Context

So, I'm sitting there, right? And it's one of those things where like I'm playing on my phone and not really paying attention to anything except my Twitter feed. I mean, I know there's people around me but it's nobody I know or anything. So, they're talking, holding a conversation, I haven't really made them out yet, like I said I don't know either from Joe Blow. I'm scrolling through someone else's shitty opinion about Baltimore when this lady says, and get this,

"Everyone has their preference. I mean, honestly they do, that doesn't make it racist."

Completely devoid of context.

I turn slightly to see who's talking trying my darndest not to turn into a cartoon character or worse a CNN pundit by whirling and asking incredulously WHAT IN ALL THE FUCKS DOES THAT MEAN LADY?

Two people. White. Mid to late 40's. The guy looks like a Cop (I watch a lot, ALOT, of Cops). He's got this reddish mustache, his skin is burnt by the sun just enough to be that weird blotchy that you get when you start to blend in with everything else that's the color of dirt. Dry dirt. The lady looks like basically all of my mom's friends. Bad hair, a shirt with a weird design on it, a purse, sunglasses with some sort of a logo on them.

But the hair was what stuck out, I mean just awful. I'm not a hair aficionado or anything but what I wanted to say was, "Well, Katherine, your preference should probably be not such shitty hair and maybe Harry wouldn't have left you."

That's mean. I don't know if she was married or not. I didn't look.

Anyways.

After she said it the Cops guy muttered something like, well it's not really a race thing and their subject changed. I can't stop thinking about it. I want to find one of them and know what they were talking about. I should have asked.

It's just, under what circumstance would someone say that? It made me really sad. Depressed really. That existentially dreadful sadness that only comes when you're certain that whatever meaning and magical oneness of all things you were trying to see is really just bullshit.

Yeah, I know. You're probably right.

I'm just

at this point

where

I wonder constantly about all of this shit we are constantly fighting over.

I got home and just sat there for a while, but not like the normal pass me a beer and watch the Mariners lose again sat there. I was paralyzed almost. It was stuck into my head that someone, somewhere, is thousands of miles from their family guarding the gate that separates us from them risking their life ready to kill or be killed in an instant and for what? For fucking what? So some white lady has the freedom to say ambiguously racist bullshit?

And then I thought about what if the wall-guard agrees with ambiguously racist bullshit.

So I went to bed.

Maybe

I, with this, will relinquish a part of myself.

I don't really know which part that is right now, but maybe by the end of this I will.

There aren't a tremendous number of times when you feel like you truly belong. There are even fewer as you get older. Belonging becomes as ambiguous as a Facebook group or an emoji in a written conversation, which really isn’t a conversation as much as it is the feigning of significance between two people that used to have conversations. It becomes harder because you used to know people but your circle inevitably shrinks. Kids, job, marriages. That could be you, maybe it is, life is built around this unshakable string of maybes – that girl was kind, sweet, and pretty, in a conventional sense. That guy could have been you.

But maybe.

Belonging becomes whatever we need it to be when we don’t belong anymore to anything but ourselves standing in a kitchen full of people that you don’t remember knowing, really knowing, like the core of what makes a person a person rather than say, a lamp, ever.  That’s a powerful thing to understand and experience.

Maybe I'll relinquish belonging.

But I like people.

Real people.

Not empty crowded kitchens.

(Fuck it. I'll just let go of you.)

But maybe the problem is those two words, "feel like." What matters more (and I'm sincerely asking because I've got no fucking clue) the reality or how we interact with it. We label and stipulate all of our existence. It's a constant negotiation between what we are, what we see and what we think we are.

Who others think we are; who others prefer us to be.

Life does not require participation. You can shut up, pay attention and, really, have one hell of a good time - because we both know the guy in the corner drinking alone is having more fun than you