Fish in water no longer

Our four-year-old often stumbles into our room in the wee hours of the morning, mumbling about a “bad dream.” I lift the sheets and she snuggles in. It’s pretty much the best.

But the true best comes later. As soon as the birds start chirping (her signal that it is morning), she opens her eyes and asks a non-sequitur to end all non-sequiturs. A real sampling: Do pigs eat sandwiches? Are sea snails real? Will my body be as big as yours when I grow up? My husband and I now anticipate these non-sequiturs like the first cup of coffee. Turns out, it’s really good to start the morning with a belly laugh.

This morning, her question really got me: Do fish ever run out of water?

They do! We were fish and we ran out of water. We were forced to look around at our deeply confused, wildly misprioritized society and take stock.

Our public systems were revealed to be inadequate and fragile—healthcare, education, environmental protections—and our nurses, doctors, teachers and indigenous advocates were revealed to be ingenious and enduring. Our police force was revealed to be a vestige of slavery, designed exactly for the violence and bias it continues to perpetuate; abolition became, not a utopian notion held by a few visionary organizers, but a logical and widespread demand by a newly awakened (read: White) public. Our democracy revealed itself to be easily corrupted and distorted, far more flimsy than most of us realized.

Shortly after the verdict came in yesterday, I was walking down my block with another White friend and we saw an elder on her porch—a Black woman that I exchange pleasantries with pretty often. She shouted out, “How are you?”

And we both instinctually touched our chests and said, “Relieved.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“So relieved. It’s the beginning of a new chapter.”

“It’s not everything, but it’s something.”

“It really is something. It’s a beginning,” she said with a firmness that was unmistakable. It was like she was telling my friend and me, in no uncertain terms, what this (guilty, guilty, guilty) was. And we took her word as bond.

It’s a beginning.

As the country makes meaning of this moment, may we not forget the knees on necks, the people in the streets in unprecedented numbers, the calls for mama. George Floyd is still dead. Our justice system is still broken. Our need to organize is no less urgent. More so, perhaps.

As the water rises again, as our thirst for beers in bars are quenched, as we hug again, and watch movies on couches with our friends, as we feel our muscles unclench and our days reanimated by spontaneity, we must not forget what has been revealed. We must not fall into our old ways of thinking and consuming and policing. We must not assume that our neighbors are okay or our dreams are ignorable or our systems are sound. We aren’t. They aren’t. We know that now.

Know it in your little fish bones, even when the water rises. You deserve ease—all humans do—but you don’t deserve to forget. You deserve to remember.