I wish there was a way for you to grow flowers where you are, my little love. I hope you still remember their radiance. When you come home to me, they will be waiting - alive and beautiful and unforgettable, just like you. —Letters from Demeter to Persephone, Nikita Gill (via meanwhilepoetry)
“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little–have few verbal means. Eloquence–thinking in words–is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”
— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (via the-book-diaries)
there’s this philosophy question - how many boards on a sailboat can you replace before the ship is no longer itself?
my brother asks me while we are making tacos.
“one hundred,” i tell him.
“What if the boat is really big?”
“one hundred boards. i laugh while cutting up lettuce.
“what if-”
“nope. it’s one. hundred. every time.” one hundred boards and one hundred nails and one hundred days on the ocean.
i don’t know, after all. you’re not supposed to know this kind of thing. you are supposed to ask this kind of question while sinking deeper into leather chairs and stroking your jawbone.
here is what i do know - it has been over a hundred days for me. it has been one hundred nails and one hundred reasons i have had to find by examining the world and the softness of skin.
for so long, i felt patchwork. i was assembled in thin i-tried-to-get-better. i felt gaping, full of fanged darkness, a facsimile of a person. an inch from drowning. somehow fooling others i was fine when every corner of my soul was dripping with seasalt.
but it has been one hundred boards. i have taken out and replaced and taken out and replaced and taken out and made better. i have built the prow of this boat so many times that i can navigate it by moonless yawn. each time the crest of the wave comes into me - i know what will bend. i know what will break. and i know i will be okay, and i will find some way to replace it.
the things that have been done to me have been left on different shores. they have been remodeled into warm wood and strong doors and i am a different ship than the girl he touched and i am a different ship than hiding cuts and i am a different ship that doesn’t worry if she’s actually enough.
i am a different ship. i am laughing about philosophy questions. i am trying to learn how to speak better french. i only sew things closed with dental floss - i learned that two ships ago. i am making tacos in a warm room. i don’t count calories or craft lies or always wish i was still asleep. i still flinch if you move too quickly. but i am still building.
and i will be a different ship, a hundred different ways. and it will be beautiful to witness.
The version of you right now is deserving of love. Not you two years ago when you had more of your shit together, or the five years later version where you’ll surely be thriving. The version of you right now. The one that might just be okay, or is really struggling, or is bored and unproductive. That version deserves love. Having trouble accepting this is fine, but actively denying it is not. Your value is intrinsic, and finding confidence in that is mandatory.
she asked me if i believed in god and i told her that when i was four i almost drowned in a public pool and in my panic mistook a stranger for my father. i clawed my way up his leg. four years later he’d send my parents a picture of the scars alongside a tin of cookies. he said, “i hope she’s still okay. i carry her with me. it isn’t every day you save a life. it isn’t every day you feel like you were here for a reason. when it does happen, you have to cherish that memory. for once, i had a purpose. just being there was enough. she tore me open but she taught me a lot about love.”
Our silence, our refusal of discomfort, our willful blindness, the shut-down feeling that refuses engagement, the rage that cancels complexity of response are also strategies. So is the need for answers and new strategies. The call for a strategy is a strategy, and I both respect and understand the necessity of that call.
For some of us, and I include myself here, remaining in the quotidian of disturbance is our way of staying honest until another strategy offers a new pathway, an as-yet-unimagined pathway that allows existing structures to stop replicating. Until then, to forfeit the ability to attempt again, to converse again, to speak with, to question, and to listen to, is to be complicit with the violence of an unchanging structure contending with the aliveness and constant movement of all of us.
In this way I remind myself of the faithful who signed up for the long game. The civil rights folks with religious perspective are perhaps the most admirable. People like Ruby Sales, who remains committed to engaging what she names “the culture of whiteness,” always have my undying respect. In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
— Claudia Rankine, from “liminal spaces iii,” Just Us
