Freedom

I mistook freedom for the encounter between two people whose mothers lived and suffered elsewhere, far away, different parts of the earth. I mistook freedom for the generations of anguish that had led to that moment, that meeting place between those two people. I mistook freedom for love, shopping malls, nostalgia. Everything had been brought to ruin, but I thought freedom was the salvation for that ruin. I mistook freedom for European summers, hope, backyards, restaurants, touching in the street. I mistook freedom for forgetfulness, beauty, pity, impunity. I mistook freedom for newsreels, loneliness, rubble. In your bed I felt the relief of facing my own cowardice, my grief without grief, that I could look without looking. In your bed I knew our mothers lived under missiles, disgusted, stealing, without privacy, vengeful. In your bed I mistook freedom for kissing. I mistook freedom for crying. Did we get what we wanted, in the end? I mistook freedom for desperation. Our love made it so. I mistook freedom for the forty-two minutes it takes to get from my bed to yours. It’s not the first time that I was repulsed by my own desire, bearing that which could not bear me. It’s not the first time that I was aching in ways I could hardly understand. Nothing is ever enough. I mistook freedom for your phone calls overseas I’d overhear, thinking I could access what was otherwise unduly inaccessible. I was foolish, naive, tragic. Yet so grandiose that I imagined history and place collapsing as I took that humiliating journey, day after day, forty-two minutes becoming hours spent, thinking, did we get what we wanted, in the end; realizing, despicably, we did.