Dogmatic
No Kings. My mother. A twitch.
“Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever…”
— St. Augustine, quoted in Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine.
My mother sat across from me at the restaurant.
I had just come from a meeting about ICE and the police and thought she’d want to know what happened. (After all, she’s the one who went downtown to the No Kings protest with my brother. I told them to go to Grandview because it would be safer; she told me I was “dogmatic.”)
In the absence of a question, I explained that sometimes my eye twitches, and I think it happens when I’m fatigued.
“Mine does too,” she said, as her eyes caught the light.
Like fine nets, papery creases lifted her face into a smile, and I was rapt—suspended in recognition.
If my body were a lake, this is how it would feel when a stone skipped perfectly across my glassy surface.
A shimmer?
Twilight.
It was like the time I noticed a woman waiting to board a plane reading Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.
“Your left eye?” I asked.
“No, my right.”
My throat felt dry, and I took a sip of water.
Fills my heart