Laila’s relentless optimism inspired me to work through my anger and hopelessness I feel about our current political climate to find the simple goodness that we’re all capable of bringing to the world.
on the days I most want to burn the world to ashes—
down to the charred detritus of men’s unwanted touches, presidential tweets and YouTube comment sections—
I think of how much easier it would be
to go inside a warm, dark place
and wait for the halcyon days of spring to arrive
dripping wet with freshness and vitality and possibility.
how much easier to hide oneself away,
but how impossible,
how even inside the bear’s closed den the fingers of frost creep.
to be safe in this world seems more impossible with each passing day;
and even the expectation of safety,
once unquestioned,
somehow rings naïve.
a girl fainted in front of me on the C train last year,
crumpling to the floor silently, without warning, and
all at once our sleepy train burst into action.
someone rolled the girl onto her side because she had started to shake;
two other women pressed the emergency call button to alert the train operator;
another man stood there shouting that she’d had a seizure and that she’d peed herself,
which was neither helpful nor accurate.
and I could do nothing
except kneel on the floor of the car with the girl’s curly brown head in my lap,
so she wouldn’t wake with her head on the filthy train floor.
in the end, that may be what matters most in this life,
doing what we can in the face of fear and uncertainty,
even when the lure of the warm, dark place beckons,
the lure of the safe place,
because increasingly we learn that these places are not inviolable
and because the only real place we have is the one that’s right here,
and we must make of it what we can.