every day I start anywhere
and do what I can
Every day I start anywhere and do what I can Today I practice remembering, I allow myself to feel grief. Today I remember that Mahmoud Khalil is still in an ICE prison in Louisiana and every day he is there is another day he is not with his newborn child. Today I remember the medics found shot in the chest, hands zip-tied behind them, buried in a mass grave in Gaza along with their ambulances. Today I remember Breonna Taylor, killed by police as they broke into her apartment while she was sleeping. Why these three terrible things, why not others, why not all? Because only a god could count every shard of destruction, and I am not a god. I can only hold three griefs in my heart today without freezing, and I refuse to freeze. Every day I start anywhere and do what I can. Holding three true and devastating facts in the mind, refusing to forget. On my walk today I watched the sidewalk and the lampposts and the parking meters and the walls. I saw a pink sticker on the sidewalk that said JD Vance killed the pope. On a lamppost I saw a recruiting poster for the Revolutionary Communists of America, above a poster with the phone number for the local ICE watch. On a parking meter, above a sticker of a flower, a heart-shaped sticker that said Palestine Will Be Free. I saw stickers for Extinction Rebellion, I saw ACAB spray-painted on a wall. Every sticker, each poster, every piece of graffiti was put there by a person who believes the world can change, that things do not have to be as they are, that they can be better. Every day they start anywhere and do what they can. A sticker here, a poster there. Yesterday I met up with a friend at a bar and we talked about an essay by an activist named Kelly Hayes. I drank 2 margaritas and ate 2 tacos and we read pieces of the essay out loud to each other, and we talked about what it meant. Every day we start anywhere and do what we can. We smile at someone on the street, we give a man a dollar, we read something for ourselves, we put the hotline number in our phone. We put the date of the protest in our calendar, we make some art, we write our own words. We meet for coffee to talk about the work. Every day we start anywhere and do what we can.
