A poem for the end

I’ve been washed with grief and terror this year. Given all new responsibilities for myself and everyone in my family. New responsibilities for my friends and innocent strangers.

I was considering pulling my kids out of school the week before a national quarantine was announced. I’m an at risk individual, having had asthma my whole life and now high blood pressure. The thought that I may need to be around for my children was crossing my mind. By Friday that week it was no longer a question, it had become a directive, handed down from the leaders of all the things. My oldest son later revealed that he was hoping he wouldn’t have to return to classes after spring break.

Little did we all know that this was going to last a long...long time. School was going to be at home from now on. Well at home, on the Internet, in class for some through video conferencing. For some it was different, more like a message board. With different rules for different classes. It was really a lot of homework for parents and kids. It turned out to be a good thing that I didn’t sign up for spring classes at the art school, as I was now spending all my free time at home teaching my children, cooking three meals for five people, all while not being able to leave the house for two weeks, then three, then I lost count until I was able to resume public access.

In no brief time, the small exhale of relief from COVID-19 fatalities drop was erased by the murder of George Floyd, filmed from the cell phones of bystanders. Then the world started to hear other names like, Breonna, and Ahmaud. Then we started to remember names like Tamir, and Eric, and began to realize that the list of names stretches back 400 years.

“How are you doing with all this?”

“I’m not doing. This. This whole year has just...I just can’t...there’s just too much happening.”

The conversations had late at night between my wife and I had strayed into areas we’d never thought that we would have had to address. Is this virus going to kill us all? Are the police going to kill us all? Is the president really this fucking crazy? Are his supporters as crazy as he is? Is everyone fucking crazy? Why is all this happening?!

You see, my wife and I have three little boys that we love more than anything in this world. We also have each other, and we are peanut butter and jelly. Like, so good together. But that is a double analogy, because we are both like peanut butter and jelly. What I mean is, I come from a mixed race family, and so does my wife. I look white like my mom, but one side of my family is Chicano and Mexicano. My wife looks, and identifies as black, but also half of her family is Chicano and Mexicano. So our three little boys have a lot of different backgrounds and cultures to embrace. So there’s been a lot of coming to grips with realizations regarding American society in 2020. How it is affecting us, our children and our futures. Honestly just being from two families that have been labeled as “interracial” for a couple of generations, I think we both felt like things were so much better than they were in America for us. I say “I think,” because I’m not certain if I just used to tell myself that to cope with daily micro aggressions aimed at my family, or beacause I truly thought it was at some point, less...racist...the more I think about it the more I am certain that I was just coping and lying to myself.

That is a hard realization to make. When you understand that you’ve been lying to yourself. Then you realize you were lying to yourself to cope with other people’s bullshit canon that’s aimed at you, and that there are entire people groups that also have to do this just to cope, the world starts to feel exactly terrible. But that’s not the half of it! There’s even more people out there that are having to do more than just cope. They’re having to fucking survive. Not thrive, simply survive to the end of each day.

Now that it’s 2020, we can all see it happening live all around us. Everyone is documenting their life on the Internet. It’s live! Happening now. No amount of algorithms can hide what is happening in America and the world, the world is watching. We can all see that black lives matter. We can all see the division between the government and the people. Will we see these divisions mended, or scarred and taken away? We’ve only just passed the first half of 2020, though it feels like it’s been decades since last year. Can we all just breathe? We must all breathe together. Patience will be earned, and hard labored.