January in America

I rip my toddler’s dinner into tiny pieces so he doesn’t choke. Try not to think about the children his age facing horrors upon horrors. The families ripped from loving arms because they yearned for safety and instead found hate cloaked in different armor. 

He laughs into his milk and I think about how he is pure joy, joy, joy. 

He knows nothing else. 

How lucky we are to be here. Home. Safe. Simply for being born in this skin on this land instead of another. 

I open my phone to check a text and watch as armed men yank a woman from her car. Guns already drawn before they hit their brakes. No longer disguising that they planned to manufacture a threat, excuse their violence before they rammed her car. 

She is barefoot; it’s the dead of winter. Not all men, but it’s always men, emboldened.

“Owl,” my son says from his perch inside his high chair, centering me again. “Who? Who?” he says in his tiny voice. It’s not a question, but I find myself asking it anyway. 

We are supposed to find the helpers. I thought I’d teach him that someday. 

But they are shooting them in the streets and lying about it to our eyes, the same eyes that watched the videos from every angle and discerned the facts despite their propaganda. 

Who? Who? Who is coming to save us? Just us. Clawing our way through the day, toward every shred of humanity that’s left in this place.

The mothers clinging to it like our babies cling to our necks. The neighbors standing shoulder to shoulder. Sharing their food. Sharing the burden. Caring in the ways our leaders should care for us, about us. 

The best of us are coming to save us. I have to believe in that, on days like these when I believe in little else.