Talking with people who speak my language. Shared experiences, peers. The night full of rain like stars falling. Meeting again after long absence the clients I’ve not been able to see since covid hit. Taking a break in the middle of my day to walk around the block with Poppy. We collected pretty leaves. She rode her bike through the largest puddle. I was instructed very seriously on how to carry her gumboots full of puddle water home. I accepted my instructions.

The afternoon light dappled through the trees and laying on the footpath and storm water like white gold. The sound of the leaves making music together in the wind.

Jay is alive. Alone, almost silent, lost far from me in a shadowed place. Avery likewise sending small messages from a world consumed by pain. We have not lost hope. We watch, and listen. Gather patience, tune our ears better. Find warmth to ease the rattle of our chilled and anxious bones. Hold our hearts tight in burnout and loss. The light falling white gold through the trees. The world waiting.

Somewhere as far away as yesterday my phone buzzes like a sick insect. “The thing you have to understand…” says a man’s voice, many men’s voices, overlapping, talking to my empty study late at night, blending like a hundred radio channels left on, all talking and never hearing. The thing you have to understand they say to my empty room. A room away, I read next to my child, sleep next to her, dream alongside her. I have to understand nothing. They buzz into eventual silence.

Everything is wrong. No one and nowhere is safe. Safety is a dream we’re dying for. My throat closes on the phone to them, the words stick. Articulateness is in the ear of the listener, an artifact of relationship, not a fixed quality of a person. The words stick, freeze, cling to my throat like mud.

I can’t explain myself, he says. I’m not good at communicating, she tells me. Her words say yes, but her body says no. 8 years in I’m finally learning to listen to her body. When I get overwhelmed I just agree with anything, he tells me. I’ve heard the same story a million times over, felt my own capitulation in the face of professional gaslighting, group hysteria. Just because I can spell it doesn’t mean I can stop it.

I’m lying naked in the bath, far beyond shame, while my best friend calls hospitals and we try to calculate the value of a person’s life.

I’m watching, who steps in, who panics, freezes, or steps back. I know who my friends are. I know who is sitting by me in that bath, in their own baths, remembering what it is to be naked in the face of injustice, wordless in the face of impatient unsafety.

The rain falls on my bald head when I take out the bins and I can’t help but laugh. The world is so intimate, bright- dark, full of dew. Life and death, words and silence, the mud on my feet and in my throat. Shared and fractured, kept safe, and lost far beyond memory. It is what it is.