Marketplace

There is a particular dust that comes to me now, carrying the weight of three weeks. It arrives without announcement and settles for as long as I let it, pulling me backward to an old memory of a place called Baghdad, where I was watching someone I think of often - Karylk, a friend of mine who spends his days trying to forecast what's coming, trying to see ahead and act on what he sees. In that memory he was caught in the same tight spiral he has been turning in for longer than I can name: whether what he does means anything, whether any of it reaches the people it's meant for. The question circles him the way water circles a stone, wearing its own groove deeper each time.