Member-only story
How do we still love?
He takes his eyes away and tells me he feels too tired and insecure to hold his sight on me
This morning, I was surrounded by missiles. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were there, somewhere, and trying to kill me. I wonder how often I sat in the hall of my apartment — waiting for the fiery rain to end — during the last two years?
I wouldn’t be able to count.
Days like that merge into one single picture in my mind:
I grab a chair (or maybe a hundred chairs in retrospect?), place it by the bathroom door, sit down, listen to loud whistles and explosions, and watch flashes of bright light fill my living room.
Today was one more such day. Even though I haven’t experienced it for a while, my body and my mind still remember the fright, the anxiety, the routine and the relief that follows.
Memory lives on.
Later, in the afternoon, I was working from a bookstore, surrounded by hundreds of books. Some people write books, and some people build rockets. What a dramatic difference of interests we human beings can have: creating and destroying, writing books and burning them, uplifting and killing with our words.
What am I doing?
