the walls are closing in

when i was in 3rd grade our class went over to the local ymca (it was 2 blocks away from our school) every tuesday and thursday for swimming lessons. a game we used to play was where me and my friends would hold our arms out, and slowly close them together as we walked across a street, or across the field we would go through, or across a bunch of sidewalk squares, whatever. if our hands touched together before we did so, we were squashed, either by lava walls, poop walls (i mean we were like 8-9 years old), you get the picture. often we'd be seen hurrying up our last few steps to escape our own demise. it did not matter to us that we were in control of our own walls, each of us playing a version of the game where we were our own judge, jury, and executioner, parameters fully in our control. suffice to say, i don't think any of us every were "crushed." our hands never came together until we just made our goal, perpetually safe.

i don't know what made that exciting back then, because as i got older, i think it's fair to say those very walls - well, not the poop ones - were one of my greatest fears. the walls were closing in on me when i was failing out of university, so i decided that perhaps the best way to avoid it all was to just end it all and let the walls swallow me up. 

the walls are back again, in a way i never thought they would be. i write to you from a country whose leadership has decided that the walls are good for us. that if we all get smashed into the shit we will be better for it, or that dying in it is ok if it kills the right people. there is no matter of control over these though. every single day the inevitability of a deadly virus striking me, my loved ones, my friends and family draws nearer. i can only do so much to push the walls off.

those same walls trap me here. i don't take my privilege of having seen most of the country and a decent chunk of the world lightly, but now i am truly trapped. nobody wants me, us, the people who live here. we have been walled off from the rest of the world because of our insistence on letting the walls do so.

i wrote a while back i would never write anything political on this blog, for i had nothing valuable to contribute, and that remains true, but i find myself drifting to writing about these walls. some, realistically, 250,000 people here have been crushed by them. and they continue to bind and squeeze and grind away. one day they will likely get to me. i only hope i can climb over them enough to get out. that i will not be crushed by them like so many others. it is entirely out of my control. there are no hands to bring together or pull apart.