alongside and interwoven

film photo by Cody Sells, 2024

It is a high fatigue day, and I catch myself bolstering up the energy in my voice before I answer the phone.

It is a high fatigue day, and I sip mugfuls of ginger tea and five-spiced salt broth, the heat shaking off the density of my limbs.

It is a high fatigue day, and I think about the time-honored tradition of crips writing the revolution from bed. (1) I wonder obstinately if it makes a difference that I am on the couch.

It is a high fatigue day, and I measure out the costs on an internal scale, with weights that seem to shift in heaviness each time I pick them up — slippery, finicky little shits.

The scale tips, wavers, catches its breath. Sometimes it falls over. Sometimes it rights itself.

Sometimes I try to push it one way or the other. That usually fails.

My therapist says, “It is a universal truth that suffering forces wisdom. You have been forced to see what others don’t have to — and having a choice to see or unsee is the definition of privilege.”

Sometimes I try to pretend I can unsee, just to see what it feels like. It feels like obliviousness, thoughtlessness, deadened rage. It feels like cutting off parts of myself.

Instead, I wrap washed grapes still slick with condensation in marigold linen stitched by an old friend (2), to share in a park in Brooklyn with new friends I have known for a lifetime. I find wrinkly apples in the back of the fridge drawer, chop them up and simmer them with crushed mace, a drizzle of maple syrup, a handful of smashed peppercorns. I spoon them over my oatmeal, welcome the yellowing tips of the trees outside my bedroom window even as the sun clamors to be remembered. It is still picnic weather, it shouts, still warm even late in the evening with a pregnant moon heavy on the horizon. But the ground is just cold enough to leave my bones chilled.

​Brandi asks, for whom do you write?

I write for the crips and the queers and the whores and the doulas.

​Amelia asks, how do you want to feel?

I want it to be rigorously easeful, sustainably abundant, intentionally generative.

​Ayana asks, what is your “dance of necessary grace and exciting rigor”? (3)

I promise to come back, again, again, again.

The writing is right there, alongside and interwoven with the resting, the mending, the kneading, the washing, the teaching.