NOTE: This was written in July. Thankfully the tsunami amounted to very little.
This city is a swamp and we wade through it. This city wasn’t built for 100°. I tried to talk to a tree on the sidewalk. An oak. It wasn’t used to the human touch. It recoiled at first, then unfurled.
Kauaʻi, far away, is under a tsunami warning. I’m nauseous with worry and love. I sit topless in front of a fan in Brooklyn and chant e hō mai out my window to the streets. The trees will hear it. The island will hear it. The island is preparing for a tsunami. The people are huddling upland as the sirens sound. The trees stay still, waiting.
Yesterday I went to Rockaway Beach, where everyone was breathing and eating and shrieking, hot and uncomfortable because drones spotted a shark and lifeguards kept shrieking with a whistle at anyone who tried to cool off in the ocean. But how could I cool off in the ocean, if Gazans in their war-torn heatwave are prohibited from cooling off in the ocean?
Sweating men tried to sell me cold sodas in their cooler, but how could I when Gazans are in famine; how could I picnic on the beach with watermelon and pineapple and blueberries and hard boiled eggs and vegan egg salad and corn chips and popcorn and LaCroix? The people are so determined to have fun; the kid lying in the sand in her socks, the woman shouting in her hairnet. And the man just trying to feed his family, selling sodas on the beach, sweating, and if I don’t buy one can I still leave a tip? There’s the styrofoam cup at his feet.
There are styrofoam cups strewn all over the beach, and bottle caps and used condoms and shards of glass and popped balloons and shredded plastic. We weave through the people who act like buildings in the sand, populating beach into city, and try to pick it all up. The garbage. We pick up as much as we can hold. But we can’t hold much. We can hold hardly anything.
I told my cousin on Rockaway Beach about the beaches of Kauaʻi; how there’s a beach for every micro-mood. Each speaks its own language; each holds and lets rest a different register of you. Each loves. There is love in every grain of sand. Each beach is a symphony, crashing and wafting and lilting and singing and diving. Swimming with seals. Swimming with dolphins. Swimming with humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa. Swimming with sea turtles. A glistening school of sardines. Whales, watching you.
And now all this surface area of my heart awaits its tsunami. I quake in a bedroom in Brooklyn. An oven of a summer. The disastrous wave we all knew would come, one after another. After another after another.
And what are we to do? Touch an oak on the sidewalk? Pick up used condoms on the beach? Chant oli we were taught? Share a photo from Palestinians begging us not to forget? Vote for Zohran?
Yes.
I hear the tree speak back.
Yes and, it says, from a few blocks away.
Life is a tree, branching skyward, rooting as much as it can. We grow. We are young. We are old.
And we put out leaflike prayers wherever we can hold them. We hang wishes from our limbs. We host worlds. We host hope.
Writing like roots in search of the source from which to grow.
If the tsunami comes, the trees will still hold out all their love to the world.
Maastik Puuga by Jaan Grünberg
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I’m new to living in this city, this city where I was born but never lived.
Our happiness here is almost frantic, or diabolical or bacchanal. We are exhausted. The exponential growth of chaos. The shaking ground. Wave after wave.
We drink beer and ride bikes and don’t have time for romantic relationships. Our parents were our age when they had us but we don’t have money for a kid, or a home. The buildings are tall, they fall. People crowd the beach. They flee. The shark swims alone, watched by a drone. And always the whistle blows.
Another motor, another engine. We weep. We do not sleep. We watch our computers. We binge. We forget our identities. We cast off effort. We are kids in the city. We are 30. We don’t recognize ourselves. We are adults.
We are ironic. Our existence is an irony so we wear it on our clothes. Everything we do harms; I want to be good. I want to be good. Shame rips through me. I’m caught in a web of harm. The spider of capitalism.
I lived with a spider in Kauaʻi. For four months we were roommates. She wasn’t capitalism. She was yellow. Neon. Real. She crawled into my sleep and spun me dreams. I dreamed my own dreams. But I was still in capitalism; even leaving capitalism was capitalism. Even being broke was capitalism; you were under its foot, when you had every right to succeed. You were the foot and the cockroach at once. You were a colonizer. You were in the spider’s home.
The irony in even existing; in every activity, all leisure, also causing harm. This is my generation. Destined for the furnace. This is us, weaving the streets. Delirious; caught between dreams.
Frantic in every irony of what it is to still believe.
The Large Plane Trees by Vincent van Gogh
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I rent a room. It’s in the trees. I buy a cocktail for $20. I learn how to be where I am who I am when I am where I’m from, what it is how it is when it is where it is now. Now, under siege, under heat, under steam, burying itself in the world it tries to assert, to destroy. How to hold. All my love, to all worlds.
How to face all these waves that come and come.
A profoundly lyrical, immersive vignette of summer in the city, at this time in human history, deeply sad, but more deeply hopeful. Look to the trees and to love.