In a circle of folding chairs, we all took turns describing pressure in our throats and tongues. Someone handed me a magic marker. I remember parking too far away - pretending to take a long walk afterwards for my health. The sky is huge during these events. The bulletin boards are bordered with scalloped paper. One middle aged man explained he had been having nightmares that it was his own children trapped under the rubble. Later, at the film screening, his squirmy little boy sat next to me, and said he likes to make films too, and I cried during the film’s sad parts but not for those reasons. Hold my hands, palm up, or grab the steering wheel of my car and scream: I hate this fucking city. I hate this fucking city. I missed the tulip rectangle at the entrance to the park because I couldn’t leave the house in the warmth. Now the stems are probably pointed up with no faces, no balloon noses. I insist on bringing home a bag of nut-less apple mixture that symbolizes the bricklayer’s materials. It looks like a bag of excrement.
I said the word “solidarity” as a salve for my grandma’s rant about fear. Maybe her hearing aids aren’t turned on. I remember when she took them off once years ago - in her nightgown in lamp light - she told a story of a holocaust survivor friend, and her voice was loud and shrill - to hear herself. I remember to turn down my dad’s stereo. I pick the brown shells of cicadas off the under leaves of my mom’s garden. Crunchy exterior of souls, hanging by jagged hooks. The man with the giant dog-tag necklace sat across from me during the night ritual. He was writing notes in the margins, flickering, eyebrows burned. Each ink letter is a hole to deposit dead bodies. I used to have nightmares of the picture from the concentration camps of a skinny boy wearing only a shirt and holding up a spoon. Then this week I saw a picture of a boy with his entire lower body burned off, and he was still alive. He held up his burned legs. Each image cannot detach from the nerves wired in soft body parts trained to protect me and make me survive.
I didn’t have my own grave-shaped silver jewelry that told the room my feelings on war crimes and bombs and animal feed and mother’s screams. Could he just tell, by the way I looked at him? He can’t hear my eyes straining. Slide my teeth to rip up green flower plaits from their long needle, leaking brine that’s shared with him, too. I read the Allen Ginsberg poem about his mother feeding lentil soup to GOD. She asked HIM: why won’t he stop the fighting down there? She said GOD looks tired, and he loves lentil soup. She was having dreams about hitler and writing Allen Ginsberg a letter about the light on the window. I was outside the brick building into the humid after-rain night. Our faces blurred into one beaded ring. I am reciting an ancient prayer by heart, but I am taught I have to read it from paper in case I am mistaken. Each wrong-turned note escapes a different soul attic. Of course I piece together themes and metaphors automatically, because I went to sunday school.
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Is it the same image all the time? I remember pink horizons, to enter a lone blue world. It’s better to write during the immediate aftermath of the hours, the memory newly delivered, the wound. But so much time has passed and now the wound has dried over. I look at the scar, and I can still access parts of experience, but the taste of blood is gone, the sting of flesh bumping against material.
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Arriving at the front of the site, the wooden welcome building appeared in the middle of the roads, a hut with windows where we would rent our canoe and kayak. The life vests hung on pole racks and inside a shed, a walk-in closet of faded orange and buckles. Some were still dripping, and I though of the other boaters that day, the proximity of their bodies to mine.
The day wasn’t fit for swimming after all. It was cloudy and the water at the campsite’s lake was full of green plants - fuzzy and invasive - and had a strange oil on the surface. The water was cold. The day had a tinnitus-buzz of motocross engines, as bikers were out somewhere in the special motocross trails of the park.
We set our boats down and surged through, following the trifold map we got from the welcome hut, showing the vein cutaways of the water. On the banks of the lake, called Finger Lakes, red and blue tags on trees marked the direction of each “trail” path. An older man was speeding through on a kayak, like a daily runner. H and I shared a canoe, and N was on their own on a kayak, smoking weed. We were sipping silver cans of vodka seltzers or something.
We didn’t have a radio, we looked for turtles or birds, but the landscape was mostly trees and grass, almost like everyday borders of a neighborhood. The ever present road sometimes appeared in a clearing, exposing us, etched on the water’s buggy glass. We made it through the dull lanes and then the trees closed in. It got darker, like a tunnel, and a green film of algae made ripples and breaks as we disturbed it.
After setting up camp later, making bratwursts and vegetables, and listening to music in drunken silence, we shooed away the fat raccoon from our leaking trash hung up. It was the middle of the night. We went to the bathroom house under a lone yellow light in the completely quiet campsite.
When we opened the door of the bathroom, there stood a little boy brushing his teeth with his mouth and wobbly baby teeth wide open, large eyes unblinking, unafraid. Startled me. His mother wore a hijab and a puffy winter coat, even though it was only a little chilly that late summer night. We said hello, and shifted around them, trying not to feel embarrassed by the shared intimacy of before-bed routines.
In the morning, I walked to the bathroom again, and watched the family praying in the public campsite space, their bodies on the ground at moments, as if to kiss the earth. It felt peaceful - a family was praying here. The motocross guys were revving up to zip around the dirt curlicue path. Is this America? I don’t want to use this juxtaposition of people as symbols for my own comfort.
The camping trip always becomes a topic in my writing, something I want to archive and come back to. It is a moment without phones, so maybe I am my pure self? I am pure in my vision of exterior paths, people I do not know around me. Reality startles me. It is a moment in time placed out of my life, into the woods, outside of capitalism, and focused on rituals for simple pleasure and survival. This feels to be the meat of it - what life on earth was really supposed to be.
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I tried to convince myself I can’t write right now, but I already got the laptop out. I scrolled through twitter for 15 minutes, looking at pictures of palestinian hospital patients burning alive in a blaze, attached to dark IV chords. Their hands looked like gloves in the death flame. I don’t know what to do anymore. This weekend it was Yom Kippur, the holiday of atonement. How can we ever atone for this? The children in northern Gaza are starving, the vice president it tweeting, oh how horrible, they are starving. Humanitarian law must be followed. How can she not name who needs to follow it? The statement hangs in its un-naming, and non-action, and weapons shilled out, millions of dollars to fuel the literal flames. These virtue-signal words of politicians are what make me hate writing. What can writing do here, can writing ever translate the expansive throb of helplessness?
At my job, I tell students to make their essays stronger by taking out excessive questions. Make your questions into statements, I say, for a clearer effect of what you mean. But maybe I need to also teach them how to write beyond collegiate terms of successful communication. The question is a perfect device for what it means to live right now.
I opened the door of my apartment to stand outside and curl around to pinch off basil leaves from my herb garden. Outside, the air is cool and flowing, the wind. In the texture of air, I hear small children yelling, with isolated cries, somewhere. Why? It was later at night, 8 or 9. Bedtime. Maybe everyone in the neighborhood’s windows are open, letting us hear their family’s routines and emotions. Maybe kids are still outside playing, refusing to go inside to brush their teeth. Why can I hear other people’s lives so clearly?