Documented in through the looking glass.

I told David I think this is the most I’ve ever been afraid in my life. Not fear experienced in a passing moment, but in a sustained way.

A tea shop we frequent burned down. Another small business we love, a cafe with clothing and shoes for sale, looted. The grocery store and liquor store in our neighborhood are boarded up. At night I hear David’s raspy snores, the hum of the air conditioning unit outside our window and I mistake it for the endless circling of helicopters. We’re startled by the alarm emanating from my work phone, the phone we have never managed to silence, announcing the 7:00pm curfew.

We’re safe, for now. We still have access to food, we can go outside. I bike with H to the little nature preserve off the river and we sit on the bridge and watch the birds dive for fish, the Metro rumble by on the elevated tracks over the water. I walk with him to the Capitol on a quiet, balmy morning with the hopes of telling him what is happening here in words too big for him to really understand, but he falls asleep in his stroller on the way. So I greet the police officer, relaxed, leaning on his elbows over the railing of the temporary fencing, instead. We carry on.

My emotions are everywhere. I tell myself this is complex, that I should avoid the spaces where people shame and simplify. But it’s hard.

The protests seem to have turned a corner, to something more peaceful, focused. It’s too early to know, really, and I tell myself not to get too invested in such a certainty. But it’s hard, because our fear is rooted in the lack of certainty, and so definitiveness is a comfort.

We are two-and-a-half months in to the relentlessness of working our full-time jobs from our bedroom while caring for our full-time son, alone, without a break. We read new perspectives, we check in on friends, we frequent small businesses, we donated the entirety of our stimulus check to a charity that supports the homeless, but we’re really only capable of so much right now. I tell myself that. But it’s hard.

Our families have not reached out.

The utility cabinets are littered with handmade signs: quotes from historical figures, simple statements of support, angry, manic admonishment, practical advice for managing tear gas. Freestanding boards advertise virus testing sites. Little American flags line the front edge of the yards along East Capitol, and eventually I notice the strip of paper sitting below each flag, four black faces in a row. A discarded mask lies in the crosswalk.

We carry on.