When a Student of Yesteryear Sends You a Photo from Two Decades Ago, You Wonder, "Hmmm. I Imagine They Finally Painted Over that Last Fragment of Who I Once Was."

10 years ago, Bambi, a deer, was touring the school, her alma mater, before she moved to England. She left the Brown 10 years earlier, so 20 years passed. She snapped a photo of a poem I wrote that Jessica Stauble artistically recreated outside the class, room 301. I learned a long while ago that the poem I wrote for the tea room and that showcased student talents and artwork was white-washed for  new use. I laugh, too, because it was a lunchroom for students and a space that teachers rarely used except for after school meetings. Jessica transformed the room into an art space and began a tradition that other students followed. 

But that's all gone. Changes is inevitable. There are two types of people in this world: artists and lovers of creative expression, and those that work against them.

In this hand - a universe / possibilities for forgotten dreams / always lying in truth moons / suns / the ones who fly by the fires of forgotten caves / cry through love rants and raves / trying to grasp the stars in the brown landscape of tomorrow...tomorrow...and tomorrow.

As the Taliban once wiped away Buddhist monuments and statues, so do administrators  to mark their territory like dogs upon a fire hydrant.

I am thinking about this today because I submitted a writing piece that required me to look back at two decades of journals, and I've been thinking about how stories transcend any one place, especially if invested onto lined pages. Then, of course, this photo showed up as a memory on her Facebook timeline. It just makes me stop to think about the fragility of any moment...it's beauty...the the unknowing of its effect on the days to follow.

That was then. This is now.

20 years

And who knows now?

Such a little tale is insignificant in the larger stories of the world. I awake to news that Putin invaded Ukraine. We shall see if the Western ideology of democracy can withstand a new world order. Civilizations are civilizations. Let's see how this plays out.