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One day last year I wrote post-it notes with moments I felt loved and put them all over my closet door. Last week I then ripped them all apart.
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Lately I’ve been seething at the reduction of hatred as a fuel, which is ironic in itself.
How many times have I pushed for a better world because I resented the state of the people around me? I’m wondering how often the hemming of anger as a volatile, reckless force has shut down movements & time of radical revolt. I am thinking about how ‘respectability’ and ‘politeness’ has never brought me far. Worse, it is used as a silencing tactic to dismiss the concerns and voices of the marginalized.
I enjoy the small, beautiful, and tender things in life because there is so much darkness threatening to crush it that I must save it all from, and when my hands are battered — of course I allow myself to scream every now and then.
And how much of a life have I lived through because I wanted, despite the hatred I was given, to get to the other side? And because I had no other choice, but to reinvent a place to be of my making? To hate this body and resolve to find a better vessel for it? To hate all the bodies that have given a cruel vestige in front of us, to hate is to respect the stewards again, to make the possibility of choice available, to refuse to revel and to always ask — “is this all there is?”
I walked backwards and pressed my back against the dock, against a shrouded night only withheld because of human light, and wondered if this is all we choose to see. I and all the perspectives I bear of my making, I and the human hand that cups water perfectly & struggles to pierce itself, I to look keenly and because of that detest what has dampened the natural world. If we move towards the artificial, how do I make it of my own making… Because anger is often synonymized with powerlessness, whilst joy is reduced to immersion in the present — and thus some sense of complacency.
When I listen I want to feel richly interconnected and interdependent. I want to fall into this world, caught with all the human hands and the machines they have made to continue carrying this body—I want to continue, against all ideas of what ‘joy’ should be, to truly feel this sensation. I want to listen without settling. I want to be needed. I want to need things again.
My microphone sits with my body and we record the night. I do this to remember the feeling; to capture something true for the people I love, to capture a sound I hadn’t heard in ages. For a moment, I also remember the human quest for silence, e.g. the need to find spaces without human noise, to find natural ambience again.
And then again I felt most comfortable in times of struggle. Unlike many others, I can’t sit still knowing something is brewing, and this summer has affirmed that completely. When I bask in the world there must be a next step, for all in this world is something to be shared and given to another, for I know that when I listen deeply to the world there is someone who has never been afforded this sound and all I seek to do is share it with them.
So in this incomprehensible mess I think of: absence, complacency, neutralization, everything, nothing, all that I could be is all that I choose, that to me what is ‘momentous’ is everything, and that I must spend my whole life tossing this strength around, and that I cannot silence the little feeling of suffering but I can spend a lifetime ensuring that nobody feels the same sense of dread. That hatred might be love disguised, a possessed kind of love carrying every burden, a love sure to ignite but a love we fear for with ignition comes the extinguishment, because I dislike all the pieces of this world that have been shown that absence of love and care and believe that everything I have ever hated comes from a desire to rewrite, fix, hold, see differently.
I’m walking home knowing the soil deserves better.
I’m walking because the world is carrying me.
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How much of my frustration in this world is seeded by how I cannot take something beautiful of it?
I want to pluck tender things and give them to my friends, offering bits of joy. Not just from myself, but out of the things I see and feel and hear and touch. Because my life has been so devoid of experience, I’ve learned to fill this rift in by making. I make the beautiful things to give to others.
This summer I was listening.
And I listened carefully to my heart and what ails it.
Where this rhythm has been conscious and giving me life, against all odds, from before I could remember. What made me cry when I was nine still makes me cry now. So much of this life is about giving, unasked for, until we cannot give any more ——
because I want to experience and know life for the sake of my friends,
because I want to create an experience and a way of seeing for the people I love,
because I want to challenge abnegation and see that nothing is irredeemable, even myself,
because I want to see the sky with all my friends knowing that shrouded or not, it is in clear view, it is something we can reach towards.
How much reaching do I have to wait for?
How much listening until I know that a thing is not worth it,
that a presence is only picking up the sickly and feasting on all the ills,
such that the presence does no good…
And I wanted to find light in every
single thing
and I wanted to find light
in myself
but it’s
not there
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Things you’re allowed to do
- Make a world
- And then leave it
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Tuesday, August 16, 2022
all this life is about remembering
so i find it so tragic when the movie posits that the girl remembers nothing; like how my heart blacks out when i wake up and text people asking if they remember something until they reassure me yes, where the worry is coming from; or my mind racing when i remember it and you don’t; why i think it’s disappointing to shrivel dying without being able to comprehend what’s in front of you — it must be a feeling worse than dead to me
so it mustn’t be bad to want to be remembered, to remember that i remembered. the desire might be inherently selfish, but what if i switch it around — to be remembered must mean that i left some indelible mark, if even momentarily
and i can’t remember anything good that happened to me in the past 22 years, and i still freak out at minor acts of kindness (thinking about men being offered cigarettes on death row and being so taken aback), and there must be a special kind of torture in being told you mean something without seeing any proof of it
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I love every reason that I have to live
I love every reason that I have to leave
I love disappearing from everything
I need to find a way
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I believe in this world so much
I believe in all the worlds I can live in so much
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