Ten.Two Thousand, Six Hundred & Sixty-Seven
Why can I never sleep in?
Hot, hot shower. Just give me a hot decaf.
It was enough.
Women in all black digging in the desert dirt with their bare hands. A little girl building a circle with rocks, digging into the dirt with her hands. She lays some sticks inside the wall of rocks. The women keep digging. She’s building a pyre. In the distance, a large group of men dressed in black march across the sand. And then you see it. A body wrapped in white, carried by some of them. A ring of fire encircles them. Life and death. I think of what is happening in the Middle East — all over, really. Can’t you feel it? The deep sadness of a mother having to dig her child’s grave? The fear of a child knowing that they will dig the grave of another?
On the way out, I read the plaque: “Passage by Shirin Neshat… inspired by the Palestine-Israeli conflict… a poetic image of loss, grief, renewal, and hope…” “That’s what I thought,” I say out loud after I read it. The women and I step away at the same time. “That was intense,” she says. “It was.”
Texture and color and light and sound. I had forgotten how much I love to be in a museum.
A book about wabi-sabi and another book about dreaming.
On the other side of the Golden Gate is real life.
I have misjudged my time, and I will pay for it.
She wants them to bring their jerseys so that they can take a picture in them. I can’t wait for her to get to high school.
