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Was the hummingbird code for something? Or just the first of two bookends? That space between them yawned like the abyss, and the space in my head felt deliberate, like Silvina wanted it to be there.
Call our neighborhood “Meadow Brook” or “Canopy Trail” or “Lake Shores” or any other name that fucks with your head if you think about it too long. Because there isn’t a meadow or a canopy or a lake. Anymore.
To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it “the fatal adaptation.”
All of this new information lit tiny fires inside. I took such delight, and delight didn’t come easy to me. But it did here.
Hadn’t the hummingbird been a kind of miracle? Hadn’t it diminished us not to see this as a miracle and protect it?
A layover in Chicago on the way back, because of bad weather in our path. The kind you can’t fly through. Also, once we landed, some mechanical issue. So we would have to change planes. Another delay. Well, that was the way of it with miracles like flight. The magic had become tawdry, tattered, excruciating.
Memory fucks with you when it tries to protect you.
Silvina wrote that even through the poisoned landscape, we must love it. We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive. How did I not see the damage for so long?
