012. on memphis, on my mind
I hadn’t seen my sister since our grandmother’s funeral five years ago. A surprise, even to me as I wrote it. Time passes so quickly. I learned things about her I hadn’t known. Things from decades ago, some as fresh as two weeks old. Without her, I wouldn’t be.
Jo, six years my senior, was the one I could run to in school, when I was in lower school and she was in middle school, and I could quickly ask her to change my hair when kids were making fun of me for having mini mouse afro puffs. My sister sat with me on the stairs, undid my puffs, braided two cornrows, and sent me back to class.
Maybe in 2000 years there will be a fictional story, some myth about us in this time. We were human once. The best of us, the worst of us, the worlds we built of our own reflection. We have a responsibility to each other, someone said to me recently. I’ve been holding that.
It has become acceptable to blow the heads and legs off of children, with video and photo evidence; so long as they are not white.
An Atlantic article read:
“Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them." But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than a murdered one.”
Someone wrote that. In, “The Atlantic”.
I am thinking about how what is legal is not always right.
A former U.S. president with 34 counts of felony charges, can run for president. We are told to choose between genocides. This country built on the murder, annihilation, and extortion of Indigenous people, the theft and inhumane, cruelty and ongoing systemic violence inflicted on Black Americans to build a country where few profit, and most suffer, — it’s not surprising that we’re here.
I think about how the Virgin Islands were purchased in 1917 for twenty-five million in gold coins.
The buying of peoples, the theft and exploitation of those peoples, the disregard for human life in exchange for the cost of whatever money can buy.
Love would never do that.
Someone told me they never cared enough about anything to have it tattooed on their body.
Even now I find it quite sad, to be here on this earth, to have never loved something simple as a peony so much that you wanted one with you every day. To have never looked out at the splendor of stars through a giant telescope, seen Jupiter’s moons, been confounded by the fact that a planet could have many moons.
After boarding a plane in the last group on my way to California, likely in the least expensive seats which they might as well announce since you have to board in Zone Z, I am reading Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace.
Reading about love in a world that persists to be without it is trippy. I feel unmoored thinking about all the people I have loved and lost to time or growth, to not having the tools to see and be seen. I miss my grandmother. I can see her in the kitchen in my mind’s eye, making something I’d give twenty pounds of oxygen to eat. I was always grateful for those moments - that red pea soup with perfect dumplings. I’m sure I danced eating it every time. I am also aware that she was a person who was and is no longer here. Just as I will be someday. And you.
Flying from one coast to the other, looking down on land cut up into squares and rectangles and circles resembling a modified QR code, I’m thinking about who it belongs to, how one person owns the land on one-sixth of the earth, how it can belong to anyone when really you belong to it. Dust to dust and all that. I’m thinking about how there are so many unhoused people in this country. How in Chicago, the teacher’s union is demanding housing for 15,000 unhoused students.
We are not well.
Humanity seeps out of each of us when we deny the humanity of others.
We are not well.
Palestine Palestine Palestine. Sudan Sudan Sudan. Congo. Congo. Congo. Caledonia Calcedonia, Calcedonia. Puerto Rico Puerto Rico Puerto Rico. Haiti, Haiti, Haiti. The Virgin Islands.
I wonder what it’s like to be soulless. I wonder what was worth the cost.
Life is hard, and expensive, and funny and fun and sweet and rough. You are in relationships. You buy furniture, and shoes and coffee. You read books and talk about how fucking good they are. You eat. You make dinner. You find your pleasure. Hold tight to something you love. Hard, but also soft.
I try my best, everyday, to be human.
Keep being human! I am glad and proud that I gave birth to you and Jo and that you have each other❤️My babies, my precious girls! And just like that you are there for ‘’Daia❤️🙏🏾