed with certain gifts that can strengthen any group/family/team/unit/country of which we are a part, I learned at home about ‘every man for himself’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘alignment with power.’ There was much manipulation and power positioning, fights that could inarguably never be won. In my first year in therapy at 15, I described us as five individuals hurtling towards nothing, disconnected, self-focused, defensive. In this arena, there was no battle to win. Every one of us lost because we were left without a true source of comfort, a place to regenerate and relax. We did not find safety with one another, did not become a strong family unit, though the pictures and lore might tell another story.

I went to my room, stopped speaking, stopped sharing the escape plans out loud. This space is lonely. I still live with the expectation of conflict instead of unity, though I fight that inclination in every moment. I have learned to take a beat and reflect before reaction, trying first to consider what is triggered, if I am taking a hard position out of protection or self-preservation or if there is something else for me to consider or learn.

So, it is no surprise to me to find us locked in battle as a nation, folks standing firm in positions without giving so much as a thought to another perspective. I know about dominance and ignorance, refusal to self-reflect, fear-based aggression, trauma with grooves so deep we think we can keep throwing the sand and smooth it over.

IV.

This is ancient, historical, pox-on-our-houses type shit where Goliath tries to convince everyone over which he’s held violent sway, that he is the one who suffers, that he is the one who must swing or have his eye flung from his face. When sizing up someone who has chosen to be an opponent, we must decide if there is resolution at which to arrive or if we are walking into the arena to be destroyed before the crowd, if this is a humiliation ritual with nihilistic designs.

Let it all burn. Let us all die rather than look at ourselves.

She was younger but stronger than me. She wanted to beat me more than I wanted to defend my place. I’d just wanted to live in a space where there was already so little air to breathe. She’d smoke me out, rattle the cage, threaten my miserable quiet with vengeance. At some point we grew up, and I moved out and then she and we allowed that perhaps it was all in the past, that we’d outgrown what we’d never even acknowledged.

We aren’t close, real or pretend, but we stood near one another in pictures. On our last weekend together when my eldest was celebrating her high school graduation, she’d written me a text so scathing, so abusive that crossed every line of decorum, kindness, or faith that I simply let go. White knuckled squeezing at the tether that kept me attached to the distorted lie I’d told myself and anyone who cared to know about family and legacy until I just could no longer hold on, didn’t want to. We were built on the lie. In choosing my battles, I did not choose this one.

Swinging the sword or taking aim at a distance, never meeting one’s sparring partner up close, makes some feel heroic, that they are victorious, that they have defeated an enemy named or anonymous. Perhaps they do or don’t know why it is they must thrust the blade into the heart of another, why winning means destruction rather than creation. I don’t know.

I’ve chosen to spread myself thin over the places worn by cruelty, where bullies have taken aim at those they deem lesser. I have chosen not to run headlong into the bloodlust, those who need to feel others suffer to know they are alive, and the ones who accept every invitation to fight. My weapon is commitment and devotion to inclusion, to fairness, to love that is so far outside of the definition I’d been given that its synonyms expose themselves anew each day, breaking me, more than physical threats and violence have been able.

I don’t engage in online vitriol, refusing to be incited to hate and cruelty. I hold fast to the community linked arm in arm sharing the possibility of peace, care, love without engaging daily in those committed to hate, disinformation, and chaos. I do not argue with other people’s parents about the rights of others, don’t allow the creeping fear of irrelevance, the refusal to acknowledge inclusive histories or the perspectives of others that center themselves and their cultures and communities without being threatened that theirs become obsolete. I am not interested in the telling and retelling of how the dominant, how the titleholders of privilege, came to see themselves as fighting a war of their own making wherein their own minds, they have become the oppressed, where without honest self-reflection, they are completely unable to find the plot.

I do not dare enter the arena where the odds are not in my favor to win the physical fight because I am hamstrung, handicapped and my humiliation is expected and celebrated. I am choosing something else everywhere.

V.

I’ve been fascinated with the stories of shipwreck and capsized boat survivors lost at sea. The monotony, sense of lost hope, and despair, as well as the punishing intensity of the elements lashing and burning them to collapse. I cannot imagine the choices that cross one’s mind, the fear, the existential loneliness and desperate conversations with their god as they stare down forever in the hallucinations of endless sea before them.

I wake to this sensation nearly every day. Ask myself if I will keep moving towards our survival, if there is more fight left in me.

There is. But I will not waste it on skirmishes. I will not spend my energy on the petty though I’ve been known to giggle at a tiny, righteous moment of some jerk’s smackdown. I want us to win. I want to turn the binary into a spectrum, to bend the linear into a spiral. And focus on all that shines grace and light in our favor with faith versus brute force and a good slingshot.

The last time the skies were red like this, also from fires blazing in Canada, it looked like the end of the world. But now I know the end of the world won’t come when we expect it. We’ve lamented the fires and the floods and the pestilence, all here now, and still we stand. Each day something new, as the unleashing of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the breaking of the Seventh Seal. I imagined there would be more hysteria and horror at the darkened skies and mood, that mankind would twist in agony at the suffering of us all, that we would, at the end times, all writhe as one knowing our end was imminent. But for so many each day is just a day. There is no anguish or moral torment, sorrow for the deaths of innocents. Fear and terror that the skies are red and the earth soaked with the blood of all killed in acts of self-righteousness by dominant groups that perceive everything as less valuable than themselves. There is more effort spent in describing who and what is not deserving of compassion, safety, and respect, than in the acceptance that we all are.

I never could, as a child, understand how Noah under the guidance of God the Father decided just who, two by two, was going to get in that ark and be saved. Everything destroyed, yet those few and the animals two by two would survive and repopulate the earth. A do over. A fresh start. It was years before I accepted the symbolism of the story, considered divine deliverance and protection in the face of man’s unending thirst for murder and chaos, that I was able to forgive Him for failure to recognize the likely goodness of some of those left to drown. I’ve always wondered about those of us who might be forsaken because we’d lacked the power to draw his attention.

The skies today are a dusty rose and the air smells faint of smoke trapped in the acrid humidity of our endless summer haze. We’ve had too many days over 90 degrees and as many with high humidity and stagnant air. Walking is pretty miserable. If not for the dog, I’d likely stay in. The air quality is at 131, unhealthy for sensitive groups and going up. (It would reach 244 before I finished this draft) But are we not all part of the sensitive group?

And there are drains on our water supply and forever chemicals on the fruits and vegetables we buy and eat from a handful of large industrial farms, which appear now to have been bathed in human fecal matter, and are causing an epic outbreak of cyclospora making people across Canada and the United States explode with diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms. But our representatives who appear to represent no one that I know or care about continue to offer up the planet and her gifts as collateral to a system that can and will only eat all of us alive.

We will watch the world around us burn despite the warnings of all the indigenous peoples of the land and the could-have-been-president Al Gore, who was too much of an egghead it seems to have been taken seriously by the unserious. An Inconvenient Truth offered scientific data and personal histories that reflected the imminent disasters we would encounter if we did not globally respond to the issue of climate change that was being wrought by overzealous production and misuse and waste of the world’s resources. It is hard not to mourn the loss of considered concern and leadership that could have circumvented the poor management of our planet and the geopolitical mess that has brought us to the brink time and time again.

We return to source, consider it, and pollute anyway, allowing multinational corporations in bed with soft-handed politicians to sell us our demise while blaming the lowest in the MLM1 for not carrying their own straws or watering their lawns or selling enough crap to make them rich. This is true of our resources and the energy, God, divine, whatever it is called by any and every group, when we ask that it all be made in our own image rather than we in a more profound and glorious way.

We likely cannot see ourselves collectively in divine light anymore, so tarred and feathered have we been by punishing, angry would-be, lower-cased gods who move the pieces, not on a chessboard, but in blocks and pulleys and erector sets made of forever plastics, metals, and fossil fuels that make shiny but destructive things. So, we figure it must be done. We’ve no chance for it to end well. It has all kept me quiet but not silent, vigilant and moving in stillness. Choosing instead to align myself with philosophies and perspectives that choose the most good and do the least harm.

I walk my dog in the haze because he has to go, try to help my children find a pathway to kindness and goodness through the mucky muck, and watch documentaries and shows that move me in between making art and writing and cooking all my vegetables so that I can maintain my will to live. I’ve watched Hamnet now four times and have cried every single time and just finished RAFA.

In RAFA, the four-part docuseries about the final season on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Tour for the formidable, Rafael Nadal, one of tennis’s greatest players, I discovered a sensitivity, melancholy, and drive I could only sense when I first discovered him. He had been one of my favorites because of how he bashfully spoke English, his shyness and humility, and his incredible athleticism, power, and agility. That I had been to Ibiza as a younger person and fallen in love with the Balearic Islands and loved a young Spanish boy from Malaga when I was at college and started learning Spanish, added to my interest.

Watching Nadal as a young boy with a sweet smile overpowering his mentors and opponents as he came into his own, learning of the toll it all took on his body, almost from the start, and how he endured, seeing the tears in his eyes as he winced through pain and tests and therapy and training gutted me and allowed me the chance to cry for everything I’d been keeping at the back of my throat. That he was mentored in an aggressive style, that he muscled (or as the kids say, bodied) through strife and torment, and that he was treated for anxiety when the demons of doubt and fear rode his back, made him a familiar.

The twitch in his frame and in his face as he described the highs and lows of his career, the revelations of his torment, physical and emotional suffering, his rituals and tics that ‘kept things in order,’ that were required for his safety, all while dominating and competing at the highest level, revealed the exhaustion in his existence that sometimes prevented him from fully enjoying the highs and caused him to suffer more deeply in the lows.

I have expected, for most of my life, the trials and tribulations, never quite prepared for the rewards, and that keeps me pushing on in an N95, abstaining from salad and fruit, and watching the rules cease to apply for those at the top, no longer surprised but still shocked and wounded by the unfettered, top-down cruelty of those with ‘power over.’

We make jokes about the Diarrhea Lettuce and having to lean on a Dorito diet to survive this outbreak but it’s hard to laugh at ourselves when the joke is always on us. Every sense has been threatened or compromised. We are running on empty, hamstrung in weighted vests believing we just might work it out when the machines lead us nowhere, waking each day to another horror, and it looks like everyone climbing the ramp to the ark paid their way on with our souls and acts like we don’t all know it.

I always wondered as a child about the cries of those left behind when the flood waters broke. I asked my pastor because I could not believe ours was a god who’d leave them all to die. I wondered if it was possible there’d been some error. How could it be that so few had been righteous enough to be included? How could it have all gotten so out of hand that the only option was a do-over or the end of the world? And it was then that I began to have my doubts, left unspoken.

I became a watchful creature, made note of who seemed to give a damn about others and those who acted in their own interest. I exposed for myself the performers and actors who talked the talk and could hardly if ever walk the walk. I learned the mental gymnastics it took to defend a position where one was either actively or passively allowing harm to others in the name of any and everything as long as they were able to keep their hands clean. I wondered if it might be better to be left behind if it meant I would be with all the people I loved, that I’d not have given up my compassion, sold out others to make it out alive. None of us makes it out alive.

We’d been spoon-fed sugar-coated inaccuracies, doubled down on definitions and descriptions that the defined refuse to be named. We were gaslit and placated with things, not even necessarily nice things, just shiny, distracting things, whose glint gave us momentary blindness that made us feel special, and we missed the boat.

In the face of the retired athlete, I saw sadness of the close of this spectacular part of his life, as he considered the new, unknown. He had a wife and two young children, comforts and appeared to have forgiven himself for being mortal, for having given all he had and being spent. I hope he has been able too to relish just how extraordinarily talented he is and how incredible the accomplishments of his career.

I sit often with the ‘best years’ being behind me. One child in college and the other rising into her senior year of high school. I think of each of the moments spent to get them here, and where it leaves me. Where it leaves us.

I remind them to look for safety, for the safe spaces, the people, the places, the things that would not put them intentionally in harm’s way. I have taught them whom to trust and with what and how much and begged them to take every precaution. Then I hold my breath.

Skies are meant to clear here tomorrow though a flash flood warning has been given from tomorrow morning until Sunday afternoon. I worry about the creek that runs behind the house and my dog who is terrified of thunderstorms and the future of the planet and everything in it. I knew there were masks somewhere in the house, but they were not at the ready as they’d been during Covid. We will move the car to the top of the driveway should the creek rise and crest as it has done in the past.

The last time the skies were red, the last time the water broke the wall and flooded the streets, the last time the lightning struck a neighbor’s house, the last time a man or woman or child was killed in the street or detention, it was still not yet the end of the world. When it comes will we know? How will we recognize that the damage we have caused is irreparable? Are we one point away from winning or throwing it all? I don’t know anymore.

The skies clear tomorrow. A thunderstorm may bring flash flooding. I will walk my dog without a mask; make sure he gets to smell all the grass and that we walk together as we always do because it gives me my peace. And I will do my part to be part of the community that despite current implications that ‘money talks and suckers walk’ wants to see us all win. It is somehow still

not

yet

the end of the world.

Integration. We were living in the white suburbs of central New Jersey with the ‘white flight’ ethnics, Italians, Irish Catholics and Jews from Brooklyn primarily, on the corner lot on the boulevard, in a neighbor with street names from the American Revolution-Ethan Allen, Ticonderoga, Green Mountain. I was almost always the only Black kid in my class, the only Black girl, the Black girl in the class with the self-congratulating, smart white kids. I have had a front row to white upward mobility all my life, and my family’s trajectory ran alongside, but rarely overlapped.

The photos of my childhood, if they did not include my cousins or members of the United Black Families of [redacted] Township, were full of white smiling faces and mine. I knew not to ‘air my dirty laundry’ so shared little about myself or my life, often living like an ‘immigrant’ in this white culture, translating and sharing insane stories with my parents about how white kids talked back to their parents or how animals ate from the table or the relaxed way they ate dinner in front of the tv or ordered take out or fast food.

When I was younger, I was fast and funny and artistic and well-behaved, fast-tracked code switching between white and Black and home and in the streets and in and outside. I don’t know that I’ve taken a full breath or exhaled since becoming conscious of breathing and couldn’t relax even with teachers who might put their hands on my shoulders or rubbed my back when the hiccups that inevitably came when I choked on my feelings, swallowing them whole rather than share with folks I knew at my core I could not trust.

Surrounded on all sides by people I could not trust and that was not my being paranoid. It was a family well out of our depth, keeping up, moving on up, struggling with emotional trauma that stunted and arrested compassion and connection, surrounded by people that even when well-meaning did not want to see us do better than they did, better than their families, didn’t want us to become too big for our britches. And there we were on the corner lot, studying, learning, witnessing, sometimes scrapping, fighting, partying. Doing everything teenagers do, walking in the woods, running through the cemetery, playing spin-the-bottle. And always, I knew the exits.

My parents had not grown up with white people, having really spent time with them for the first time when they started working full time in their early twenties. They were privileged with a childhood where everyone in their orbit was Black. Their teachers, preachers, mail carriers, lawyers, accountants, plumbers. While their lives were segregated from the dominant culture, they did not compare themselves to their white contemporaries, though their white contemporaries compared themselves endlessly to them.

It was ‘understood’ that white families and children and students and neighborhoods and communities were ‘better’, were expected to be better, because the presumption in this country is that white lives did, do, and will always be more valuable, more important than those of Black families and children and communities. Those white families who became our ‘friends’ fled New York when Blacks were allowed into their neighborhoods when redlining slowed. You’d never hear them describe their arrival on the Jersey shores thus, but they came en masse, happy to escape ‘danger.’

The origin stories of the white ethnics that made up our community and the Southern whites with whom our country cousins only occasionally mixed with gave us a fuller picture of the landscape of our country’s folk. Because my family attended a white church, while our cousins attended churches like the ones their parents were raised in, we witnessed the god made in the image of white men and their virginal vessel and self-righteousness, which lead to great searching and seeking of justice for me and likely my siblings, though I do not speak for them.

I have been there as the unicorn, the only one, the ‘Oreo,’ a curiosity to white and Black kids alike. And I also knew I was something else entirely to both groups which may have spared me interested in being popular or included but did not spare me assault, bullying, sexual violence, none of that. And I knew that if anyone hurt me, there would be no one to defend me. Certainly, no neighbor or classmate, surely, they’d try first to establish that I had somehow been responsible for my own abuse or that I could take it harder than I could dish it, and I hardly dished it for fear of the gang up.

I am smaller than expected. It is a shock to me too. The way people back away if I take a step forward or tell me I am hard or strong or resilient.

I have been unprotected. First by my father who believed he taught me early enough to stand up for myself or keep my head down, one of the two to make sure I’d not get in trouble, having not had the schoolyard version of the discrimination he’d have as a man in the executive suite. And I understood that, held space for that as soon as I realized he was on his own. We were all on our own.

Even when we got people, we are on our own. Nearly every friend has stared in disbelief, explained my lived experience, expressed their outrage quietly, relieved themselves of the hot shame that surrounds feeling helpless, and I have helped them because I am more exhausted discussing it all than they are.

My non-Black boyfriends, husband, colleagues, bosses, the people that don’t see color, who explain their family members who vote against my interests are not bad people, even crazier still that they are good people, that I misunderstand or misinterpret, or do not understand the nuance of their experiences, and I nod and step away, seeking the parts of the sidewalk that won’t break my back when it is all cracks.

I am rambling tonight because I did not want to write this. It takes a lot out of me to write. That’s the truth. And today I painted for a good part of the day and finished an audiobook that left me tender and wildly emotional, and struggled, as I do every day, with the state of a world that continues to deny me and mine and those like me our basic humanity, while trying to mother alone, dream, and hope, and wish, and then…then, stumbled upon the story of Nolan Xavier Wells, saw the last photo of him with his ‘friends’ a group of white boys in Mississippi, and before the revelation of the tragic end, knew just how it would go.

A beautiful Black boy in blue swim trunks with a red string necklace around his neck. His skin like copper. And they left him on his own and returned home without him. Said all kinds of things about why he wasn’t with them and little about why they had his phone. How was he meant to ask for help if he needed it without his phone or his clothes?

Our friends are not always our people. Our friends are not often our friends. Our expectations may be too low or too high, but we are not being met nor meeting one another in a place where we create safety, where we are the net, where we leave no one behind. And I have questions. We all have questions, those of us who know there are more questions to be asked, who are willing to dig deeper than what we see before us, who ask the hard questions of ourselves and the people we love and care for, about accountability, narcissism, violence, and terrorism masked as boys being boys.

We have been vilified and caricatured as the insidious violence that terrorizes the dreams and nightmares of white Americans. Their protections and walls have been constructed to keep us out, and when we are killed by your ‘friendly fire’ there must be justification without, of course, saying,

Everything about you threatens us.

But how can it be that again, a young man beginning his life is dead, shirtless, left behind, a wall of silence? And I am meant to go on with the lie that everything is alright, nothing to see here. The difference between then and now is that the white boys are assumed to be ‘friends’ and not just dudes out for a joyride searching for a Black boy to menace.

I have no friends from high school with whom I am close. No one that I spent hours with on the phone, driving around after football games, eating sundaes at Friendly’s. I reconnected with one classmate who reached out and all these years later became a soulmate. A white woman who said,

Truly, I cannot imagine what it was you endured in that racist town,

and it was all I ever needed to hear without knowing it. She’s a real one.

I don’t have it in me to hold hands anymore, to allow the pretense of shared experience to create false connections, spaces in which I still glance sideways when I am expected to hold space for low emotional intelligence, lack of consideration, higher expectations than demanded of themselves. I don’t have it in me to imagine the final moments of another Black child who believed he was having a weekend outing with his friends, the only Black face in the photo, and it is he, the only one who ended up dead.

May he rest in peace, dear Nolan Xavier Wells. May his family find comfort in whatever it is that will bring them peace.

Yankee Doodle, it turns out, is a kind of ‘dozens’ done in song with verses from British and American soldiers of the Revolutionary War, mocking one another, one calling the other a disheveled, disorganized group of ‘Yanks’ acting above their station, and the other changing verse to exalt George Washington and mock the British, their supposed overlords with whom they fought for their own right to rule themselves. What I remember cracking myself up over as a kid were the words, ‘Yankee Doodle dandy’ and ‘called it macaroni’ which seemed the most ridiculous of word choices until now realizing that the macaroni style wigs were all the rage in fashion in the 1770s, though they were so ridiculous they became synonymous with ‘fop.’ The dandies were middle-class British men who dressed themselves like the aristocracy with silk strip cloth, stuck feathers in their caps, carried pocket watches and put on airs. Their style and manner were outlandish and performative, making them easy targets of the press, those of the manner born, and those of lesser stature who found it all particularly silly, the posturing of privilege and reputation.

The song has evolved over years and become a mainstay at Fourth of July celebrations in all states, even finding itself the national song of Connecticut.

Today we mark the celebration of the experiment at 250 years with similar posturing and performance, still struggling with who it is we are to ourselves, what we claim and release, what we are still awfully afraid to look at. It is right now, one hundred and one degrees where I sit, stifling hot. And it has made me moody and brooding and tired. I am afraid for the fireworks (because my dog hates them), disheartened, battle fatigued, and righteous.

Before the heat threatened to blow my hair back, I took my dog out for his first walk of the day and saw the runners lining up for the holiday 5K. It’s the Fourth of July and in years past, the girls would be geared from top to bottom in red, white, and blue, would have decorated their bikes and lined up with all the kids in the town for the ‘wheels parade’ where bikes and scooters and skateboards were decorated with ribbons and flags and all manner of craft and ridden through the town center, culminating in races and games for the entire family.

Despite the customary celebrations and excitement, this year was decidedly quieter, more subdued. Maybe it was because the heat index, for the fifth day in a row, was going to be well over 100 degrees, maybe because we’d all been up rooting for Capo Verde in an epic showdown with Argentina in the World Cup, maybe some had been up watching Wimbledon or awaiting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding at Madison Square Garden. Or maybe we are all just weary from the relentless daily barrage of assault to common decency, humanity, and compassion, and the thought of getting lit for suffering, discrimination, warmongering, and cruelty left a bad taste in the mouth.

That there is a class of ‘emperors’ parading, ‘dandying about’ outright naked with aggression and corruption, dripping with contempt for commonality, peace, and decency at the helm, their swirling ‘Macaroni’ feigning importance, class, and leadership, demanding attention and reverence for their bespoke despotism, and a horde of followers blowing smoke up their silky drawers and calling the rest of us every name in the book but a child of God, doesn’t scream ‘party time excellent.’

Moving through the world at this time feels like cake walks of old plantation times where the enslaved mocked the pomp and circumstance of the slaveholding class, which was in turn mocked by white minstrel performers in blackface attempting to make fun of Black dance and performance, somehow unaware that the joke was on them. But now the collective believes themselves to all be of the dominant class and takes pleasure in inflicting and/or witnessing the suffering of others as entertainment or folly, taunting and making fun of citizens who are closer in experience to themselves than they want to consider. Oh, the Yankee doodles.

My parents and my grandparents and my great grandparents and their parents were born here. I know this because of the family trees my families have compiled and built over decades to ensure that we remember from where we’ve come, so that we can find ourselves rooted somewhere in something. It wasn’t that we didn’t know the soil was polluted by the same people who also fertilized it with our blood, bone, muscle, tears, and pain, but that we ran our hands and marched our feet through that earth. We’d been in no position to go or be anywhere or anything else in front of white folks, and every moment of doing so was coded, secret.

I have learned that when my heart is breaking, it is not for everyone to know, because some have been lying in wait for this moment. But my heart has been breaking and breaking, tiny fissures and tears that leave me clutching. My grandparents and their parents sang hymns and spirituals, songs with an overlap of meaning about freedom and connection to God and salvation. The oppressed prayers and songs meet the ear of the Divine differently, sung in another key, stripped of show, deep with pain and anguish and endurance.

Staring at the image of a lone Black woman on a subway in the nation’s capital with masked white nationals surrounding her on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I am reminded of summers in Virginia running shirtless with my cousins, through the fields and yards of my paternal grandparents and their people down the hill from the church where they worshipped. I am drinking Coca Cola out of glass bottles, eating fried chicken prepared by my grandmother from one of the chickens running around out back. There is corn on the cob and green beans and hot dogs and hamburgers and baked beans and seven-layer salad, and everyone we see, everyone we greet, everyone who stops by is kin or close enough. They’ve grown up entwined with the roots of our tree. They know me, even if I don’t know them, and the Fourth of July feels like ours too even though all the promises had not quite ever been.

We believed it would be if not yet, that there was no God under which we were one nation that could not see it through and then witnessed the creation of the other god, drawn in the image and imaginations of the citizens who could never call us brother or sister, and would not even call us American. They’d parade themselves about, trying to convince themselves they had somehow become superior in their rewritten texts. Oh, the Yankee Doodles.

Then the rain fell in torrents on the 4th on the grounds of the Great American State Fair, coopted by Freedom 250 to focus attention on the would-be king and his followers, extending their hands to him like the dead reaching for the old man, Reverend Henry Kane, a 19th-century utopian-seeking cult leader in the movie Poltergeist. The rain fell and they ran for safety inside the foyer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, taking cover, seeking safety, under the roof of all they deny.

A Doodle, from the Low German dodel meaning simpleton or fool, wraps himself in the frayed costumes of the class he hopes to emulate, ingratiating himself to their whims, hoping it means they see him like them and not like me, not like us. I think it might be the American way, despite the hope to the contrary that it is individualism that defines. There is the privilege for some to do whatever they want, however they want within the limits of their wealth, status, and class, and when they discover the boundaries of this ‘freedom,’ they come looking for someone to dominate, on whose forehead they might plant their flag. ‘Stick that feather in a cap and call it macaroni.’

Maybe I am crazy from the heat or have stayed up too late watching the World Cup (yes, knowing just who and what FIFA is), or stressing from my poor dog’s absolute insanity around these violent thunderstorms, but I am tired too, from all this foolishness. As American as apple pie, hot dogs, fireworks on the Fourth of July, are the dug in heels of petulance and myopism, a hell of a combination. Oh, Yankee Doodles.

On Father’s Day we honor the dads and the fathers, one or the other or both, and grieve for the ones that could somehow not be one or the other or both. My mother called her parents ‘Mother’ and ‘Daddy’ which was strange for me even back then and I found myself asking repeatedly about the formality of one and the playfulness of the other.

My granddaddy wasn’t really a ‘daddy.’ I found them both rather formal and their play and banter kind of square. It never seemed possible to get inside the curve of their conversation, to find a pocket inside their love that felt cozy and relaxed. This does not mean that I did not love them. I absolutely did, but our relationships were cordial and polite. I found that I loved my granddaddy most for his contained sense of humor and the inside jokes he shared with himself, his curiosity, dedication to his greenhouse and garden, and the time he spent in the basement workshop. But he was at an arm’s length.

My male cousins who lived closer and whose father was my mother’s oldest brother have described spending lots of time learning to build and create in that space, but I only remember being asked to return a hammer to the pegboard on the wall and the demand that I not touch anything.

My papa was a man of few words but with a shy smile that surprised me. I remember him big and strong but he, like my Granddaddy was a little guy, just stocky in build and muscular in character. One did not doubt his stance and his beliefs. He said what he said, but with us, the grands, he said it with a relaxed, wry smile he was unable to offer his own children, fearing he needed to be stern with them in order to save their lives in Jim Crow Virginia. I enjoyed sitting quietly in his company.

There are pictures of my dad and me at various stages of our relationship standing together, both of us in a wide stance with arms folded in front of us. We were both always ready for the world and for each other like this. There were hot flashes of real and true love shared before one of us, usually him, felt some kind of way about that kind of vulnerability, that kind of openness, that kind of love and need, and flinched. His flinches looked like tiny cuts and splinters on my heart, scrapes on the knees, sometimes punches to the gut.

But we built things; I have photo evidence of a birdhouse. We went on vacations where we rode bikes and played tennis and he threw us across the pool or over the waves. We’d watch movies in the theatre or our favorite family shows. There were Saturday night fondues and game nights, and Broadway shows and museum visits. He didn’t always speak it out loud, but he was trying to teach us something or more accurately, have us learn something, and he put the opportunities he was able to provide in front of us.

Dads have hands on love. Mine wasn’t a hugger, but he did squeeze up and love the babies. Not just mine, all the babies, the grands and the nieces and nephews and cutie pies on the subway who’d made eye contact with him and couldn’t let go. He was magnetic, everyone was drawn to him and only some of us, certainly one of us, did he work ardently to both repel and attract.

I wanted a hands-on dad who held me and my beliefs in high regard, who found me magical. I wanted the same for my girls. I don’t know that I can say I was successful in either case.

More often, my dad was a father, not a dad. He’d write out directions for all of life’s possible scenarios on a yellow-lined notepad with a mechanical pencil he always carried in a breast pocket or simply in his hand and map out the appropriate, sometimes read ‘the expected’ outcome of any particular situation. In these moments we were more like his employees being prepped for company success, and conversation was driven from the top down. We were allowed to ask questions but not contribute easier or different solutions more tailored for our own lives and experiences. I fully understood the risk in pushing back against the yellow notepad.

At some point it all became top down. I was forever reaching up, extending my hand to be pulled to his level, waiting for him to hoist me onto the little platform, no matter how small we both envisioned it, and then push me up over his shoulders, but he couldn’t. I’d see the limitations in the shifting energy behind his eyes which made it harder for us to connect.

Perhaps he did not think himself capable of this kind of leadership, this kind of commitment to another’s success, this kind of humility. Perhaps it was that I was his daughter who’d not followed protocol the way everyone else with whom he’d engaged did. Perhaps because he knew I was both afraid and defiant, or that I was not a mutable sign, or that he’d listened well to his own father and could not understand how he’d raised someone who simply wouldn’t or couldn’t do exactly what I was told. I don’t really know, but we diverged so sharply here. And he stopped wanting to be my dad.

I still called him Dad, not Father, not by his given name (I would not dare). I’d say,

Dad. Hey, Dad. What’s up, Dad? How’s it going, Dad? hoping it reminded him of when I asked him for everything, where he was my guide, where he was so clearly the light of my life just by being the dad. I became little around him until I was violently huge, rising into a shadow monster to protect myself from soul annihilation. I wondered if he knew he was trying to kill me or if it was all impulse.

The girls’ father never got that chance. To try to kill them, I mean. Will never. Their father cannot meet them even part of the way. They walk all the way to him, every time. He cannot hold space for the women these girls are becoming and does not realize that finding them beautiful and compliant does not create a deeper relationship or connection, that it holds them at a distance, not enveloped in care, consideration, or love. When I sniffed it out, when the hair on my neck stood up with some of his commentary, the dissociation in the face of their excitement or curiosity, I recognized a man who could not care for or truly love women, even while being their father.

We don’t always understand the reason we have been trained for certain battles, why we have this seemingly useless ability or skill until it arises. There were telltale signs of a man expecting capitulation, dominance over the group of women that make up our family. Though we are culturally different, me being Black, Gen X, white suburban-raised and he French, Boomer, raised around his country outside of Paris, his patriarchal leanings showed up first in his praising of the girls’ beauty and deference and in his expectation that we all stop what we are doing and cater to or consider him despite his relative absence and disinterest in any of us.

And as I had showered my own father, my dad, with adoration, fawning, fanning, quieting, stilling my true voice until I was hoarse and sickly, I’d done the same for him. Honoring him for providing basic needs, congratulating him for handling expected tasks, allowing him to believe there were no other requirements than occupying a space next to me while I did all the heavy lifting, letting him believe that close proximity was also parenting, was also support, earned the seat at the head of the table. I let him also believe that the position was rightfully his and that all he’d had to do to be crowned was share his biological input and stand with his hands on his hips surveying the land, claiming it was all good, that we had done well.

A friend messaged to wish me a Happy Father’s Day, said I did it all. I did. I do. I’d taken the girls to have sushi at their father’s house that day, then shopped for dog food and the girls’ favorite granola bars on the way home. I’d painted in my little studio and tried to write, done some laundry, and run the vacuum for a once over because of all the dog hair. And while I appreciated the sentiment, I am not their father, a father, their mother and their father.

I am the mother I never had, the mother I hope is enough in the absence of a real and present father. And everything I have given them was something I desperately needed too. I know now that it was possible for it to be given. That a person whose trauma pulls them back by the shoulders and nearly forces them to fall backwards into the abyss, can pull the direction forward, move the needle, change course, and refuse to repeat patterns by being aware of them and sitting in the loneliness of that truth.

The girls and I found ourselves alone during Covid as they were both reaching developmental and social milestones that were arrested so we could all be safe during lockdown. I’d found myself unable to keep up the facade for that long, the only adult in the house, the only parent they’d had real commitment and contact with, so I began to tell the truth and allowed them to do the same. Our home is structured differently. Reverence is earned, respect is shared, admiration is mutual. And while we celebrated both Mother’s and Father’s Days with gifts and food, they know they honor me by being the most of themselves, by becoming whatever it is they are compelled to be.

They learned to ride their bikes with their dad, me running alongside cheering and filming so they’d always remember. They have swum in the oceans and seas of our home and travels with us both. They have walked in the woods and jungle landscapes feeling the container of family around all of us, despite their father and I living our own separate lives. They know that we both love them to their best of our abilities and they feel safe enough to say, even now, when it is or is not, has not been, might never be, enough.

We left at the height of me as me, left as I began to spread myself across the lives of the three of us, sticky glue peeled off fingers in one piece, projects and kid focused and centered everything. I’d begun to use my voice, literally, as a voice and commercial actress, and discovered I was hardly a weirdo, more like kin to those who roamed. When we left my walk, my strut turned to a slow-gaited stroll, with a rolling of the hips, slow tender steps for littles to keep up. I moved them from grit and close quarters and shadows and alleyways, skyscrapers and nationalities and personalities to the exploration of my diasporic roots (Caribbean to Carolina) to the flat earth suburbs of Northern Jersey. But in the depth of my being, I still feel NYC.

I was in Boston when Brazil won the World Cup in 1994 and the Allston/Brighton neighborhood lit the fuck up! It was thrilling to see all the world’s color and culture pour out of the apartments and houses along the T line, singing and dancing in the streets. The celebration of world domination in sport and a language, football, in which the world was fluent, but I, and much of the United States, was just beginning conjugation.

The transplants from Brazil and all parts of the Southern Hemisphere dancing in the streets embraced me as one of their own and I’d wished I’d known more about the us of us, how I was part of the larger world and not the suburban nation to which I never quite felt I belonged, how the deliciously-scented, baked-in magic and wisdom just oozed from all of the hues of beautiful brown and black and tan and beige-skinned peoples celebrating a pride in culture and belonging that I’d always wanted. I was claimed as when I am with any peoples of the colonized world, always assumed to be theirs because I ‘look just like’ someone’s cousin or daughter or auntie or kin. I’ve rooted since for everything Black and brown to win out loud.

Seeing the people in the streets when the Knicks clinched it in five burst my heart wide open in a similar way. Seeing my people, my family, my folk jumping up and down in the streets, seeing joy, relief, elation, hope in their eyes and creating light halos of sweat and tears across their brows, third eyes popping open with revelatory ritual gives me the same release.

We are all New York, everyone says, and WE are all New York. Fitting that the Puerto Rican Day Parade follows, where Caribbean peoples hold court for their roots and culture and the contribution made by their community, the labor and heart that built this city, proposed melting pot, example of the mélange. Walking through the city today on the way to see Schmigadoon1 with my family and friends, I felt the wild, crazy, hot summer shimmers that reminds me I am of the living.

It has not felt so for a long while. Shall I count the ways.

Like my fashion, I like to mix high and low brow. I have a deep love for art history and painting and other intellectual pursuits, but also love a good, cheeky mystery or naughty joke, like a soft, comfy white t-shirt. But I find myself shaking my head at the cage matches in front of the White House, too bread and circus on the nose. Why not monster trucks rolling all over the capital, dare I suggest. Oh, wait…

The monster trucks are roving all over the delicate flowers in our collective gardens and their drivers are screeching with delight at the destruction of all things beautiful, pleasant, and easy. I am not sure quite how to describe watching the death of curiosity and wonder celebrated as strength. The dissonance leaves me dizzy and a bit queasy. Fake Evil Knievels popping wheelies and flying over the restricted/restricting air space over the White House lawn flexing flabby arms and red faces in muscle shirts calling an elegant Black woman, a former First Lady, the first Black First Lady a man with giddy recklessness, feeling like they ‘owned’ her -DISS! and yucking it up with the other schmucks in the peanut gallery.

Who would ask, ‘have you no decency?’ at this point when decency has long been off the table. Even those who might be outraged just shake their heads and sigh and rub their Goop all over their faces and wait eagerly for Isaac Mizrahi’s collection at fucking Target because they can no longer, if they ever did, hold the line for what is decent. Like the cooties, no one wants it to touch them and when it does, they try to brush it off quickly with flailing gestures. But if it sticks it’s stuck and it takes a long time to get that smudge off your aura. It will take root work and energy healing for this level of trauma to be cleared.

The first step in energy work is grounding, standing firm, reclaiming connection with the land. For me this is home, our indigenous wisdom reminding us to regroup and align, let our feet touch grass, toes deep, heels dug in, feeling the sensation of rooting towards the earth while light energy rises through us and leads us into the infinite. It takes awareness and vulnerability to admit to the loss of center and commitment to seek it.

Ours is a culture that refuses to acknowledge mistakes, collectively and individually. The demand to right wrongs is often met with overturned tables and uncontrolled rage simmering and breaking out, and the silencing of true conversations. It is finger pointing and blame and fear of our own shadows. It feels like tiptoeing around the sleeping, angry giant only to wake up and find that we are the giant. It is the moment in the journey where we suddenly discover ‘it’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.’2

It had been fifty-three years since the New York Knickerbockers had won an NBA Championship title, a lot of lives fit into the parentheses of then and now. The story of civil rights in these United States was still in toddlerhood and those of us born around that time feel our legs wobbling under us.

We’ve been confident and sure, taking strides, working our offense and defense, and have had the strength of our ancestors behind us. We have felt like those Knicks. Lots of close calls, keeping our eyes on the prize, tapping each other in and out when the fight is too much or it feels all hope is lost.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to watch the wins, already preparing myself for the letdown of the backlash or future losses. I expect a sore loser, violence, and vitriol, so I brace myself even in celebration. So, I cannot say that I never imagined we’d arrive where we are right now because I have believed equally in the magnitude of human magic as its black tar choking shadow side. I have witnessed the promise and also seen the punches below the belt and stolen pocket watches when all the arms are raised and the crowd is jumping, looking up at the heavens, thinking we might have finally found peace.

You know we won’t find it behind the smoke and mirrors of the illusionist’s tricks, right? That we cannot keep telling ourselves that we cheer, that we root, that we are the same team if one of us is actively working against our humanity, our collective humanity. Without dignity and self-respect, care, consideration of one another, acknowledgement that we are all in equal measure worthy and valuable and able to be declared winner in a fair game or fight, we undermine the sanctity of our lives and the game.

I never wanted to leave New York. Living in Barbados I wasn’t just ‘the American girl,’ but the New Yorker and I didn’t know how to slow down, how to pace myself, how to saunter and not race, how to take deep breaths into the sea air, letting go the shallow fits and stops that felt like locomotion and racing to be in the mix. But it was hot, hotter than I’d been anywhere else on earth, and it was home too, but I didn’t quite realize it.

In the crowd I belonged. Black-skinned, copper-toned, hair natural, holding my babies on my hips. Folks stood on the bus so we could sit. Everyone said,

‘good mor-NIN,’ to one another and to me too, to us. We moved with the crowd, music, sea, home, community, we. To be welcomed into the wave is a pleasure. To welcome into the wave is one too.

Crowds gathered everywhere and in them was invitation. To life, to joy, to hope, to connection, to gratitude. Collective effervescence.3 There were tears, reminders of all that had been endured to arrive at this moment of high vibration. Everyone said how much we’d all needed it. Everyone exhaled, even if just for that evening, in relief and satisfaction.

I bought a championship t-shirt from a street vendor and giggled to my girls about how much counterfeit shit I used to buy when I was young and single and running the streets feeling hopeful and young and daring. That freedom and the sense of wonder and possibility. There were invisible hands cradling us and despite endless differences in the world in race and sex and sexuality and class, wealth and poverty, I believed that we all ultimately wanted the same things for one another and that we would certainly not find it entertaining to witness atrocities, abuses, and humiliation of others. Not would I have imagined a cage fight on the White House lawn. So there we are.

That night in 1994 in Boston, word went out that the block was hot after Brazil’s win and that people should be careful wandering the streets because things could get violent. I am glad I didn’t heed that warning because, just like the night of the Blackout in NYC, 2003, just like the night the Knicks won it in five, just like Cropover, just like the cookout, just like the spaces where love leads, I felt welcome, wanted, celebrated, and honored. The incredible satisfaction of being alive!

May we find the delight again that sends us over the moon.

Your memoir writes itself!

And I laughed because it does and because what I am writing (attempting to in between painting and parenting with my full chest) is memoir adjacent and also crazy odd, disturbing, exciting, challenging, interesting things are always happening in my life, even when I am craving peace and quiet.

The girls’ father lives less than ten minutes from us and in the aftermath of what was an incredibly stressful and painful separation, we were able to find a comfortable groove in which to continue to support our daughters. Americans claim it is very French of us (he’s French), but I really think that when we are able to put the battle weapons down, we can see where the fighting left us all with wounds and scars, and that we did not want our girls to carry those with them into their relationships. Is it more American to keep fighting to the death? I suppose that is a question to consider.

There are still days where his behavior and worldview infuriate me, and I would not say that we have grown, rather that we have chosen well our battles, and that both can agree we’d rather not have every moment of contact have the potential for violence (emotional or psychological). How we got here is another story altogether, but I mention it to prepare you for what follows.

Last summer, D spontaneously bought five Rhode Island Reds, a breed of chicken, sturdy and curious, and brought them home to his backyard. He’d created a garden oasis with fruit trees and herbs, a swing, and glorious windchimes that echoed sound vibrations throughout this heaven, and in less than a month, they’d all but turned this haven to dust. They ate everything, scratched at everything, trounced on every surface with abandon, and slowly began to recognize him (and us) and seek affection and connection, which made their destruction forgivable to some degree.

Realizing that he could not find peace or respite on a dank sandlot, D began to rebuild his garden and relegated the chickens to a fenced-in coop with two shelters and large water tank and feeders. (This was the final result after first trying to contain them with an electric fence that they simply used the only bit of their flight power to flap over, then were unable or unintelligent enough to fly back over.)

The garden began to return to form; peaches and pears, oregano and mint and dill, lavender, forsythia, and roses grew, and honeysuckle made its way over the arched trellis that announced the entrance to this paradise. All was well until it wasn’t.

He first noticed the food disappearing at an alarming rate.

Are these chicken eating all this food or what? he’d asked in the way he turns a phrase in English.

Where is all the water? Why they are so thirsty?

And the chickens continued to strut around unbothered, showing no signs that they were famished or that they’d overeaten. D bought a new water tank convinced that the original had a hole somewhere and the water still disappeared. He put up motion sensor lighting, fearful that a racoon or other animal had somehow gotten inside and on a night when he’d returned early from work, saw the light go on on the surveillance camera and discovered the intruder.

Rats. At first there was just one, one that he could see anyway, but on the days that followed, he discovered a steady stream of varmints coming from next door and found that an empty lot behind his neighbor’s backyard had become a breeding ground.

You should call the city, I suggested. They are not going to stop coming if there is a nest.

I could hear him blinking through the phone, trying to figure out how this solution could not be the only one.

These rat bastard! he’d exclaimed and set to designing a fortress around the coop through which the rats would never invade and then went to Home Depot.

He made a lot of trips to Home Depot, each time arriving at ours unannounced and heated and agitated but also excited and sure he’d solved the problem.

I think you should just call the city. Let them know this is likely a larger problem and make sure to mention that you are across the street from a school.

There was the blinking again and he left to set up the traps along the perimeter and fortify the fencing around the chicken condos. He’d report each night how many he’d caught and where he’d disposed of them and each time I’d suggest calling the city.

If there is a nest, they are likely breeding like mad. You won’t be able to catch all of them.

He caught so many that it seemed he’d begun to agree with me, and he had, but not in calling the city, but in confirmation that there would be too many and that he needed refortification. Stopping by after another trip to Home Depot, he explained that he was going to dig a trench around the coop fencing and add additional fencing one foot below the surface and then overlay the area with cement tiles so that if the rats somehow were willing to dig below, they’d struggle to come up due to the tiles overhead. I just shook my head and said to let me know how it all went.

I don’t like to receive phone calls. I prefer a text to ask if I am available for a call because often I am navigating the world with one-track focus and any interruption can throw me off, making me a terror until I can get back on track. I think a lot of creative people are like this, so I don’t apologize and also know that for some it is a pain in the ass.

But he kept calling that afternoon, so I answered.

What?

It is in these moments that all the ways we were wrong for each other become apparent again. We don’t speak the same languages in so many ways. He is older and patriarchal and dismissive and completely out of touch with the feelings or intentions or motivations of others. His calls, like many/most/all feel intrusive with high expectations and a courtesy he would not/did not ever offer me. I try to temper my tone.

Is something wrong? Do you need something?

I forgot to tell you, he starts. I catch one. Can you believe this? They not digging. They climb. The motion sensor go off and I go outside to see and she is climbing but on the inside of the fence! She get through a hole up top so now I have to put more to reinforce and I don’t know if I can before I leave for the week.

And here is where it gets good and also goes all the way off the proverbial rails.

If some get caught in the traps, you can…

Pardon me, what?

You can remove…

Excuse me? Are you kidding?

Nooooooooooooon. They already will be dead. You can…

Know one another’s love languages they say and we all giggle like, of course, and here is where I failed. Because like so many women eager to be chosen, never to be abandoned, I lead this man to believe that he could or should or even would start a sentence with ‘if a rat gets caught in the trap, I could…do something, anything other than speak it into existence, no ma’am. No. Non. Nope. Uhhhn uhhhn.

And he was shocked even that I was so adamant, that I invoked the names of his tennis and Frenchie friends and suggested he call someone more qualified and willing to do his bidding, but alas, he’d said, they cannot.

So here we are at a stalemate. And by stalemate, I mean, I will likely encourage him not to set traps because I don’t want to see them rats dead or alive. I will go in the mornings and grab the eggs and make sure there is food and water for all of God’s creatures to eat at their leisure. I will ignore the calls and texts asking if there are holes in the ground or the fencing. I will report how many eggs I found each morning and water the indoor plants.

This will be the unspoken compromise. We won’t talk about it, and I will not explain why I feel so triggered by being asked to do something so far outside my comfort zone. I have by now shaken the expectation or hope that he or anyone really, sees me as someone to take care of, to be gentle with, to consider, because I know this is not the way we’ve engaged with one another, not the way the world has ever engaged with me. And the part of me that so loves the world, that is beyond all the imposed definitions of me, is eager to engage, to feel, to experience, and connect. But the part of me that is afraid, still small, still hopeful that I am really enough as I am, even when I have to say no or I can’t or I don’t want to, is somehow still conflicted. Such is the life of a daughter raised with conditions of love.

I called the city and left a message on the hotline though I have no expectations that anything will be done. I couldn’t let it go and I wanted someone in authority to take responsibility. I have always wanted someone in authority to take responsibility and protect us. Protect me.

And so, I have loved him and everyone before him with every resource I had, dared myself to try harder or move in and out of my comfort zone, hardly letting on that I was terrified or angered or hurt. I have had so few expectations and made so few demands that being asked to protect his impulse-buy chickens (that I love so dearly because, well chickens), feed and water them and the garden, put myself in harm’s way, real or imagined, for them and anyone else while never demanding the same, only breaks my heart a little. Until it’s a lot.

And the part of me that so loves the world, even when it doesn’t quite show me the same love back, wants to make it all right. And that is what I have believed was love.

Our teacher said, rather than making corrections, might we consider…

Might we consider, take into account, examine how our bodies were working in pursuit of achieving a particular goal. Might we consider that we have fought ourselves, added tension and stress into our bodies to achieve a task that likely could be done with more grace and simplicity. Might we consider, redirect, realign with a purpose that allows for forgiveness and grace for ourselves when we ‘fail’ and create new pathways for ‘success.’

The girls’ dad hears every comment as a correction, a reminder of his inferiority in his own mind, which he must conceal. His face immediately contorts into the little boy in France being told time and again of his shortcomings. He is prepared for attack and insult, says ‘I’m stupid. I screwed up’ before I’ve finished, or he defensively lashes out, thrusting a question or request back at my throat to silence me. Before he is able to listen to what I am asking, shame sticks a knife in his back and tells him to fight.

In the shame spiral that is becoming all too familiar in our everyday lives as well as on the grander scale of national, international, geopolitical landscapes, we are collectively less and less able to consider, and more and more reactive, expecting that we are being scolded, told we are wrong, rather than beginning the process of untangling ourselves from the mess of our own making.

He is not the only one. I use him as an example only to illustrate how challenging it has been to connect more deeply. How the protective wall he’s thrown up, and is most likely unaware of, has prevented us from considering together. I am all too familiar with the desire to hide from my own shame.

Ours was a household built on my father’s shame, a weight he carried from his childhood that, though discoverable only in small flashes, offhand comments, and flickering sadness in his eyes, that descended from the top of the pyramid down to our little feet. It showed up in anger and frustration at our inability to remain quiet or still or even keeled, failure to immediately grasp a challenging task, riding a bike, hammering a nail, driving on the highway, becoming disengaged from conversations with adults meant to be impressed by our order, grace, and rule following. It only became apparent in my teenage years that the shame in which he’d dressed himself was not mine to wear. By then, I’d found my own.

I was/am incredibly self-critical and quietly berate myself for mistakes big and small, but also for miscalculations, misunderstandings, being human, wanting or needing more or less, becoming physically or emotionally exhausted, needing to course correct. As a girl, it was hard for me to say I’m sorry, admit I’d gone too far, possibly hurt someone in the process, because of the fear I’d completely disintegrate, turn to dust, if I didn’t hold my woven story close, pulled tight like a widow in a Victorian novel, clutching my sweater or my cape or my shawl close to me.

And so, we are here, in a moment in time where the clutching of our pearls, our capes, our hearts has prevented so many from reconsidering. Too wrapped up in remaining intact despite the inkling that perhaps we might have been wrong, jumped to conclusions, judged too poorly or harshly. We want to keep doing things, going through the motions ‘as we always have’ so as not to fall apart, expose ourselves, admit that perhaps we are afraid to be met as our truest selves, wholly imperfect, contradictory, protective of wounds that still fester and ache that are too sensitive to the touch.

Standing at the ballet barre, our teacher suggests that we might consider how little effort we can exert to do the same action that we have, since we can remember, muscled through with tension, contracted muscles, clenched fists, glutes, abdominals, wherever it is the body continues to keep the score. We are reconsidering how ‘it has always been done’ and finding the grace and relief that release allows. It is both vulnerable and restorative.

Most powerful for me is standing next to others, watching in the mirror as each dancer realizes his or her moments where they hold, where they are unforgiving, where they are punishing, and see them let go. Witnessing this release is easier to become excited by in others than it is for myself. I feel myself blush when commended, with pride but also embarrassment for the freedom of being gentle with and loving myself publicly. I fear that until we can collectively admit to wanting the love and grace inevitably or intentionally denied us, we will continue to fight ourselves and each other.

I have made many a call of apology, admitted to unnecessary rage when cornered or hurt, begged forgiveness for lashing out or punishing what I struggle to see in myself. I have received such apologies too and ended relationships over the lack thereof, no longer wanting to do this hard work without reciprocity or acknowledgement. All of this is hard and nothing to be ashamed of. There is no path forward without clearing the brush.

When I have found myself unable to course correct or sadly, when the interest in resolution or reconciliation is clearly one sided, I finally started looking at myself, at what I may have done to get us to the place where we are unable to move forward. Like looking in the mirror and seeing myself pulling up in my glutes and my quads, putting strain in my lower back, I search for the internal places where the chain reaction begins and works its way through me. I ask where I am hurting myself and in turn repeating the same patterns expecting a different outcome.

I know we are all waking up to the same hellscape. Every day the same, and it feels perhaps easier to curl into one’s old habits, wearing out the groove of our familiar patterns even if it hurts us. Or,

We can consider

Stepping into each moment with grace and permission to be imperfect, admit we are here on this planet for more than this, forgive ourselves, release what no longer serves, exhale into creating harmony, and realigning with purpose.

It is true that my body is weary, having been molded by a practice both beautiful and brutal. But I am choosing to meet her anew, allowing myself to consider another way to move through space, bearing witness to myself and others trying to do the same.

He doesn’t know to be bothered or upset. He’d just like me to get a move on so he can sniff things and eat grass and pee on everything and shit before we come in for his meal- 1/2 wet food, a scoop of kibble, some water, rice, and a little bit of medicine to stave off the gastro upset that has plagued him since his cancer diagnosis. He is not worse for the wear, but I watch nonetheless, knowing the time will come when a symptom of some kind will arise and we will start more closely monitoring.

We both yawn and pandiculate. I turn on the light and face the mirror to my puffy face squinting back at me, gray hairs framing my one-side flattened fro, the swelling under the skin, agitation and inflammation of midlife, itchiness wherever it might show up this morning.

Ice was on my block this morning. Neighbors were moving out. There is a concentration camp just miles away where there are bugs in food and rancid milk and beatings and it’s also sunny out with a breeze and I don’t have to turn on the air conditioning. There will be a blue moon tonight and though I am agitated, I still myself when I can with the reminder of epic change coming and still try my best to think of this as positive. So much of the current change is not. It’s often hard to breathe.

When I received the call that Ice was near, I ran to the bathroom, nerves getting the better of me, and I had to evacuate. I was scared shitless for real. I made the calls. I called my family, told them where I was going and that I’d locked the door to the house and had already walked the dog. Told them in case I wouldn’t come home. I got in the car and drove over, but they were gone.

This has been a long weekend even without today’s events. Performances for one of my daughters, settling in with the other, retiring from teaching dance, saying goodbye to a place that had been my home away from home for nearly as long as we have lived here. The astrology tells me to prepare for rapid change, for some of my familiars to no longer be so. To let go and fall back and trust.

Drinking my coffee, I stopped in on the painting at the easel each morning, no matter what piece, and look. The one today has balloons because it’s a birthday party scene. As I revisit these moments from my childhood, family, parties, celebrations, silence, fear, I take them to the canvas where they swirl with the unspoken.

There has always been so much unsaid. I knew not to so as not to upset the status quo which at my house was going along, getting along to get along, and never expressing grief or anger or sadness or fear or boundless joy, maybe a little happiness, never too much of anything in either direction so as not to make yourself a target to someone else’s dysregulated emotions. There were hungry ghosts and angry bullies ready to destroy, watching vigilantly for weakness, for the moment they could sense you wanted or needed something which became suddenly delicious for them too. I knew better than to show any feeling at all so as not to be exposed.

My poker face is more of a stony face, a wide grimace with eyes that do not make connection. Behind the sockets the electricity of my nervous system creates links and connections, and I turn the Rubix Cube trying to figure the algorithm that will keep me undetectable. Sometimes I slip up. Usually when I feel my children have been threatened.

Some shitty machinations from a young fool one of my daughters dated for thirty seconds, had me prepared to burn the world down, at least the connections between us and them, his family and mine. I fought the urge to tear everyone to shreds and was pissed at myself for giving a shit, reminded my girl that some people suck and they walk among us, and sometimes we love them and sometimes it is time to let go. Blue Moon.

Someone had to have called. The target was too specific. Our block is quiet and unassuming, how on earth could they have chosen this one out of an infinite number of suburban streets to threaten?

I walk these streets and neighborhoods every morning with my dog and, on the ones when I have more time, I try to explore those usually too far to walk on school mornings. When I heard Ice was here, I knew immediately where they’d gone because I’d seen the crew out there peacefully working many times, always with a smile or greeting. I always felt safe with them. I did always know that too many didn’t care about the kind eyes or familiar greetings. I knew there were always promises that would never be kept. Too many Miss Anns and Nellie Olesens and Laura Lizzies1 in the wake of my life’s speedboat ride for me to completely let my guard down and toss back my head.

I still say good morning to almost all I pass, and you’d be surprised how many don’t respond and how many appear not to see me at all, how many only see my dog, Ivan and either embrace him “because they are dog people” or fear him because he is walking with me. To say that I expect either and am neither hurt nor angered is to tell myself the lie that I didn’t want more, after all the chances and promises.

Hope is certainly audacious, at least it was, and I have learned too so is the creeping, insidious cancer of hate and denialism that has people trying to explain away my reasons for being disappointed in my ‘friends,’ my colleagues, my community.

My blood boils so that were it to be drawn it would spurt as it once did after teaching a particularly rigorous dance class. I took a beat, then messaged, and knew it wasn’t enough. I got in the car and drove over. The same secret passageway I’ve walked or driven, a hideaway at the edge of the block, used as an ambush, a trap. Where we live. Where we call home.

The weekend had already been fraught. I’d begun to feel the fraying of connections, the loosening of ties, the sudden goodbyes and small steps on new pathways. I’d watched my children, now young women, live outside of the grip of my exhausting childhood. I witnessed their expansion, the rise in my chest near to exploding.

It was a group of teenagers that first spread the word, they are here. And there was no hiding. How incredibly disappointing to find that no matter the idyll, the bright blue sky and white, fluffy clouds, the children covering the baseball diamond learning to play ball, parents sitting in the grass watching and calling out in support, blocks away masked men were turning down our street to wreak havoc. How incredibly disappointing to find that not everyone who promises will step up and keep it.

I am less fearful of the men whose uniforms, hidden faces, and nihilistic aura threaten to throw the world off its axis. Believe me, they terrify me, the possibility of their imposed violence. But I am more afraid of those who swear we are in it together and never look us in the eye, don’t pick up the phone, or answer the call.

Today, so many answered, dialed in, and connected. The gratitude I hold for the text chain that would deliver messages of safety, guidance, and protection. When we feel most vulnerable, it is a gift to know someone is thinking of what we need before we ask. This is what we said we would be.

I have driven by three times this evening and put a blessing over the house. I prayed to them, keeping my hands on the wheel, that they are able to sleep through the night, that they have called the safe resources, that they believe in and trust in their community, our community. Us. I hope we can continue, that we won’t let go. That we won’t disappoint.