How to squander a magical life

 

Back in New York, people are going on vacations to the beach, slapping each other on the back after a perfect joke at a corner bar, walking the streets as if nothing has happened. This is how it feels to be left behind, to imagine that life that was not lived while you walk the same rooms, drifting around like a dust ball while the streets grow more and more infected, while this country fulfils its destiny - to be nothing more than a gas station and a graveyard. I remember what life was like after a collective disaster in New York. You swept it under the rug and went right back to squandering your magical life on rooftop parties and expensive meals, new shoes and good coffee. It was a shadow that you passed from time to time, a shudder of cold air from an imaginary air conditioner and then it was behind you. You did not have to chew on it for so long.

Here, the madness knows no end. It stagnates, and devours. It grows in the sun and under the low hanging moon. I sprouts white hairs across my face each night as I walk the same rooms and look out the same windows as last year. Those old trees are there, and must have grown but for all we know they have been shrinking. It has been a year of disbelief, a year when nothing you heard felt like the truth, just a convenient answer, a comfortable explanation as people die by the minute, as the streets flood, as the wildfires burn, as the hospitals stand like dark monuments to nameless battles in a forgotten war. 

There is history on every street here, and somehow it all feels like a parking lot. A name on a plaque every so often, a gesture towards a life well-lived. Eduard Tisse, I knew your name when I young. I will nod to you if I am ever on that street again.