should seem basic

When I look at my fingers striking different arrangements of keys in just seconds it amazes me. It's largely controlled by neural input and output, but still now and then it just catches me. I operate these hands.

When I was a kid I had a hard time understanding that I was alive, as funny as that sounds. I realized yes I was alive and had a living body like everyone else but it didn't feel that way. I was reminded of it when I felt pain but aside from that it didn't feel as if I were in a body. I felt like a spectator watching everything pass before me. Even now thoughts like that appear where I have to step back and remind myself. I think of it differently now after a recent scare of my own which I can't confirm or deny. A body feels basic, but so complex when it turns against you.

On the news they showed A.J. Walker, a person who was injured in the trolley square shootings. He had a tutor sitting with him at a table. They would flip over little cards with pictures on them, a panda, a rock, a train. After every time he pointed a finger at a card a silence would follow. Sometimes it would catch up with him and he could name that panda or that train. Other times it would take longer.

Even though in most aspects he was fine, I felt a sense of injustice seeing a grown person reduced to that. "How about this picture?" There are somethings that I need to see as given to someone, but even the most subtle but needed things can be stripped away. No one should ever have to face that. It still happened, and life seems all the more fragile.

When I delve into it there is so much more that that which gets to me. I understand I am still young and only know but a fraction of the world. I've sought comfort recently focusing on the fact that I'm not the only one having to fight a battle. I knew that there was so much worse out there.

I watched on the tv these brown starving eyes watch her mother wilt to her end from aids, shut away in the corner of some dilapidated shanty be unprepared to be an orphan. On another programming I saw a handful of children born with a disease which ages their little bodies beyond reason, four year olds plagued by arthritis, heart complications, strokes, and all ailments you only see at a very old age. With a more recent, local happening, that poor husband who watched as his house exploded with his wife and new baby. When I was younger I would notice but it seemed like it was happening in another universe, now I am able to understand the grave reality of it.

I think back on darker times in history, the holocaust, Mao's reign in China, the black death and so on. I know human suffering is not new. It breaks my heart to know of these things especially knowing that in all of these situations someone was there still pleaing for change with their nerves cut off. No matter how charged their will they couldn't save anyone. I've had a very different outlook lately.
In the end I am able to impart from these things but it is difficult to know that it is indeed there, while the rest of us go on like normal.

I'd do anything

I came to know
when
I locked my
hands around you
in protective circle
the thin bands of life
the tragedy of fragile.

then was knowing that even
if I had the will
of ages
still you could fall
still the Gods would laugh

at the walls of breath
at the shields of skin

and for pagan tries
at meaning.

to not remember

I managed to jump into a conversation the other day. I accidentally laughed out loud when a real estaste agent on the bus told the man across from him. An officer gave him a dui while riding a horse. He talked a bit about the court and the legal trouble. Whether it's true or not, it still has a lot of humor.

I talked a little to the old man who sat across from the real estate guy after he got off. This man was very eloquently spoken and cheerful. We talked a bit about busing and the driving population.

He mentioned an accident he was in and went on to the next thing. I stopped asked him a little about it. The details don't matter so much when you can't get them straight so I won't try to remember specifics and write them. On I 15, go figure, he got rearended by some guy going 80 or something. The car frame got all mangled, the drivers seat hit him in the back of the head. No one bothered to look for a body given the condition of the car and how it also looked empty. The tow truck man found him hours after it all. I really admired how this man could talk about it like he did, impartially summarized it all while treating it as real but without pity.

He said he lost a lot of memories. "It's just the little things that went missing, is all. There's just enough gone for me to notice." I think that's the only time he stopped from smiling.

I think I'm going to start a new notebook or something. Jot down every basic memory possible like empty road outside a window or a park from childhood. I can't imagine what it's like to lose large resources of memory. It's uniquely yours no one can ever restore it completely if something happens so that you lose some of it or time erases it. It's an idea at least.

" I want to have good news to report
everytime I come up for air"
- Ani DiFranco