I've Decided that America is a Lonely Place

I’ve decided that America is a lonely place. A body of people that don’t want to find our heart. So we are disjointed. The knee does not know the foot who has never heard of the liver and so on and on we go. The mouth speaks but the ears do not hear. The ears listen but they do not wish to understand. America is a lonely place full of artificial community built upon shared oppression. Our birth was bathed in blood and we pretend we don’t remember what we did to get here. The body knows, though. The knee aches when the weather gets cold, the liver cannot work fast enough to rid us of toxins, the foot stumbles and our heart, dear god, beats faintly and cries loudly.
We do not know all of our neighbors’ names and part of us doesn’t want to find out. Doesn’t want to get close enough to hear their wails beat out of their chests. If we heard, if we understood what we heard when we got proximate to those around us, there would be a moral obligation to care. To call them kin. To call them ours and know we are theirs to hold and be held by.
Damn this revelation. This inherited compassion. Forgive me for choosing loneliness when caring is too big a burden to bear and too much of a sacrifice in wait.
America is a lonely place and I understand why but wish I didn’t.

My neighbor, Ms. Joan has lived in the same house for over fifty years. I sat on her porch and we tried on shoes I bought as she told me how they would shut the block down for parties in the summer. How the kids were everyone’s and they would sleep on their porches side by side by side by side. Together. Ms. Joan says everyone moved out or died except for a couple of families. She points to the houses of people that stayed, told me their names and who their families were. She told me one would move out soon and I believed her. Who would want to stay when you don’t know who you live beside?
Then we nipped at the loneliness, kept America at bay, and talked until we grew weary.