Nothing will ever be the same.
It's a Tuesday night after 10pm. Over 100 days since the terrible, the horrific thing. My children are somewhere else, and this house feels too big and empty, unmoored without them. Maybe that's why I'm drinking whiskey at 10pm on a Tuesday night while my husband sleeps and my children are gone, and I am feeling that indescribable weight of both loneliness and solitude.
It's a bittersweet feeling.
I am pulling the poetry books from the shelves, stroking their spines, wanting to crawl into the pages of every single book. Seeking solace, I guess you could say. Some comfort. Empathy from strangers turning pain into art. Because the empathy we all deserve won't come from an angry, indifferent world.
Most of these writers are dead, or almost dead, or very old, or sick; or else so young they don't understand, they are numbed with false narratives, wrapped up in this century like those silver blankets they give to people with frostbite. I get it; it's bitterly cold. You want to stay warm, even if that means enshrouding yourself in ignorance under the guise of resistance.
My whiskey is too fluid. the ice clinks jarringly in the glass, it's musical, in an annoying way. My children are elsewhere and hopefully asleep. Asleep and without nightmares. Asleep and without the thoughts playing like a horror film behind my red eyelids. Without what they've seen or heard on the news in any language, or in the passing, whispered conversations of concerned adults. Because the poetry is not helping me forget the horrible, awful thing and everything that came after it - the destruction that always seems to find us, naming our children, defining who are even as we resist the pull of history. Our broken wandering, our half sung battles, our millions of ghosts trailing behind a fragile hope for centuries, white-hot and anguished across every country and continent. Chosen, yes, but for what? At least we learned to laugh, then. To braid our bread in the dark. To always carry a candle. To make up a secret language of humor and pain. For lighting the dark.
We are tired of this never-ending dance that soldiers on for millennia. But we never give in.
And yet: every time I think we are better, stronger, more resilient as a people and a nation or as citizens of the world and then I remember the world is awful, will hurt us; wants very much to erase our collective voice and then blame us for the pain. God forbid we had the audacity to live through it, to outlive every kingdom, regime and government that tried to destroy us. How dare we live through it in perpetuity. How dare we carry on. Contempt, at its root, is more so for thriving than surviving.
It is cold here, and too quiet.
Meanwhile I am helpless in my suburban midwestern house with the expensive bookshelves filled with the words of dead poets, the words I keep trying to climb into, when nothing can save us. There is no real refuge. Even the place we carry in our bones, like an ivory DNA map of home - even that we've swallowed up like songs no wants to hear.
So: I am drunk on a Tuesday night, my children safe somewhere else, my husband asleep and oblivious because only then does he allow himself to dream. I know he must, because when he is awake he is always haunted.
We are meant to be a light among nations. Sometimes I have to remind myself that's how we survived. Guided by something else, something that means more than revenge, heavier than blood. Something that has guided us through wandering deeper into despair. Light from the prayers we've buried deep within the sky of our hearts.
As for me, these words are all I have now. Let me have my last refuge.
Maybe that's my one true homeland.
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