I’m walking around the city this city,

looking at people, they’re looking at me, same old.

just walking. I go in a bathroom, I get the code, I punch it in, it doesn’t work.

“You’re using the code for the other bathroom,” a woman says, gesturing toward the other bathroom. Apparently only one bathroom is open to the public.

“Thanks,” I say. “I won’t be long.”

I go in and there’s toilet paper on the floor, urine on the seat. I use it, then clean it a bit, hating for the woman to think
I’d left it like that.

I go back out, holding the door a bit like you do.

There are a lot of tourists today. I’m by the Empire State building and they’re taking pictures.

I pass a sign on a wall that has a red hand on the right and a blue hand on the left, and tells passersby to place their hands on the appropriate places on the sign
and then to wait until their hands come together and there’s a hashtag which says “unity.”

While I appreciate the sentiment, the sign makes no sense and strikes me as naive. The sign would make more sense if it were ironic — if it were on the ground, say, forcing prospective sign-readers and sign hand-putter-onners into pushup position. Then the sign would show us how truly hard it is to put our hands together — to be unified.

Maybe the sign was meant to be ironic, I’m not sure.

But it seems earnest to me, and naive, as if we could ever come together and be unified at a time such as this.

I’m still rattled and discouraged by the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Outraged, if I can take the time to let the horror and evilness of what actually happened get through to me. I’m numb though.

A day after the Synagogue shooting, a man shot two black people in a Kroger supermarket, after trying unsuccessfully to enter a black church. What?

Hate crime upon hate crime.

It’s horrifying and infuriating, or should be. If I can let what actually happened sink in. If I can un-numb myself and wake up.

God, we need your justice.

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