Thoughts on Gaza

The morning was already gone, like a person dissembling, and it had left without waking me, which was, in some ways, a relief.

A neighbor made eggs for me and her boyfriend and we watched football until the game dulled and she went back to sleep. She felt the same way about the afternoon as the morning had felt about me. Her boyfriend and I read the Sunday paper from the window light like an old couple and then sensing that it was time to go, I left.

Outside it was a pleasant for the fourth day of the year, it was quiet without the wind and the sun was bright and suffused the cold like a thin blanket that did almost enough.

The Hudson River shined and so I went to the Westside Highway to walk where I'd normally run. The promenade seemed like it was home to the few of us there now that the strangers who had come for the new year had finally left after only days.

There weren't many tourists and very few groups of groups. A gentle solace enveloped the walk, it was like a parade of mourning for a small war, something that was really ours. There was space and in it, people read and sipped their coffee, but mostly the seats were empty like for a show no one wanted to see. How was it wrong? It wasn't. Everyone else was missing out. I walked out on a pier and looked back. Empty.

At the end of the pier there was a bench looking out on the water. That it was empty built an enticement and then a longing for something I couldn't quite think of then, but I didn't sit, it was too inviting and I didn't want anybody thinking from afar that it would be a good place to sit to feel unwelcome. The planes flew from the north low and slow toward airport in a reluctant migration. The recalcitrance was spelled out in vapor. The river lapped the walls of the pier like an echo that was never going to stop ringing.

Out in the water, there weren't any ships; ferries were in dock like lines of poetry and the fiction I felt I had been living came up like a spray of water and fell.

The moment was intercepted by a gull. It flew over and stood on the wall, rested one leg up.

I moved in, but I don't know why. I created a fiction in which it had a contentment in its solitude that I wanted to seize upon. I kept moving in closer to it, but it was my shadow that always got closer.

I got too close and the gull flew away. More fiction.

I sensed it was time to go and I left.