7 Things We Can Imagine
“Winter was very long.” a friend wrote to me. It was simple. It was curt. It was honest. It was powerful. It was true. It was beyond the snow and ice that expanded past the sidewalks too many days to count. Beyond the “depression pile” of clothes that sat in my room (I learned that term from my friend, B). When something is written simply it becomes a gateway that allows the sentence its full weight.
“The world is always dying,” I said to a friend two weeks before that missive. Which is something I’ve noted throughout the winter an intense amount. It has been more than a salve. That would be too easy. It has been gospel. What happens when you are to bear witness to your dying? To that of your beloveds? You are forced to make magic.
I am an optimist, so I fear typing this because I also fear that it may sound like I have long moved away from the typical transmissions of my brain. But that would be too easy for someone like me. A mind like mine. I am so aware of the dying that I’d like to make the living juicy.
March is my father’s birthday month. I think, if I am correct, it was around the time I had a late-term pregnancy loss between the two kids. I am so tired of both of these stories. And I am not quite certain of either of these dates—so they circulate in an attempt to carry on. We mourn the dead even in our own aliveness as an attempt to wrap one up and fully experience the other. I’ve processed one wholly—the loss of a baby. And my father’s passing rounded a bend when I was writing Stand In My Window, in my thirties. However, with death being embedded in cavernous scenes in Gaza, Sudan, in our country, and in our news cycle with reversals and up-endings that seem to bring us closer, these events don’t pale in comparison… they’re just not there. For the first time, maybe, I realize, we are all dying together.
March is nearly over, and part of witnessing the death of something is… imagining. At the arrival of spring, I noticed the Q train delivers us to my daughter’s class every weekend in rapid speed. If the windows weren’t slammed shut I am sure our curls would blow as we crossed the bridge. “How lucky we are to cross this bridge?” I ask myself. Every weekday when my son reads to me in my bed—large words slip off of his tongue, becoming easier as he’s growing—as the world expands for his mind and him, because life is complex already but equally deeply available to a ten-year-old. How lucky I am to witness his living and his growing? How lucky am I to experience the joy of him finding new words and putting them to work? Lately I am imagining making art, paying bills, starting new work, bringing people together, pushing back, and limiting availability just ‘cuz I need to in this spring. The kind of spring of falling in love; I can taste it if I let it. Let them. You know? It is the kind of spring when a friend gets married, and becomes another one, possibly moving to another country, and the sign that in this dying world, we can start again. That is what I love about spring. We are losing at the same speed we are truly living.
“On the March equinox, the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere receive roughly equal amounts of sunlight; neither hemisphere is tilted more toward or away from the Sun than the other. Equinoxes are the only two times yearly that the Sun rises due east and sets due west for all of us on Earth! While the Sun passes overhead, the tilt of Earth is zero relative to the Sun, which means that Earth’s axis neither points toward nor away from the Sun”
7 Things We Can Imagine:
A reminder: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Distant Lovers, On Music That Makes Space.
‘As distant lover was in my mind, I gravitated towards love songs, either in the form of seduction or breakup songs. Jesus is the ultimate distance lover […] Famously, the group playing music on the deck of Titanic started playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ (c.1800). According to my grandfather, that’s what his father sang right before he died.’ – Fred Moten
While waiting for River to get out of dance I enjoyed this conversation between Harmony Holiday and Fred Moten on music and distance. There’s a track playlist that you can listen to after. The music brought me to church and back to the seat in which I remained. To be transported and to lessen the distance between us and time.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been wearing a pair of blue and gold vintage earrings I purchased from a flea market in Paris with River. They’re lightweight but make a statement like these.
Struggling Through The Work is extremely important.
My friend Aminatou in spring (during fake spring) looks ℅ Free People holding Stand In My Window. There’s so many ways to show support for your friends’ work and I truly appreciated this (even if the opps made her blur out the title lol)
With love,
L
Oh this. I needed this. I think about this dying every moment. It is heart wrenching and it is grace. It is impossible to turn away from. The war and getting older. Having a child just opened me to the end in such a different way.