life without bars

{public post}

my loves

greetings from a table at an air bnb in new zealand / aotearoa. it is 12:56 am. i am wiring this on  my phone. i am tired.

i am sad.

and i am scared. and i am fine. and i am lonely. i am okay.

i am worried. about michael. about neil. about my kid. about my old people. about my friends and family. about my country. about my future. about my heart. it’s going lub-dub, lub-dub.

it’s doing it’s thing and it’s staying alive. it’s none the wiser.

i am up in the middle of the night, writing this to you, feeling history groan under us like a sleeping giant with terrible breath.

this is like watching a slow, slow car crash. the tractor trailer that is 3500 feet away.

i am full of poetry and i am paralyzed.

i have never felt like this.

i was a german studies major with a concentration in the holocaust for fucks sake.

i feel i know i feel i know i feel.

i know how very little i know.

i know how much i am homesick.

ash wants every day to go home.

……………..

world on lockdown

like some backwards dr seuss book

OH! all the places you won’t go!

……..

no bars. no restaurants. no shared joys and sorrows. not that way, anyway.

………

this afternoon, new zealand / aotearoa just announced that full lockdown is imminent. we have 36 hours – then in we go. level three is now. level four is wednesday. everybody locked inside, no fucking around. jacinda arden, the PM of this country, makes me want to cry. her bearing and ability to do adulting compared to donald trump is shocking. i want to tattoo jacinda across my heart.

neil and i are going to move from temporary house #1 to temporary house #2 tomorrow.

first world refugees, in our car with our coffee ground and bags of olive oil and toilet paper and sneakers and shampoos.

the overstuffed boats. the trains at dawn. dachau.

what our grandparents saw that we did not, that we do not. i know i feel i know i feel i knew they knew i know.

we are fucking blessed.

to have wound up here, to have found a house to move to, to have money for that house, to have a friend with a cat to help us move and race out to get money from the ATM for us, to be all together with nobody sick.

i am thinking about what i am good at.

what am i good at? am i any use?

i am thinking about how, when the boston marathon bombing happened, i went onto twitter for three days and barely stopped typing. i tweeted hundreds of times. thousands. i connected. i wept. i offered hugs. i said i know i know i know i feel i know.

i do. i did. i am.

today, i did not do that. made eggs and sat with a screaming four year old and explained why he really didn’t WANT his father to die, he was just saying that.

BUT I WANT TO EAT HIS BLOOD says ash

and it would usually be funny but today it’s not.

my job has changed.

my job today wasnt to tweet 900 times.

it was to make eggs and lie with ash while he wept, after hitting izzy. he wept

BUT I WANT TO BE BAD. I WANT TO BE BAD. I WAAAAANT TO, ash says.

I WANT TO BE A BULLY he pouts

no you don’t ash, i insist.

……

yesterday we held a hair cutting party on the lawn. kya cut my hair with ash’s help and i cut ash’s hair with izzy’s help (she’s seven).

i was tempted to hack all my hair off like i did when i was 20 and had no control in college and that’s all i could think of to do.

neil declined a haircut.

tomorrow, he said.

i posted this to instagram.

then someone made this.

this.

what i’m good at?

surviving. through connection.

my biggest fear?

that the internet will go down.

that i will pick up my phone one day, and there will be no bars.

no comforting set of wifi wiggles trailing up to the sky.

no connection. a dead line.

that is my fear.

i don’t know a lot about how likely that is.

but i didn’t know a lot about how likely it was that an illness would rampage through my earth, either.

tomorrow we have to move.

to be honest, y’all…. am not in a great place, neither is neil, and i would be amazed, frankly, if any of you were.

how are you?

…………..

in positive news: the new temporary house has a piano.

you can bet your asses that as long as the internet exists i’ll be doing a “it’s just a fucking ride cabaret“ as often as possible via crowdcast.

let me get settled. mama is tired. mama is trying.

heres a beautiful video of the beach….

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-D_IBhFqHW/?igshid=e0hoib0s6qs0

and if you follow me on instagram, i did a live stream of just … the birds and the waves. who knew it could feel like that. it did.

j went into the today and screamed into the oncoming surf.

not a fear scream.

no. a true, deep, mother-of-a-four-year-old, OH MOTHER OCEAN-EARTH ARE YOU WITH ME OR ARE YOU FUCKING AGAINST ME scream of challenging aggression.

no reply yet. i’ll keep checking my what’s app messages for her answer. .