Tristess

Time has me by the throat today.
Perhaps it is because it is Sunday, the saddest day, chased relentlessly by history, lost love, death, and unrealized hopes.
I am very sad to be leaving and feel almost I shouldn't go.
I saw a play built on improvisations a company of actors generated from everyday objects. The play was entitled Les Ephemeres--ephemeral moments--and was a mélange of vignettes built upon cinematically iconic moments...moments that stemmed from both individual and group subconscious as stirred by the memories and nostalgia which accompanied the original objects. I was disarmed and unprepared for the intensity of the struggle ongoing in this nation to reconcile the war with reality, with any system of being or living. Twice during the viewing, individual audience members collapsed, stricken by the play's content, and were attended by emergency services.
I now understand the heaviness one feels in Europe, is the burden of the past. France was an occupied nation. We can't understand this in America, a nation that has never been so violated by 'the other.' Our homes destroyed, heritage razed, children shot, and humanity betrayed for the fear of staying alive. The war BREATHES in France. It is in the collective memory and consciousness. This LAND, the very land I walk on is a palimpsest of fate's collusion: the blurring of right and wrong, aggressor and victim, man and animal.
This epiphany haunts me.
I am afraid to return to America, where the virginity of even our land, our youthful innocence makes it too possible to forget.
I am at once terrified and soothed by the ghosts of this landscape.