Dear Wigleaf,

I'm in Kansas on a Saturday, static again, after NY and DC and Providence and NY, after a car ride and a plane ride and a train ride and a train ride and a car ride and a car ride and a plane ride and a car ride and then home. To bed in a bed with new sheets, scratchy and not smooth as promised, but hardly a hardship, with my daughter once again a thousand plus miles away, and me living here again as if that doesn't feel like lopping off half of my own head and sending it in a box to somewhere, elsewhere, known but to me also unknown.

Wigleaf, I just listened to excerpts of a podcast by a man who used to host a tv game show interviewing another man who used to host a tv game show. The second man lied and rambled, and you could tell the first man knew the whole time the second man was a dangerous fool, but the first man will never say this because of what? Money?

In other videos on my phone, mothers lay on hospital beds with their limbs encircling their injured children, as if one human body can save another human body from the obliterative power of bombs.

Outside my window, yellow leaves trail down from a blue sky that looks manufactured, chemical. My daughter calls me from Riverside Drive, and the leaves are falling there, too, and the sound of the wind is like a metal sheet being rattled. "It's so beautiful today," she says, and she FaceTimes me so I can see that, yes, it is.

I'm in no danger right now, which is reassuring but also unfair. I wish for a world that cares more about people than power, but I look to the sky, to my phone, everywhere, and I don't see it coming. 

At the risk of sounding too sentimental but also with hopes for something better for us all,

Amy Stuber