the wall is thin

At the conference this morning, an independent researcher
reads her paper about nostalgia and peoples in transit.
She says "doors" to answer in an ambiguous way a question
from the audience; she describes as doors the door 
of airplanes that, like magic, one comes through to places;
also the screen of phones like doors.
My friend J- is having a depression and is remembering
all the people who used to read poetry with him; they are 
all either dead or have gone away. He repeatedly says

come over the house for dinner, but that last time his wife
casually says "I have no friends", repeating it as she leans 
on the doorframe. It troubles me to this day.
What can a person say to someone well past his fifties
with two children not yet even of school age? There are
children in the news feeds, children from far away, dying.
The graduate student who, during consultation, repeatedly

say how she did her work she did her work she did 
her best, her work
was truly only navel gazing 
at her own miseries. Sometimes it angers me

but only because I have been to countries of bone dry misery.
Where people do not have rooms for pathologized miseries, 
caught as they were in systemic and vicious precarity.
It troubles me to this day, how I cannot say
stop it

because I have no right to; because I, too, am flawed with
my own miseries, trifling in the larger scheme of things.
What can I say that will be of interest to you?
When I come home and open the door and see you, beautiful 
calves, legs stretched comfortably while your feet rest 
on the table after a long day at work, your attention now 
on a book, your long braided hair, what is there to say?

I hope there will be no need of words. I will 
fall on the space beside you, a door, a sigh,
so at last there will be no need of words.