How many years has it been since 2014? 

I remember how the roads would fill to the brim, a sea of white, a sea of paint, of flags and rage, contained by the need to build something better,

Last night I was in the passenger seat while we drove back from the bar at two in the morning, and as we drove along the overpass I remembered the ghosts of protests past, the spectre of promise forgotten, the air thick with memory. 

And the world, it moves on

That year we spent indoors, casualties piling up, bodies of 20-something year olds buried and families mourning. We found ways to feel some joy, some happiness, but

mostly

we found ways to live around everything we’d seen.

By the time I graduated I was desperate to leave it all behind. We didn’t think anything would get better. We needed to get out, to find something different, make ourselves at home somewhere new.

And the world, it moves on 

Nowadays, when I visit, I always have a feeling that I’m a foreigner here, I don’t know where anything is any more, 

I only have memories of the places I used to go, their shape and feel,

So much of the mountains and the roads is the same but there’s new names, and it’s difficult —

How do you grieve what you never experienced?

Now it’s all about visiting, keeping in touch, making plans to spend time together, promise you’ll be back soon

And the world, it moves on 

And the years are passing, aren’t they? I feel further and further away from the life I used to live here,

Feel a weird sense of rejection because my opinions are a little different, or I just haven’t been keeping up with the way a woman should look here, the emphasis on femininity, a need to be adjusted and molded into desirability,

it’s not outright rejection, it never is, it’s more like feeling that you’ve missed the mark,

This contention of two identities, I tie them so much to space and familiarity,

I haven’t been able to show my family where I live, what I do, the places I go to for coffee, the places I call home,

And the world, it moves on 

I wonder if it’s self-important, self-absorbed, but I ask myself how the days have passed on this side of the world when I left it. When the years enveloped crisis after crisis, and now there’s bodies buried, men and women who will never be my age, who will not have another chance

And the world, it moves on

But we don’t 

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