1.7.17

I would’ve written this sooner, but I was helping with my niece.

She’s sixteen months old.

She had trouble sleeping, woke up screaming, would not stop crying.

For two hours, this went on.

Her mother thinks she’s having nightmares.

What does a sixteen-month-old dream of?

Is she new to the world?

Or have the echoes of our history reached her?

Can she feel, in the air, in the general way of things, how miserable the world is?

Is she crying now for all the years she’ll have to suffer later on?

She looks at us, half-dazed, not because she’s tired, but because she fears what’s coming.