graphic by kayleigh woltal
What if we wake up to each other as something we know not of, as the not-you and the not-me but the interrogation of an impossible task, a means of waking up in the morning, waking up to an already-afternoon, asking not of our virtues, but of our birthrights as peacemakers. I can sense a separation now. Who am I kidding – I could sense it even when my nobel peace prize was denied and I suffered, consequence at the hands of stereotype threat. How fluid it was, how surely it has already happened. I know it has And Cain was not his brother’s keeper, and I suppose neither am I, but there is something rapturous in the way I miss you. It’s almost a comedy I think it is a comedy. I wish I could purify myself, to make pure, to stay pure until I am strong enough to be tampered with again. I am not addressing your shortcomings mine ours. I am not a prophet from another world, separate from yours, unavailable to your dialect. I am a mirror image and that scares me. I see permutations of me in you, perhaps an alternate reality, a fiction, a mirage. I see a happiness I once had (or thought I had) and I feel a dread that you fill me with sometimes, many times. I am prolonging, I am prolonging. I want to sit over a cup of tea with you and talk about things – but we’ve been here before. and we’ve been here before. What time are you coming over? Do you want peach? Sleepytime?