it’s hard to / relate to folk who don’t consider their own demise fifty ’leven times /

I have a blood pressure monitor, which is a thing my doctors recommended I get. I haven’t used it in two weeks. I don’t need to. I know what it will tell me. I wake up every day with my heart racing and I go to sleep every night with my heart racing and I spend my waking hours reminding myself to take deep calming breaths as if they will somehow make the hourly onslaught less brutal.

Onslaught of what? I am fine. I am safe. I have a job. I am grateful that those things are true, despite the pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Ah, right, the pandemic. And that grim parade of names memorialized on protest signs around the country and desperately, cynically invoked by #brands trying to stay on the right side of, if not history, as least customers’ purchasing habits.

Now, all at once, everyone has a black friend (but none of those folks are on their boards or in their C-suites). Everyone has an indigenous ancestor. Everyone is very sorry for all the things they are now being reminded that they said and did, up to and including yesterday. Yesterday, they did not know better. Today, though, today they are listening and learning and ~growing as a person~ and they want to make sure you know that.

That is what the attempted deep breathing is for, and the cheerfully neutral expression is for, and the group text is for, and the addition of the exclamation mark in that email is for, and the exclamation mark you removed from that message you edited six times before sending is for, and the playlists you listen to in private mode only are for, and the poems you return to again and again are for.