(I missed last week, and I think I'm late to this week, but here goes...) Dear Pam, I know you would like me to call you Mom or Mother, but in the time we’ve gotten to know each other, I still am not comfortable with that. Maybe if we had met sooner, or if our ideologies better aligned, I could find that spark of connection they say mothers have with their children from the nine months in the womb. Or eight, in my case. As it stands, the only thing you and I have in common is one half of a DNA strand, and while I cannot deny the test results, when I look at you, I see none of myself there. Maybe, when I look at pictures of you at my age, maybe there is a hint of the eyebrow, and I cannot deny that I have your sister’s nose, which must have come from an ancestor because you do not have it. Possibly the darkness of my eyes, one of the many things about me that proves I do not match the family I was raised with. Everything else must have come from the other half of the DNA strand. Just some man, not the one you named, for DNA doesn’t lie, and though I spent my whole life believing the lie you told the people who arranged my adoption, and learned a heritage I thought was my birthright, I now know that the one part of myself I was sure of was nothing more than a lie. A lie I have believed so long, it makes me feel lost to admit it isn’t true. A lie that I have told so long that it shaped who I am even though it wasn’t true. And while you have fought with your own mother for over 40 years over her part in your giving me up, the truth is, you wouldn’t have recognized me had we met on the street. For that matter, I am sad to say, we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other if we had met randomly on the street as strangers. You cling to your faith with anger and vengeance. Yours is a vengeful hateful God who judges instead of loves, and only punishes, while mine exists in the light between heartbeats and is felt most in the kindness given willingly to those in need.

Hi Robert, Well, we’ve moved on to email... I’m not really sure how this is going to work out, but you know, as you said, I’m pretty open-minded. My curiosity has got the best of me and life’s too short to hold back this late in the game. I’ll be honest. You’ve stirred things up a bit between Jack and me. He’s delicate. I know that might be a strange thing to say but that’s how it is. You didn’t give us much to go on, and he was confused with how we even knew each other. Do we know each other? I have the feeling we’ve met face to face but I’ve only been to Torun a couple times, and I always had a bit too much vodka and a date with a basebin ;) Tell me about your new girl. That was a pretty quick move, wasn’t it? I don’t even know this new girl’s name. What was the attraction? Would I be wrong in assuming it was mostly physical? Is she a rebound? A party girl? I’m not even that curious. I need more than a shadow woman to consider. Tell me something good. I should know more about you. You are impatient. Impulsive. Inquisitive. It’s not enough. I’ve been sitting alone on my virtual mountain top for a long while. I’m not even certain if the circuits are working the right way to tap into the right frequency. I don’t know if I’ll blush or if I can still believe in sweet nothing. My drive is not like yours. It’s mental. You need to convince me – convince all of us. I’m not doing any heavy lifting. It needs to be feather light if not meaningful. I’ve done emails. Words can do the heavy work, you just need to answer the call. You remember words are sexy to me, no matter the language. Show me the depth in the man from the fighting ring. Make us an intrigue worth unravelling.

Between yesterday and today, I've written over 500 words on an essay that's been knocking around in my mind for a while. It's not a lot, but it's significant after a long string of days with 0 words. It feels good to be writing again.

I feel this rant belongs in the challenges section because I find myself in the strange space between being aware, wanting to let the process happen - to feel the situation, and wanting very much to preserve my own peace and reject the more than natural feelings that are coming up this week. I'm talking about the elelphant in the room or rather the stampede of angry, incredulous, fearful and devastating feelings that are driving the elephants throughout our global awareness. I'm an American living in Eastern Europe and I cannot unsee nor unaware myself of the elephants. Yet the horror is so thick with reality that dissociation is attractive and probably a necessary part of processing in order to stay with that reality and hold space for the truth, to not make little or make light of what it is, to not deny and reject what we are about to face for the coming months and years. Obviously, this becomes a huge obstacle to being creative, at least right now. Getting into the flow to create something with whimsy, passion or concentration feels forced, strained. In equal measure, I cringe to think of writing as a way to express what I'm feeling, to create something from this unprecedented time in our communal consciousness. It all just feels inherrently inadequate. I dare not speak of the stampede of elephants. It's too hard, too hardcore. But these are my personal feelings, and perhaps it's just challenging because I must prepare myself to both express and supress my feelings on the topic whenever it's broached with the 20 or so other feeling, thinking professional adults I will meet over the next week. I wonder if anyone else has similar feelings? Is anyone else dismayed and distracted to the point that writing isn't flowing, that the mind must detach, and somehow the elephants must be addressed before returning to our creations? Or perhaps you are blessed with enough distance to be able to express something poigniant, and it has great potential for your creative process? Thank you for reading and I would be grateful for your thoughts, as a different perspective would be amazing.

I have put this on another group. https://vocal.media/authors/kiana-carda Which I write under a pseudonym. Ragtime - performative piece's Isn't it funny? [inhale] that the place I now love the most… I never brought you to? [inhale] [in one breath] There’s no you on the seat, no smile across the bar– No tapping. No trace. [inhale] ...No essence of you. The lights hum low, as the saxophone sighs- [wistful] and for the first time in months. [inhale] I don’t feel watched by a memory. [exhale] It's just strangers– red wine and me Listening to the sound of someone else’s heartbreak.