what beautiful battlefields you are

can someone help me find the poem about the number 3

had a dream where i was in the old house again. i was crying and crying lost in old grief and someone who loved me looked at me and said, “still? it was so long ago now, it’s like it never happened. you should be over it.” but i cried and cried anyway and then packed up the house for the hundredth time, but only in the way you do when you’re leaving for a little bit, leaving the big things behind. i left you behind. i left you behind and when i looked back you were somehow smaller and bigger than i remembered. you lifted your hand, maybe to wave at me but in that moment i woke up. i asked God right then to let us see each other soon and I know He will answer me the way that is best. until then, i am waving back at you, old friend. in many ways i wish we’d never grown up at all but i know it has to be this way. love you always, suspended between wherever you are now and where i am, in the land of the dreamless. if your haunting is all i’ll get from here on out, then i’m still pretty lucky.

if it led me to sujood then it wasn’t a waste. God bless the lost loves and lost friendships, may everyone i’ve known, even for a moment, be protected and guided always. i forgive you and hope i am forgiven. i’ll remember you making this heavy earth just a little bit lighter. i hope you remember me the same way.

i don’t come back from any day the same anymore. i stare the alternate life in the face and sometimes it has the decency to stare back. most days though, it just looks the other way. and when i cant face the world at all, i face the qibla and it carries me to the next moment. i don’t dream of the dead. i don’t dream of anything sensible. i don’t write. i don’t plan. i hardly breathe. i am angry all the time and my anger is making me resent people in grocery stores and airports and i wish it wouldn’t. my thoughts jump from year to year trying to trace it back to one moment but grief outlines everything and i exist only in its borders.

the world keeps moving all around me. i go outside and watch people buy in abundance, complain about traffic. i watch influencers sell us their latest makeup product, hair product, selfie light, stanley cup, starbucks order. the construct of whiteness has created two worlds. one where bombs fall somewhere far away and people think the greatest inconvenience is a boycott. and another world where we stay up to memorize faces under rubble, hold on to lines of poetry during the 100th day of bombing, and wait wait wait for a different ending to a very old story. i want no part in their world of comforts, in their life of escapism. how can i escape the orphaned child,a US bomb falling on him, signed off by my million luxuries. how can i continue looking people in the eye.