Month: June 2025

frankly, it terrifies me how much an entire group of nations are willing to look the other way when atrocities are being committed so long as the perpetrators are on their side. In fact I’m less surprised that a people that were decimated by racism would commit such atrocities. That part, at least, tracks: it’s a classic bullied kid becomes school shooter situation there. Yet in the situation I’ve outlined nobody stands by silently while the shooter takes lives or marks victim and sympathetic protests as anti-Semitic on spec.
You can believe what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity and a genocide without being anti-Semitic. Not standing by the destruction of the Palestinians doesn’t mean I hate Jewish people. Not basing or justifying everything off October 7 doesn’t mean I hate Jewish people.

I don’t hate Jewish people. I do strongly object to what is being done in the name of Jewish freedom and advancement. This is a clear atrocity that has lasting consequences and implications the majority of the US press is choosing to ignore.

An entire people are being displaced and slowly destroyed. All the while Israel is voicing intentions to seize more territory in the interest of safety. Civilians are being massacred at food lines, often in retaliation for the death of a soldier elsewhere. This behavior is codified. This behavior is known and while being broadcast, is being denied by the Israeli government, who refuse to let press anywhere near Gaza… so it’s their word vs the victims and the victims are people we are taught not to trust or care about. This is the lowest a people can go, given how their nation was formed.

Yet we arm them. We give them money. We support their war for military, political, and religious reasons. We ignore the evil because we don’t want to see them as anything but good. They are clearly anything but good. We know this, at least subconsciously. Thirty years from now I wonder if we will reconcile with that knowledge

Yesterday’s freewrite was an assignment I was completing for a class on microfiction. It wasn’t perfect. It might not even have been the proper prompt. However, once I began I was going to go down that road, because why waist the moment. That is how I am beginning to feel about the concept of acceptance. The past few days in Tossa de Mar have been extremely low tier. Tossa de Mar reminds of of Atlantic City at its most desperate and without the draw of Casinos. Everything is outdated and the crowd is the lowest of the low yet pretending to be of a higher status than they really are. We are eating full board, which translates as cafeteria food. Each meal the hundreds of elderly people cue up minutes before the spot opens and fill the tables with sadness and disdain–mostly towards myself and the Lady Talis. We do not belong in their eyes–not together and certainly in their sight.

I accept their disdain. I accept this place and moment. Acceptance helps me carry forward with my day. Today, for example, I had an amazing morning and afternoon. Come time for the return to the hotel, things fell apart. I discovered that I could not find a decent meal anywhere and the cafeteria slip that had been sustaining me isn’t available till much later this evening. I accepted that this is the case. I picked up a yogurt. Forgot the spoon, but I went back and bought one of those eventually. It was more steps, but was it terrible. No. It was meh.

Just like Tossa de Meh.

The nurse called back and told us to use bleach on anything we touch. I touched Carlos, my black glove leaving a wet smear on the hairs of his arm. I sprayed the spot playfully. He jumped back, almost hitting the edge of the sphere. He yelped. I giggled. I kept giggling, hearing the sound of my voice cascade off of the sphere.

I’ve never understood how echoes work. People say it has to do with space and curvatures. It probably has to do with dryness too. The large sphere at the center of the room probably wouldn’t force echoes if it were wet. I touched it with my gloved hand, imagining the hundreds of years and thousands of people who came to this place to watch the waters bubble up from the center of the sphere, cascading down the side like skin.

when I pulled my gloved hand away now it left an imprint in the dust. Carlos stood beside me, watching. His spray bottle hung limply in one hand, pointed at the rubble strewn floor of the cavern. The nurse was much further up ahead where Timothy had tripped over the loose stone and lost his balance. He’d scraped his hand badly on the side of a dusty wall. He’d hurt his head worse. Her tending to him meant she couldn’t watch me set my bottle down and place both hands on the sphere, moving my fingers through the thin layer of dust like an artist.

I wandered with my hands and wondered at how all things grow old and forgotten. In the dust the outline of a face took shape, emerging like an expression. Carlos watched me, quiet, his own hands opening and closing as if wanting to join me through a will of their own.

“paint with me.” I said.
he shook his head.
there is an invisible line between exploring a thing and defiling it. I don’t know when I crossed that line, when the face became a caricature of my own. I only noticed once I stepped back from the sphere, observing my work on the cold white marble. By then it was too late. The others were turning back, having reached as far into the cavernous temple as they dared, and now returning to collect the stragglers.

Carlos looked at me and giggled, the echoes of his voice breaking over the loops and twists I’d left in the dust of the sphere. I giggled too. Then I lifted my bottle and sprayed. I kept spraying until the bleach made a new skin on the marble and the trickle of it dashed away the echoes of the past.