Protaras – Something to Write Home About

You locked us up!

You locked me up! And my brother, he’s younger you know. Oh yeah and my mum, too.

For weeks and weeks, while you were busy elsewhere.

After we had been in there a bit my mum stopped working.

Some weeks from that I stopped missing my friends so much.

You told us nothing but to stay in there.

My brother is not as old as me, you know. He can’t do what I can. And he doesn’t want to, so he fights my mum.

I fight him and her, and then we can do what we want for a while but somehow it hurts.

While you were busy elsewhere, we were less and less busy in there.

You were doing important things every day and telling my parents about it every night.

But you talked only of other people.

My mum held my brother, and fought the school people, then one day she stopped teaching my brother. On the TV you talked about everyone else.

Not yet.

Less angry maybe at State & Life, more angry probably at wild children rubbing sand down each other’s necks. We have to drive back in a car! A car! For people!

Bringing kids out of a long lockdown is honestly proving more complicated than keeping them there, which was very hard.

Things are hard.

We wrestle by the main street.

We air our grievances in the summer house.

I sob in the bakery. Wearing a friggin double cotton mask and some ridiculously huge see-through gloves. Like some inadequately equipped builder. Desperate for a break from a never-ending, payless shift at the world’s most beautiful AND COMPLICATED building site.

After seven in the evening, I threaten sand-coated people in the beach shower. People who suddenly seem to have lost all ability to compromise. We are the three uncompromising beach goers on empty stretches of waves and seashells and millions of grains of sand that want to come home with us.

I wouldn’t call this healing.

Maybe shared, love-based suffering in glorious natural surroundings?