Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war.
Do you ever forget that your friends are dead?
Perhaps in the middle of the movie or the play or the book or the song or the sentence you find yourself thinking, oh I must tell him about this; oh she would love this. A beat, and then the realization, and then the wave.
If eulogy is memory is forgetting why there are no new memories a kind of prayer?
Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd just about a year ago. Already a different kind of forgetting.
Perhaps it is an act of radical imagination to hold space for people who should still be here.
Perhaps it is an act of radical imagination to make spaces better for the people who are still here.
Attribution:
Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war. War worm squirms in the ear, infectious. Can you name that tune—anything but fear. It’s just a war, baby.
—from Some People Love War Like a Song by Rochelle Hurt