Meditation 74

23 June 2020

To grieve over what someone thinks of you is not self-pity. It’s being on stage without knowing you’re in a play. (This is easier in the zoom times.) To speak one’s lines offers a space for seeing yourself see yourself. But you’re hardly the star, more an extra assigned to wave a sign, put in your 10K steps, then return home to pat yourself on the back. She worries that she’s been shouting “Black Lives Matter!” for 20 minutes, but it seems to matter in a more difficult way when she passes two Black men standing on the stoop of a hostel. Her partner hisses at her to stop. To see yourself as others see you is a line in Ashbery; it’s also a bad habit, especially when you don’t know them. Let mirror dissolve into light, and watch light move up and down your spine like climbers on a wall. We climb for real on a fake rock face. But in a Berkeley park, a woman yelled at teens that they didn’t belong there, climbing Indian Rock. She yelled the n-word at them. Her face is a mask, but no barrier against sickness. We turn our masks around so we can face them, staring through empty eye sockets and a mouth that grins through very few teeth. You’ve come to accept the mask as yours. Without it, you’d be too difficult to read.