Dreams

Dreams. I’m thinking about dreams. I never noticed how many restaurants were in Minneapolis until they all closed. Now when I drive around or walk around this ghost town, I see them all, standing, waiting for when they might open again.

I thought about what those buildings represent for people, or stalls if they’re food stalls. For, well, the first person I think of is the corporate worker who didn’t want to work a soul-sucking job anymore and so they quit and started their dream restaurant.

Then I think of the immigrants, refugees, folks who don’t fit into mainstream (white) culture, who have a restaurant because it’s one of the only economically viable and culturally acceptable ways for them to show up in this space we’ve perpetuated.

What is happening to those dreams?

Dreams that are dying from a shuttered business, from a lost job or a rule to stay in. The insecurity of resources. The connections being missed. The loneliness that’s lurking in the bushes waiting to come in the front door or climb through the windows lest we allow it in.

Maybe there’s space for that loneliness?

A reminder of how much we need other people? For love. For support. For resilience.

A reminder?

And I wonder about emerging from this. What life will look like when we come out on the other side as we always do—there’s an ‘other side’ whether or not that is ‘back to normal’.

When we come out the other side will we wish for normal? What the fuck is normal? Where we pass strangers on the street and don’t say a word, where we put off calling our friends until a ‘later’ that turns in to weeks, months, years, never? Where we compete for every goddamn thing on the planet because we can’t —are trained not to—understand the idea of ‘enough’?

Do we wish for the normal where every business-to-customer interaction is transactional? Where we don’t think even for a second that people need to be taken care of, and how? What if elderly folks always got an hour to spend at the grocery store without jockeying for their loaf of bread? What if they didn’t have to wait in line for their prescriptions? What if gave our old folks priority instead of sending them to homes where we don’t have to think about them anymore? What if we left a space open for the lessons they can teach us, and left a space open for the lessons we can all teach each other? For the wonder that being in relationship—instead of executing a transaction—may bring? The ways in which we are incapable of enriching our own lives? The ways in which we (god forbid) need each other. And that others need us. All of us. Not just for things, for connections, for material goods. Simply because we need each other’s presence. We need other beings. We need touch, and love, and stories.

We see now that we could take care of each other all along, and made a choice not to. We have a choice of what the other side looks like coming out of this. We have a choice to go back to normal.

Fuck.
Normal.