here i am.
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I won’t stay here, but this is where I’ve been this week. I’m turning off the comments because I can’t bear to hear consolation, or heaven help me, admonishment. This isn’t a plan for action or a blueprint for organizing. It’s just a report from a very human heart.
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I dusted the top of the wardrobe and found a forgotten magic princess wand. I took it down and snapped it in two. I seethed as the silver plastic splintered in my hands. I don’t want my white children to play act their power, assert make-believe dominion over fantastical people, or weather, or ice.
It’s 75 degrees in November. Every night mosquitos buzz in my ears and my kids wake up with fresh bites on their cheeks. When I hear one I lunge at the light switch. I hunt it down with a swatter, squelch my family’s blood onto bedroom ceilings and walls incandescent at the satisfied fools destabilizing the only planet we have.
I move a stack of paper boxes and try to remember what I stashed inside. Dried flower confetti and seed balls. I want to call them bombs. I want to hurl them into the dry mounds of dirt that sit on what should be green grass outside the public housing project. I want my fury to sprout a garden.
I look into the eyes of the men and women I pass on the street, trying to divine if they are someone I should reach out and take by the throat. I want to punt the men chortling on the sidewalk to the other ends of the earth. I want to fling them into space, send them spiraling into a black hole.
I can’t abide by calm, measured conversations with anyone who tsks tsks the election results and offers hollow comfort. My rage is right below the surface. I try to speak and it’s a bark, a growl. I want to see grown men cry. I want to watch tears rack their bodies and fury spew from their lips. Just for once I want to hear them acknowledge how bad things could get, how vulnerable people are, how much care we lack, how much care we need. I want to hear how broken the institutions, how immoral the electeds, how infuriating the injustice. I want to see them spit and stamp their feet and howl at the moon.
I want to see the dads hold each other at school drop off and sigh their sobs into each others’ shoulders. I want them to take long walks through a park to process a country that hates the women they claim to love so much. I want to see them slump on a stoop too undone to take another step.
I want to see these men unraveled by their rage and their sorrow so that they might begin to put themselves back together again. I want to watch them plumb the depths of their humanity so they can rebuild the makings of their brains and hearts. I want to know they are trying to save their souls.
I buy a box of heart-shaped cookies and share them in the park.
I push a child on the swing and count the squirrel nests in the London plane tree.
I slice thick rounds of eggplant and mozzarella.
I brush a child’s hair and kiss their sticky cheek.
I send a kid to the store for bread.
I make a PTA agenda.
I pay a doctor’s bill.
I smell a brush fire.