Small Framed Kim Stands at the Kitchen Sink

January 24, 2017.  Kim stood at the kitchen sink and stared at the street lights outside her second story apartment window in Barrow, Alaska.  A slight sleet hit the window and bounced off with little pings.  Her reflection blurred into the scene outside, which in turn was blurred by streams of water running down the inside of the window as inside air condensed against the cold glass.  A large pick-up made its way west on Ahkovak Street.  She could see the lights around Fred Ipalook Elementary School across the way through water beads.  But mostly she saw her own reflection--a woman alone at a sink at the top of the world.  Usually, that was a good thing.  She liked Facebooking friends back home about her far-flung life.  But right now it only depressed her.  Here she was nearly thirty, alone, staring out a steamy window.  She looked at the frozen bits of ice around the aluminum window frame--on the inside, not the outside! she thought.  She had been proud of that.  She had Facebooked photos of it.  "It's so cold, I'm growing ice inside my apartment" she had proudly written when posting the close-ups of ice clinging to the edges of glass and aluminum.  Now though, she wondered.  She wondered about it all.  Why was she here?  What was the point?  The world was sliding towards catastrophe and nobody seemed to give a damn.  Just today, she thought, Trump issued several memos to hasten the work on the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.  Perhaps it was that she couldn't share these thoughts.  Almost everyone living on the North Slope, even the Natives, was connected to the mining or petroleum industries in some way.  Barrow was not the place for a liberal environmentalist.

 But it was more than that.  Although what could be bigger than humanity racing towards destruction while the president of the second biggest contributor of greenhouse gasses worked diligently towards increasing emissions?  Nothing was bigger than that.  She knew it.  It was her life's mission to counter that evil.  And yet it seemed like there must be more.  More than standing alone a kitchen sink at the top of the world watching little sparks of ice wander out of the night and slam their little frozen bodies against the glass pane.

Without a conscious thought about it, she shut down her mind and pulled the drain on the rinse water in the right sink.  She watched it swirl-out with a sucking sound.  Then she walked over to the cabinet by the fridge and grabbed a $9 can of pork and beans.