kashballs
ruptured states.
home is an aching not for place, but people. a loyalty to arbitrary lines and borders. (whereas this is an exploration of rootedness, belonging and identity, or the lack thereof.)
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Thiết bị công nghệ Thoại Nguyễn
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absurd times call for absurd amounts of love.
I read through Ryan's project this morning, reaching across the three years since the night we sat up until morning in Merida, talking about life. He told me about suicide and how it sat for Black men, and I didn't know how to hold the depth. I ran from it. It was 4am and good sense was drifting.
More figuratively, I don't know how to relate to people who stay in it.
My family has always been one that smooths over rough surfaces, looking ahead rather than staying in it. Or not to stay in it. A toxic positivity if the bar was lower for defining positivity, an eastern euro approach. Seeing my mom hold my dad's hand in the hospital yesterday, I couldn't stay in it. The reality that he's sick and that their love is one of the only enduring things still around to grasp.
Today is a day when it feels like the inner ache will never ease. Rationally, I know that it will. Know this is hormonal or situational or seasonal or just a bad break. I know.
When Ryan talks about Earleen and grandparents, I can't hold the reference, either. My memories of grandparents are alcohol, violence and forgetting. I don't know how to hold what happened to Marco, to Seth. The survivor's remorse has been bubbling close to the surface since February 24, 2022. Their deaths still make me numb. Fitting maybe that Seth's last book reco was My Grandmother's Hands.
What would it be to have grandparents who loved each other deeply, who were kind? I'm grateful Mila and Elka have mama and tato. The ancestral good is shallow but enough for gratitude now.
"our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors"
- jonas salk, a man who decided not to patent the sun.
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the aesthetic dimensions of ancestral anger.
"because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. to be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted."
- ocean vuong
to be part of a diaspora is to live freely, to make no promises.
"most people come from people for whom the world was ending. most of us come from collapse."
- ross gay
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on third culture kids.
ni de aqui, ni de alla
(not from here, not from there.)
- latin american saying
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aim for my head
Go easy on me, darling.
Don't aim for my head.
Yes, it's your skin. It's your bones.
But it's my home.
- Mr. Jacob Banks, from Lies about the War.
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maybe i've lost count of the rooms you're tall in
moments passed, dermott kennedy
[nobody ever got my soul right like she could]
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money // power
“... to be coronated [...] under capitalism is to claim a domain that comes, as Marx puts it, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
- eula bliss, having and being had (p. 240)
“most young kings get their heads cut off.”
- jean-michel basquiat
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Like most immigrant children, I grew up speaking the language of longing.
Tracy Wan.
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The tenderness of life is preserved on islands of temporary calm. And today I find that a rather daring, albeit inexplicable, thought. Even the soldiers I meet in the center of Kyiv seem to feel their former occupations within them—despite their weapons, despite having already been to the front. “What were you before the war?” I ask and hear in reply: a lawyer, a mechanic. When I take their pictures, they ask me to delete the photographs. I always do. After the war, my files will contain almost no pictures of soldiers or ruins.
THE WAR DIARY OF YEVGENIA BELORUSETS
DAY 34 (TUESDAY, MARCH 29): ISLANDS OF TEMPORARY CALM
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“American history is longer, larger, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
― James Baldwin
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big in japan.
The slick wet of the shark’s rubber skin in the foreign documentary we watched. That dank hotel room in Hokkaido, its mildewed green carpet the best we could afford. Our wet jeans hung on a shower curtain bar, dripping, soaked from a day of wandering in the rain. Because in the context of this attempt at a holiday escape, monsoon rains seemed more a mild inconvenience than a reason to sit inside within our misery. You asked me if sharks get divorced, with glazed eyes fixed on the janky tv set. This was the dance that felt big in Japan.
The romance of a paper map and foreign road signs, a tank full of gas and manual crank windows. The languid transition, from tense confusion after we missed the exit to easy silence as we fell into tiny abandoned towns and farmerless fields and the soundtrack of Japanese talk radio. The car rolled under a glorious bluebird sky, your face reflected in the glass of the dashboard. You asked me if people could forget to be happy, if one day your mouth would forget how to smile from years of disuse. These were the losses that felt big in Japan.
The salty remnants of fish skin and rice on small plastic plates, frothy filmed beer glasses and distracted conversation. Our jetlag pulling our posture to pieces, we slumped on plastic chairs and raw concrete walls, fixing our eyes on the restaurant’s sole tv. The dining room shone a faint blue glow from the neon sign outside. We should have known by the group of college kids at the first table that this was a place for sustenance, cheap fish karaage and chess tables rather than a meal to remember. But the monsoon rains still held us hostage and we acquiesced to the pull of proximity, stepping into the guest house’s main floor restaurant. I asked the server for another lager, and you asked me for the room key. These were the dissociations that felt big in Japan.
The ripples turned to waves as we left the harbour, and you opened your mouth into the wind as if to knock the cold, stagnant air from your lungs. We sailed for days, alone with a pile of paperbacks, the sun, and its shadows, until the water returned to calm. With nothing better to do, we would meet the sunrise by jumping into the swell of the sea, though never at the same time; we could share a room, a car, a closet, but the risk of grazing up against your skin in the black expansiveness of the undersea would have been too intimate an intrusion.
Floating on my back, I could see the inverted outline of your form bobbing on the deck of the boat. I watched you rise from the deck chair, your profile dark against the harsh, hot white of the sun. Floating, I watched as you walked toward me upside down, the sky heavy and solid beneath you. I swam back to you, white wrinkled fingertips gripping the fibreglass of the boat deck, breath sharp and lost. Looking out to the line where the sea became the sky, your face a squint against the brightness of everything, you asked me if I’d had enough. These were the last acts that felt big in Japan.
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He watches as the green vines weave up through the cement floor, wrapping tightly around the bone of his ankle.
They ground him in place, and the universe expands as he exhales.
They are not vines, but weeds.
The only green that grows for us, and we say nothing of wanting more; we have learned to make do with what is given.
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most young kings get their heads cut off.
I tried not to speak when I was with him in public; I stumbled over the words to use and my English wasn’t good enough to be useful anyway. To speak was to leave the door unlocked at night and then wonder how the jackals had gotten in.
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