Uncanny

.
I know you know what it feels like, staring
into your phone, bleary-eyed, at 3-or-so’clock
in the morning, trying to fathom the abyss
.
of what you’re witnessing. Charts and graphs
of delusion and disease, primary colors—
primal ones—flipping themselves over
.
into something you can’t make sense of, where
red is cold and blue is warm and all you’ve ever
learned till now has been a conjuring. Earlier,
.
when you witnessed light bearing down through
darkness—really just a break in the clouds
at an opportune time—and you saw the trees
.
leaning in to the glow, you knew the moment
held meaning. Tonight, opening the abyss
of pale blue light in your hand, you see maps aflame
.
with surging cases of COVID-19: counties
where new cases peaked during [orange]
the last week and [red] the last month,
.
counties where deaths had peaked during
[orange] the last week and [red] the last month,
and staring into chart after chart of the entire
.
United States pixelated [orange] and [red],
you find yourself staring at the tops of your
comfy, red-leather shoes and neatly folded
.
bright-orange socks, and the white of your legs
so resonate with the pale green and creamy-white
pattern of your grandmother’s kitchen floor.
.
The cold blue laugh of the boy standing over
you broke into shards and tumbled around
you: Look at her! Look at those shoes and socks!
.
That’s when you’d dropped your gaze, seeing
the shoes and the orange socks you’d just put on,
yourself, and the pale-green, creamy-white floor
.
glistening beneath them seemed to suddenly tilt
sideways. You heard your grandmother’s voice
telling the boy her shoes are fine, and you heard
.
something in her voice you’d never heard before.
You never heard Nana sound tired. You never
heard Nana sound frightened. You looked up
.
to see your grandmother staring not at you or
your shoes but directly at the boy. They don’t match!
he was yelling again, insistent. Her shoes and socks
.
don’t match! Look! And then he lunged, pointing.
You’ve never stopped looking, or hearing those
shards of cacophonous laugh. You’ve never forgotten
.
your Nana’s intent and questioning stare into
his dark and dagger-like eyes. You’ve never forgotten
the cold blue light of the open Frigidaire door
.
behind them. Fifty years later, staring into charts
tracing the path of calamitous illness and death,
you remember the damage that bullies can do.
.
They won’t ever say they were sorry; they won’t
ever say they were wrong. Their voices get louder
and louder, and they just keep blaming you.
.
And in these charts you see the beauty of orange
and red and how they’re working together.
You admit when you first saw the charts you saw
.
fire, thought they were tracing fire itself—and
in a way, they were—but then you saw the beauty
of clarity blazing. You thought of the trees
.
you saw earlier, leaning toward the light: Give
me some more, said the trees, Let us drink it all in,
said the trees. And you understood the uncanny,
.
beautiful way those trees had glowed. The angry
boy grew up, went away, and died. You grew up,
went away, and somehow, keep living.
.
There’s no sense, really, to the living and dying,
all that anger and hurt. Some of us are born
with eyes wide open. Some of us die refusing to see.
.
Some of us never stop staring into our phones,
or writing down what we think we remember,
trying to make sense of color and pattern, memory
.
and meaning, love and fear and light waving
through trees, sometimes shining through, sometimes
………….bursting, sometimes burning everything down.

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