COUNTERCLAIM REVIEW

Liminal Week
by Dana May

He comforts me by saying,
“It’s always harder to stay.”

I made up this game, where,
when one steps out of my building,
they wager how many rats will cross their path before reaching their destination.

We played it one summer night on the way to the garden.

I understand the tendency to bid low.

I’ve taken to greeting my street in the morning and holding gratitude when I turn the corner home. “Thank you for having me.”

The longest I stayed anywhere was six years, when I was a kid.
I’ve lived in this apartment for five (I know now to bet high).

We eat Chinese on Christmas Eve,
Bagels on Christmas day,
I will dance with you on New Year’s Eve.
“To have a friend takes time,”
and I see you for dinner on Tuesday.

I am so used to leaving.
Easier, I assure you.
Immeasurable, the moments.
I will count you in my steps on East 6th Street.

—

Dana May (@wtfacch) is an artist and eviction defense attorney based in NYC. She works in a number of mediums, as well as edits and writes for Embryo Concepts.

loneliness: a dawn chorus
by Courtney Seiberling

There was a time in the pandemic when many of us were home exclusively, and the nuance of domestic life amplified. Most notably for me was a host of sparrows outside my window. At sunrise, they’d gather in the bamboo around my apartment and shriek in unanimous song. I’d never noticed them before when I was trying to get out of the house for work; they’d become an expected detail in the background of my day like the percolator chugging, but when my world got smaller, they got louder. The dawn chorus was miraculous. Encompassing. The hum of everything as one. Yogis call this OM: the unification of time, reality, and consciousness within a single sound.

I looked up: Why do birds sing together at sunrise? and found blogs which said it was males attracting mates or deterring competitors, but it seemed like more than just the resolution of social dynamics: a ritual of some kind; a reminder of their likeness. One bird began and the rest chimed in as the sun took its next position in the sky. Perhaps they were planning their day or alerting one another of a new predator. There might be talks of migration or the change of season. Whatever it was, there was a synchronicity of communication, and I was in awe of it.

People are rarely this in sync even in shared experiences. I’ve lost a parent, but I can never know what the loss of your loved one was like. I’ve had precancerous cells but was never given a death sentence. Police have pulled me over, but I’m a woman in white skin. This is when I feel most lonely, thinking we should be better at relating to one another than we are. Sure, we all want to be loved; we are all averse to pain, but we aren’t like those birds. When we sing out, it’s often alone.  

When the birds would stop singing at once just as they’d begun, I would feel the stillness of isolation. The reminder that I was accompanied, but now I was alone. I’d think of my brother in France quarantined by himself, my friend with cerebral palsy who hadn’t seen anyone in months, a nurse who read my farewell message to a coworker dying of Covid-19 in a hospital room, her family not allowed to enter.

Remember those daily walks a lot of us went on to get out of the house? I did them in downtown Los Angeles, but they were often met by interactions with the unhoused. Once, a man asked me for $12 to have his prescription filled, and I wondered if he was shaking from a withdrawal of something besides insulin. I gave him money because I didn’t know what else to do. Who was I to say what he needed? All his belongings hung in a plastic bag on his wrist. I cried the whole way home, confused about why I had a place to live and he didn’t, how little power I thought I had to change it, and if he’d even want his life to look like mine. I can still see his eyes, a blue cataract haze shelling them. Some images stick.

The images I remember from the pandemic are mostly moments I hadn’t lived myself: b-roll on the news of a body being flipped by a team of nurses or a chilled semi-trailer of bodies; a knee on a neck or two white men with a gun chasing and killing a Black jogger; Breonna Taylor’s bright-eyed, pursed-lipped selfie posted for likes now an obit photo; a mob of angry red faces in the Capital; images told to me by my friend in a hazmat suit, rubbing her boyfriend’s head until he died. Thank goodness for those rare interruptions of joy: high school graduation car parades; health care workers at the Super Bowl; or pandas enjoying a snow day at the National Zoo. Twenty-twenty and 2021 were a zoo. Exhibit by exhibit, cage by cage, there was an open sky but no way for any of us to get out. Who knew what kind of post-traumatic stress, economic loss, or impact losing a year and so many lives would have on us after we got back in our cars, drove to work, and re-entered the rat race, if we were lucky enough to still have a job?

Between the pandemic and political divide, arguments over whether racism even existed, and opinions replacing science, I experienced an elevated sense of loneliness. It took the form of depression in some of my friends or an uptake of wine or weed in others, in some moving across the country without moving away from what their lives once were. Loneliness is an emotion that motivates or repels. It reminds us of time, of who is no longer here, of our body in space, and the desire to be held but not just physically. There is a human necessity to collapse into the support of another person, and so many of us were overdue.

I can’t help but think of Orpheus and Eurydice, how Orpheus was so distressed by her death, he decided to try to cross over to the Underworld, something no living person had done. While Orpheus strummed his lyre, Charon, the ferryman, charioted him across the River Styx. Hades was so moved by the song, he struck a deal: Orpheus could bring Eurydice back to the land of the living as long as he did not look back to see if she was following. Unfortunately, he did, and when Eurydice was not able to return, Orpheus dedicated his life to writing songs about the saddest love stories ever known, giving voice to the grief around him.

Music is the embodiment of solitude singing back our shared humanity. What I missed most during the pandemic were concerts: standing in a dark room shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers mouthing words about wanting to be with someone you can’t or taking the chance on something you never thought you would. No matter how alone in my thoughts, musicians have always given them a voice. The last thing I did before everything shut down was fly to Nashville to see a show at the Ryman. Ruston Kelly had us all up and out of our seats, swaying to melodies about addiction and loss which became our own, a different kind of OM.

But what if loneliness doesn’t have to be a gaping hole of what’s no longer here but a space to ask what we want to fill it with? There’s a book I loved as a little girl about a woman who lived alone and wanted to make the world more beautiful, so she plants lupines wherever she goes. Flowers are a literal way of creating beauty, but there are many seeds we could be sowing to grow the world we want to live in.

In the time of online school and Zoom birthday parties, of the first Christmas I ever spent away from my family and not knowing when I’d go to a concert again, I sometimes had to stop and remember we were all going through that desolate time together. Being an introvert made the lack of socializing okay for me, but seeing cases reported on a screen, I sometimes forgot the numbers were people, the helicopters above were calls for justice, and even though systems were shaking, they stood strong. I want branches to break. I want new things to grow. I want wings like those birds to fly around and sing premonitions that it will all be okay, but it’s up to us to make it that way. Maybe I’m romanticizing birds or personifying nature. Animals might be just as lonely and better at communicating it, but wherever you are and however your heart breaks, I want you to know you are not alone even if you are lonely. When that dawn chorus takes the stage outside my window, I’ll think of us shoulder-to-shoulder, mouthing the ways we want life to be more beautiful. Even if I can’t understand the chirp inside you, I am listening. I’ll be singing, too.

—

Courtney Seiberling is a writer and yoga teacher living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Yoga’s Yamas and Niyamas, Five Leaves Left (Antar Press), and the forthcoming novel Shadow of Saguaro. Her essay When Things End, There’s a Magic To It All was featured on the On Being blog.

invitation
by Michael Young

Another year winding down,
and tomorrow,
a clean slate
a new canvas upon which to create

The what ifs can become overbearing

But for this year, I am swearing to live in the moment
appreciate this life
the choices made
those around me
the beauty of my history
memories from long ago

I receive an invitation from a friend to submit a poem, an artwork

let’s be sure to express our feelings
to make them known

to honor the friends who moved out West

This may sound wistful, but I am grateful
that we have love all around.

—

Michael Young is a high school visual arts teacher located in New York City. A Fulbright scholar in Madrid, Spain and graduate of CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, Mike has been involved in a number of original projects and is always seeking the next creative challenge. Mike holds two Master’s of Science in Education Degrees: the first in Bilingual Education and the second in Educational Leadership.

 2022
counterclaim is committed to producing work that counters normative and traditional forms