Revelations, baby!

it’s been months. the coffee is tepid. james tells me about nechayev’s catechism: kill anyone competent with power, exacerbate common misery, compel people to rebel. create untenable conditions and see.

james writes about bells. a common tongue of iron beauty. a prayer call, a time kept. when he talks about bells, I ring too, reverberate, echo, sing. bells in books, bells in churches, bells in hearths and hearts.

james is a pessimist, and I’m a pessimist with a churchgoing habit. the weather whips us together on a bench and I know it is not as cold as it should be, yet colder than it will ever be again.

martial law, rebel armies, manifestos scratched in bullet casings. december this year isn’t like december last year except in most ways for most people it is. james is sick of grad school.

why bells? well, he says, they reveal something true about distance and the experience of time in the past. the slavic department’s holiday party turned into a dance party. it’s going to be a cold winter, but not here.

we walk down highland ave all the way to the library and it feels like a destination. the house decorated with blue glass ornaments has on its lawn a scale model of itself, and in that scale model, another.

we’re grimmer than we’ve ever been, sirens wail louder than they ever have, grey sky greyer than it ever was. it’s revelations, baby, ending it all, tolling the bells, killing the time we have left.