Written late last night:

Every day I’m met with a little more suspicion. The man who works at the coffee shop where I hold so many meetings looks at me over the top of his glasses, and glances over at my half-empty table too often. The person who rides my bus every day and always looks my way with a furrowed brow. The coworker who slinks past my doorway; the colleague who’s certain he can’t trust my praise. I always feel so certain I haven’t earned such distrust—but then, I haven’t unearned it. I haven’t proven myself worthy of anyone’s trust, have I? So: another task, but a worthy one, this time.

I’m listening to more and more lullabies these days, as that’s what these days seem to call for. Suddenly, I’ve got this radical need for comfort and concerted mourning. Poems about mourning and missing for my grandfather, my father, and my brother, who are all gone for such different reasons. Plays about sitting in tension like cooling bathwater, for the ex who keeps calling. Songs of betrayal to hurl at some threat that’s more a constellation of inklings, a cloud of concerns, than anything else.

This week is the anniversary, too, of a friend’s death, which was so tragic and so commonplace that it’s become hackneyed, the stuff of after school specials and statistics. Another queer is beaten, then offs himself–what’s new? It’s so regular that it’s stopped being real, and that his friends and family have lost ownership over what became of him, if they ever had it to begin with. This is for all the callous retellings that diluted that loss, and that shattered the person he was so that everyone could have some shard of the incomplete image.

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