You know that feeling when you take the last step on the stairs, and it turns out there is no step and your foot comes down extra hard? That unexpected jolt, tinged with chagrin? Now imagine the missing step was a friendship you thought you could rely on: how much worse would that feel?

I’d felt that way about My Fellow Americans in general, and certain people in particular, over the past three years. Even my past seems to have been overwritten by these… interesting times in which we live.

Of course, I’ve picked up the fragments of this trust and rebuilt what I could, in a kintsugi kind of way. I can’t live with unrelenting suspicion of everyone I meet for the rest of my life. I wonder if all of us are in denial, but for very different reasons. I consider this new collage, “Denier,” a warning to myself as well as others.

Speaking of broken trust, one of my previous works has been accepted to the upcoming exhibit “Fracture” at the Kirkland Arts Center. I appreciate that I’m not the only person thinking about cracks in what we used to think was stable.