Now: a white president eating a white cone.

On the state of the world, my world, premonition, performance, magical thinking, and Paxil.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
[….] the centre cannot hold
- W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

I have been thinking a lot about omens, premonition, foreboding.

Four days before my baby was born, we watched Knock at the Cabin and saw representations of the four horsemen. The biblical augurs armed in jeans and t-shirts knocked on a family’s cabin door, taking them hostage in an effort to avert the impending apocalypse. There was bloodshed. There were natural disasters. Planes fell dead, their steel hulls raining from the sky.

Two days later, real bombs rained down, and then two days later, my baby was born.

This week: stories of babies eating flour caked in mud and images of mothers collecting weeds to boil.

This week: people in need of food being shot while approaching trucks of aid, decomposing infants in hospitals.

In the midst of death, an influencer talks about her daily routine. She writes, “I brush my teeth, make tea, and sit down at my desk while still in pajamas…”

Someone once said we write because we believe we have something interesting to say.

I get in bed in my pajamas and feel like I can’t breathe.

I am reading Easy Beauty and am at the point when Chloe Cooper Jones visits the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge while researching dark tourism. Her writing moves seamlessly between past and present, trauma and the everyday. One page ends: “I could see blood and bits of brain matter.” Another begins: “It is late morning.”

There is something to such turns in language that disturb the lips.

While lying in bed, I rub a little white pill across my lips, then swallow it—only to get back up and press my fingers distantly, forcibly on my tongue, demanding a coughing then choking and then the white burn out.

I am taking the little pills to override the magical thinking: the belief that my actions can cause or prevent undue harm.

I am also taking the pills to rub out the terrible loops—the point where one thought ends and another begins.

Over email, my psychiatrist told me we label intrusive thoughts as ‘terrible’ or ‘scary’ because we recognize them as morally perverse, dark, even deviant. Over email, she assures me that the fact that we recognize these thoughts as ‘terrible’ or ‘scary’ is a sure sign they will not come to pass. That is, we will not precipitate action.

It seems in being mentally unwell and yet fearful, I am also someone goodly and right.

And, yet this week: a well man who lit himself on fire.

And, yet this week: emaciated children with bowls rush toward me, my face warmed by my phone’s light.

Two Sundays ago, to protect her from the sun’s warmth, light, I cast a net over my baby’s ray-riddled pram—strolling her toward the island’s Wildlife Refuge.

There: my baby hugged her lion lovie as we passed a man waring a shirt that said “Wildlife Refuge” who was hugging a bird. The bird’s dirty plumage and long, dark wings tucked tightly under his arm.

There: my phone buzzed. A long text from my dermatologist containing botox injection discounts—the leading line, “Save on self love.”

There I saw myself as my dermatologist saw me—a woman, and her darker plumage: bruises studding legs; long, ruddy skin; slub tee dripping milk.

In A Life’s Work, a freshly postpartum Rachel Cusk writes: “Threads of association hang from me, as if I were unravelling.”

Postpartum, I find I am finding joy in capturing the looser threads that hang from our island.

The stabs of light that puncture it, the jagged shadows that cross it, the debris-filled cans that punctuate it, and its roosters and its ibises and its construction and its bright orange cones.

On any day, on any street, you can find treasure: a squat box hand-labeled “three working lights, crane mobile, fake grape clusters” or a trash can of fresh, white flowers topped by a gleaming High Noon or a barrel chair with a twig back. Against a cracked brown fence, the chair’s brown pig skin ripped from someone who once sat, who had once been sitting.

In my first writing seminar in college on the theatrics of war, we looked at staged photos from WWI. Empty boots sitting in trenches where soldiers once sat, ownerless helmets hanging limply on bayonets, barrels of guns.

At the time, I wrote bad incantatory poetry evoking the war, and every Sunday, I passed the shadowboxes commemorating dead WWI soldiers in the annals of my college’s library.

In them: the crosses and the handkerchiefs and the partial shrapnel and the black-and-white photos of mostly young, mostly white men—their gleaming hair perfectly parted.

In them: the presence of absence, or the absence of presence; youth and its shrine.

When I went back a decade later, the shadbowboxes, the once-young men were gone.

Now I read young babies are dying from eating animal feed and there are concerns that food is going, is gone—that famine inevitable.

Now: a white president eating a white cone.

A friend writes—tells me this has been prophesied, and I tell her I once believed.

I was 15 when “it” had started.

“It”: an obsession with the rapture, tribulation, conquest, war, pestilence, beasts.

“It”: wearing a garnet cross on a thin gold chain, teething the links as I moved from classroom to classroom, as if warding off an evil.

“It”: drinking only diet Snapple for lunch for 365 days.

“It”: scrubbing my hands raw under hot water, opening and closing and opening and closing my bedroom door.

In college, I would write of ritualization, observance: “dip an eyelash,/any eyelash/in a robe of oil.”

In Contradiction Days, JoAnna Novak would write of Agnes Martin and process: “You could think…about the punishing energy of repetition, the labor of drawing slender line after slender line.”

I write to my friend to tell her I now believe each generation believes they are ordained.

Last week, after a morning of writing slender line after slender line, postpartum hormones coursed through my veins and I felt ordained, was full of magical thoughts and magical thinking.

Readying my Pentax and baby, I walked us to the beach. There we would see a paddle boarder paddling, an umbrella rolling away from a tourist, paratroopers jumping from a nearby base’s plane—the paratroopers in muddy uniforms, the umbrella’s blue-and-white stripes pinwheeling across the ocean’s blue and blue and blue.

This week: a change.

This week, I decide I will let the world come to me versus the other way around, the little pills working.

I convince myself this is how it should be as a new mom—to be outside the turning.

Inside, I sit with my baby in a singular chair and let light pass slowly over me, news fly in and out of view on my phone.

Inside, I peel plastic from food, plastic from paper, plastic from plastic—throwing it all in the trash.

Inside, I write into the many workshops I’ve signed myself up for and apologize for my lack of, my absence.

I rock my baby and watch videos of doctors crying and then cry, letting the dark blue grow quietly over.

I rock my baby and watch videos of babies who lost their fathers cry for having za’atar but no white bread and for the babies who are crying about the bread and not their fathers I cry.

I think I should google how to send money for aid, but know the results will be infinite.

I think I should post my feelings but fear it will feel performative, that I am performative, and I am tiring of performing.

Instead, I brush my teeth. I make tea. I sit down at my desk while still in pajamas. I find my baby then hold my baby then stare absently through our glass-paned door to another screened door and through that door to a lounge chair at our shared pool. The light dancing across the chair, the deck—heating the arms of the palms.

The light like a man on fire.

The frames: a box inside a box inside a box.

I think this is a metaphor for something.

I think this is all the energy I have.

I take a photo of the first door, then the second, then the chair, then the light, its falling.

There is no center to hold.