boom.

Sometimes I need to sit in a different place to see things differently. I sit at the end of my bed, the place where, normally, my feet would go. My back leans against the tall railing that the girls use as a gymnastics bar while we yell at them from the other room No! Don’t hang on that, you’re too big now! and it is really astounding how quickly they can get all of their clothes off and be in undies looking like underfed Sumo wrestlers. Actually — honestly, this is a phase we’ve already passed. This scene doesn’t happen anymore. We’ve moved through so many phases: take a photo every night at dinner, feel radical hope for the future and the possibility of change, make videos based on impromptu poetry readings, cry while trying to meditate — listening to the long sirens pass — March, April, May, June have passed. Yes, I can keep going. Yes, we can stay strong. Yes, yes, we bought a car. Yes, one of the lights went on, yes we all woke up with a start — yes we are awake! Yes, the fireworks start around 7pm nightly, yes some neighborhoods are louder than others, yes I wonder why there are very very loud fireworks relentlessly powering through our neighborhoods all night long from 7pm — 2am. Yes, I am wondering why now. Why these fireworks began a week or two ago and haven’t stopped and they follow a schedule and create an atmosphere of destabilization, or, celebration.

I don’t know. I can’t say. I have moved into the girls room, typing by computer screen light while they sleep, small hot bodies in bunk beds.

I don’t know how to celebrate. I didn’t know how to celebrate my partner today. I bought good coffee and bread and smoked salmon and it was delicious but mainly I just moved from one room of the apartment to the other, moving objects, taking pictures of objects, in the hopes that I could make space.

Now, the cats meow, even though they’ve already been fed.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Night, night.