i use words for my work. i think about the implications of each word and how that might affect and effect a choice.
i also think about the words i don’t have because i’m too sad or too tired. how they escape me just as they’re about to make an entrance into the world.
i’m thinking about how words are unnecessary at times and how our hands afford us information we otherwise wouldn’t give or receive.
how the lack of touch, of feeling heat from another body is literally keeping us cold and isolated, and rewiring our brains to the point of despair.
i often joke about how at one point i was a hot 20-something year old, traveling to spaces that affirmed my Blackness and femininity and how i am now a 30-something year old with a bicep injury, likely from sitting too much. likely from cowering, closing in, rounding my back too much. succumbing to capitalism too much. worrying about the future too much. because i made the future, my son, i must see him and it possible. and comfortable, and safe, and excited—because why then, did i do this radical thing of giving light*.
i’m coming up short in this return to self because realistically, how much returning to the past can i do in this moment? what does it truly serve me other than a sweet nostalgia i can barely taste anymore?
i’ve been bugging my dad for a bag of printed, family photos for months now. my family, Beautiful and Black Dominican immigrants in the early 1980s, in Washington Heights. they brought all their dreams and nightmares with them. unable to properly decipher each one once they touched ground, a deep, deep sorrow is what they came to know instead. they carried it knowing this lie was now home but they had to buy into it, because why then leave a paradise? i think about what it would have been like had i been born there. what would i smell like? what wishes would i have made? would i have loved myself?
i’m okay with being here, in this time and place. what i’m not okay with is how hard it is to be here. to create, to have wishes and hopes. i would much rather simply be—quiet and observant of all that breathes and moves.
there’s a certain beauty in a NYC summer: the thick humidity, how it dances in the air, forces a quiet—or a hysteria that lets you break free after months of darkness. i worry this hamster wheel or twilight zone we live in is keeping us from our version of freedom.
the notes are already there; the paths are waiting to be taken in. what will it take for us to slow down enough to see we can dream up another world? that this doesn’t have to be how live, how we create, or how we love?