Our Tribe

Our friendship ended in a silence no one heard, surrounded by the chanting, the honking horns, the chorus at the intersection, the quieting snow beginning to stick to the roads.

I saw you first. The hat I made you with the chunky orange wool stood out from the clusters of black, green, red, blue and white. I thought wildly, for a minute: did someone take it? Had you given it away in a bag of things that no longer fit? And then your jacket: that vintage rusty sunset you bought after I told you your windbreaker wouldn't carry you through a New York winter.

The number of things that went unspoken in our friendship had grown like parking lot snow piles, things we pushed aside and dumped somewhere we wouldn't have to navigate. By the time you found my playlist labeled, Songs in the key of justice, you didn't even ask me what it meant. We swallowed everything that would've divided us sooner. Told ourselves we were above us and them. Prided ourselves on thinking of each other as, people, first.

I hadn't planned to go to the protest at all, but I skipped my usual route to the coffee shop. I don't know why. I know that when I stopped to watch, one group called: who does your silence serve? and I thought instantly of your smile. I stayed, knowing it would hurt you if you knew. It didn't occur to me that you'd have made that calculation, too.