Wonder Woman
It was the first time we were allowed to go to a movie theatre in (I don't remember) how long. Putrajaya had zero cases of COVID so the mall was open and someone organized a trip to go see the new Wonder Woman 1984 movie. I was just excited about the idea of getting out of my house.
I rode with 2 others and while we were on our way one of the girls started talking about her life abroad and how she didn't miss home. Normally I would have said something more positive or affirming in response, but not this day. This day was one in a long string of days where I had felt lost, broken, and fragile. I told her that it only gets harder to be away. I had my family in mind.
Only about a month and a half earlier I had talked to my dad on the phone for what I thought could be the last time before heading to class to teach. He and my mom were in the ICU with COVID and dad wasn't responding well to treatment and neither of them could talk much. I got off the phone with him thinking that could be it and then had to teach...
They recovered and returned home by some miracle but not without taking a toll on me.
So this day I had no patience for someone being flippant about "home." Every comment I had made for the past 2 months had been made without hope. I was broken and I didn't see a point in any of it any more.
So there I sat watching Wonder Woman being beat down and defeated by the greed of humanity and then she said if each of us just made a different choice to forgive, to love, to give - it would matter. We could heal. (I'm massively paraphrasing here - but this is what I took away from her speech.) A few minutes later as the movie is wrapping up and the world is being put right there is a scene of people walking through a beautiful snowy street and a balloon floating away and for some reason at that moment all that hope and brokenness that I had felt seemed to be a little lighter and I thought that we might not all be lost and there might still be something to hope for.
When I think of Wonder Woman now I think of strength and hope and how she met me when I was broken and fragile.