Of It (and Over It)

When I take my evening walk about in my Queens neighborhood, and maybe I’ve written about this before—this is the age, but I sort of marvel that I’m of it.

I can’t help marveling that for a truly odd woman, odd since birth, who never really belonged anywhere or with any group for as long as I can remember (and lucky enough to find loads of friends just like me), I have still managed to make a life in a range of locations, learning through walking, greeting everyone I make eye contact with, with “Hi.” I’m not stupid, but my experience has been that as Anne Frank said in her diary, most people really are basically good.

It’s hard to feel like that today.

Trigger happy white men are freely enjoying acting our all their Nazi fantasies, their blood lust, on ordinary sweet Americans, and they know they can do it with impunity. It won’t matter if anyone is charged for the murder of the Minnesota poet/wife/mom whose van was in an ICE agent’s way, because Trump will pardon him. This is America now. Until these men rape, kill, pillage, torture, torment, destroy everything human and decent to the point of over-satiation, they won’t rest. And they won’t stop, not really, ever, because their rage is superfueled by their increasing cruelty.

I remember seeing footage of the earliest days of the war Russia has waged on Ukraine, where confused and under-equipped Russian baby soldiers pointed weapons at and were utterly baffled by old people walking out of their houses to shoo them away, like flies, and they went. That didn’t last long. Three years later, the war is no closer to ending.

America will soon be under siege, too, I guess, by its own kill-happy MAGA citizens. It’s so hard to fathom how quickly it all went to hell. And how long we will have to endure this is anyone’s guess. General Stephen Miller all but came all over himself on CNN the other night as he talked about raw power, how he had it now, and would never give up that “raw iron” he was, in his dreams, holding in his pants.

Even harder to reckon with is the fact that we have absolutely no Democratic leadership to meet this nation’s defining moment. Not even a retired military official will break protocol. Trump has zero real opposition outside ordinary citizens doing their best to keep democracy going. It’s lonely and it’s terrifying. And now, deadly.

So here I was this evening, after a half hour of wracking sobs, making myself dress well and go out into the world in search of dinner to bring home, marveling at the sky.

And I began remembering other skies, the seasonal skies of many walks, from early adolescence on, when you start going outside yourself—the wild Virginia sky of my childhood neighborhood after a hail storm; a playground sky of Biblical proportions, the light coming down from behind the clouds, as I played basketball with middle school friends; windswept blue drama during Hurricane Andrew in the eye of that storm in rural Central Virginia; half blue, half black clouds with rain to dodge walking across the Virginia Tech campus; an otherworldly dark orange sunset in Vermont during summer in graduate school; the still-light sky of London at 11 PM in summer; the perfect dusk of summer parks in Oxford; so many skies.

In all my walking in places as disparate as Woodbridge, Blacksburg, Appomattox, Vermont, Oxford, Spriggs Road, California, Iowa, London, and New York City, alone as I always am, I’m of it. Always of it. The sky never lets me feel abandoned. And so it is that I seem always to be from places, eventually, regardless of my oddness.

I’m too deeply, darkly sad to write anything else tonight.

As if on cue, my friend Tom sent me this:

Yes, they are.

I’m sending you these:

Once at the beach around midnight in Nags Head, North Carolina, a few decades back, I heard a mother, probably the same age as the Minnesota ICE murder victim, say to her eager child on just arriving, “Let’s not gather shells at nighttime. Look at the moon.” And what a moon it was.

Look at the sky. Don’t let the fucking fuckers take away your sky.

Sending love even in grief,

Miss O’