There have been lots of thoughts and feelings about this year, not just from me in particular, but because…well, we’re in the middle of a global crisis that makes every disaster movie you ever watched feel a little bit too familiar. Yet it’s been well over six months since I’ve written anything here. That’s half a year of blog coma. Quite bizarre when I have so many words that I feel I’m bursting.
When it started, 2020 seemed like it would be an unforgettable year. Guess it will be, but not in the way anyone imagined. The incandescent hope spilling out into the lanes and streets of Shaheen Bagh that freezing January night, the pulsing crowd of women who were making history, that feeling of connectedness in the roar of slogans calling for the end of the citizenship act, the songs, the pack of Good Day biscuits…
No, I wasn’t going to say they don’t seem real any more. They do; they are. But a lot has happened since then, a pogrom and a pandemic. And the change that started when I entered my first protest in December continuted through both these events. I don’t yet know what, but there are some things you don’t come out of without losing bits of yourself or finding parts that you never knew existed.
~PD