Hater Town, population Me in anticlimatic

It’s strange to endure hateful things on the promise of a better tomorrow. My eyes feel like they have been ground into dirt- the dirt I walk back and forth through. It’s like the more hateful the circumstances, the harder it is to raise my eyes to any height. Any height but the bitter dirt I carve up and down up and down with my shoes. Can’t even look people in the eye- worried eye contact might betray some malcontent within.

It’s strange to endure hateful things to the point that other people cease to be people. When capacity for empathy is squeezed shut by survival instinct- a big RED ALERT on the self care department. All hands on deck. All guests to their cabins.

Yet, even in these moments I am occasionally touched. If I can acquire enough respite to manage it, I celebrate anyone I happen to pass by who is alive and enjoying themselves- regardless of how they choose to do it. Bits of pleasant memory will still hit me out of nowhere of bygone eras and long retired characters and sets.

Just today I caught a whiff of laundry on the air and remembered the backyards of my parents and my neighbors on the block I grew up in. Helen had the yellow house with the garage and the crab apple tree, Estelle had the tiny grey house on the corner of the alley, Doris the long white house with the old blue car in the drive. I remember these old ladies holding gossip court over the neighborhood as its proper elders, hanging their laundry in the early summer morning breezes. People didn’t go crazy with the landscaping back then. There were more trees, and older ones. Mostly plants just ran amok wherever they could. These were wet, lush, young years.

Now, the dirt’s gone dry.