anyone lived in a pretty how town

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to to the person holding it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

Think of the firefly, beating its bright pulse. Think of the firefly smashed against a child’s arm because someone promised it would make his wrist glow and he wanted to keep the light forever. Think of the first love you ever destroyed because you’d never known anything like it before, like seeing your own heartbeat outside of yourself, a flickering, luminescent miracle— you wanted to crush it to your skin.

Мрррр!