What a war can buy.

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where is raed? Wry accounts of daily life in a city under U.S. bombardment.

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"Still, we have the tree with the birds. We have moments when we take a turn we never have taken before and walk up a staircase crowded with pungent bloom. We have sisters and red and blue scarves." - littlecough

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This morning, I had him nesting close over a breakfast for two (love)birds chirping broke: three soft boiled eggs that run when bitten into, two pieces of sourdough toast, a bowl of yogurt and muesli, and two cups of coffee. A continental breakfast, Berlin-style, like the fr�hst�ck N and I had, sitting in a tiny east Berlin cafe crowded with sunlit lovely somethings - punks, lissome androgynes, damsels in deshabille.

Everyone was so friendly and seemed to smile generously, at each other and us, who after weeks in transit, were becoming quite disheveled despite attempts at elegance. I am not the sort of person comfortable with just licking my hair down or wearing clothes gone wrinkled and sticky with traveler's sweat. The night before, N and I had argued, probably about money or a personality trait that finally pulled a nerve, but by morningtide, we had made up, because we were good friends, and good friends should the be the sort to always remember that regardless of arguments and festering hurts, you must be able to breakfast with that person in the morning. That was what we had agreed on, breaking our eggs with our spoons and spreading butter and jam on our toasts and sipping on our coffee and then later, our tall glasses of beer glinting amber in the earliest of afternoons. This was ours, our friendship, something that we had to make sure would endure, despite the changing of selves, of seasons, political climates, etc.

By the time the argument was forgotten, it became just another morning of that summer in 2001, a few weeks before the September morning when I woke up to K weeping in front of the television, her raspy smoker's voice breaking into her palms. Her cry marked the eve of fatal seasons.

In the many months since, choices had been made, both death- and life-affirming, by governments and loved ones. What troubled times, and made even more troubling by the understanding that someone close might ignore the fact that people were gonna get slaughtered in a war that should never have happened. Ignorance is a political choice, you realized; it was a choice to not listen. Or to change the subject, because confronting injustice might not suit one's own national sentimentality or class interests. And this is when you want to rewind, fast, to summers and fr�hst�cks before the advent of the fatal seaons.

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