run into sam on the bus this morning. the encounter touches me. i don’t have many friends in this town. which i should qualify, but it’s difficult to pin it down. i don’t mean the presence of friendly (ay, the language is not helping here) people around. there’s much of that friendliness, much more than in many other places i have lived. it’s the friendliness my mum was so attached to in her golden US years. by now parts of it make marÃa and me smile. like: yeah, sure we’ll meet up soon when you know it’s not gonna happen (i remember it made berna cry.) but i’m talking about other economies of affinities and affections; perhaps i’m talking about falling in love, for sure i’m thinking about people travelling with you through life, about becoming part of the caravan. changing the language might help: it’s the excess of ami/e in relation to friend (and i can’t help thinking that ami/e is related to âme) that seems so lacking.
on this cold, grey and foggy morning, after months of not having seen sam, it all of a sudden strikes me that sam is closer to being a friend than i would have thought. i wonder how much it is about me being less intensively “at war” with this place (as rutvica summerizes it) or the things that have objectively, or better relationally, changed between sam and me. we didn’t have any contact these months, but other webs of connection were spun. sharon martinas and challenging white supremacy. the intimacy between sam and kristy, and my connection with kristy during her experience of the war in lebanon and the trauma of leaving beirut as she did. as we’re speaking on the bus, a different dimension of life and experiences pop up between us than before the summer. part of me still feels that it isn’t really there, it isn’t real, but clearly something is different from before, more dense, more populated.
sam’s news. a whole bunch of them, connected to the Student Workers Coalition for Justice, went (back) to New Orleans this summer. they met up again with sharon while she was there. they keep going back to New Orleans, and continue to make plans to do so – i share my plans to go as well. then there’s the disintegration of the Student Workers Coalition for Justice. sam decided to join Rainbow theatre, a people of color theatre project, which means she can’t continue the Student Workers Coalition for Justice. kristy will be back in Beirut. and they are not the only ones who can’t make it this year. (she asks about me, and i tell her that i’m going to the Brown Berets meetings now, which also coincide on that same thursday evening…) oh, campus politics crumble a bit…