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[smokefalls]

I believe we have come far enough in civilization that sex is no longer a tool of procreation. Sex is an act of warfare. Sex is a political act. Just think of it. In all the dangers we’ve encountered by now through the simple act of touching—we touch now for all of the life we can’t take back. Think of all that we didn’t deserve because we wasted it. If we don’t touch each other now, what did we save ourselves for?

Shayla Lawson, "On Sex (Los Angeles, California)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

If beauty lasted forever, we wouldn’t need it. If beauty lasted at all, we’d all forget.

Shayla Lawson, "On Beauty (Venice, Italy)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

Beauty is fleeting but its absence can make you an entirely different person. There is beauty in this and newness. In letting the gone gleam through.

Shayla Lawson, "On Beauty (Venice, Italy)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

Knowing what you are worth makes you look at the world differently.

Shayla Lawson, "On Beauty (Venice, Italy)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

We don’t become beautiful until we believe it.

Shayla Lawson, "On Beauty (Venice, Italy)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

Although I want to believe otherwise, I have learned humanity is meant to scar us, something ugly must befall us in order for us to say we’ve truly lived.

Shayla Lawson, "On Beauty (Venice, Italy)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

Witnessing the beautiful is always the petite death. We say we are awed, stupefied, entranced. For a moment, we forget there’s anything else worth paying attention to. We are what we feel and we feel enchanted. “Enchanted” is a word that once meant “emit sound.” “Encantare.” To sing. That’s exactly what beauty does. It’s not just that we see beauty: it rings, in our ears, like iron in a bell tower, it wakes up and ends us. The cycle of life and death is present in everything beautiful we see.

Shayla Lawson, "On Beauty (Venice, Italy)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

The one thing I was becoming more aware of in my late twenties was the abject loneliness of being a Black woman. Whether you are coupled or not, there is this strange displacement that comes from being Black and leaving childhood behind for good. Our time in the space of the innocent is always truncated. But the more I grew in my maturity the more I understood that my womanhood would always prove both outspoken and othered by the world in a way that made it impossible to truly feel a part of it. Strangely, even so, I felt called to protect it. There was a certain equality I started to demand for those I saw as unwanted, unrecognized by the world, with little regard for my own position—which was perilous. There was a recklessness in my discontent that, foreign country or not, I attribute to how being a Black woman is always a foreign feeling. Even when we’re in the company of each other, there are so many moments when I find us brushing up to feel each other on all our haunches, uncertain if we will be taken into the fold.

Shayla Lawson, "On Storytelling (Hoensbroek, Netherlands)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

A woman that I love more than life once told me, “Disability is really just a measure of time.” With time, all of us will be different than we are right now. In sickness, we all become time travelers. “Disability is just time working differently on the body.” At a certain point in time, we all will have to consider what we can no longer do. Some of us just reconcile with this earlier.

Shayla Lawson, "On Time (Mexico City, Mexico)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

That’s the only real way to stay in love, I believe. To stay curious enough that opening each part of your heart feels like delicately unhinging each clove from a bulb of garlic, each experience made roughly of the same material but each reflection filled with new reverence. An adventure.

Shayla Lawson, "On Love (New York, New York)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

… falling in love is about building a mythology around who you really are.

Shayla Lawson, "On Love (New York, New York)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

The modern question of pronoun usages is not just a conversation about self-actualization, it’s a battle about who gets to define language. And, in our contemporary times, if English is meant to maintain its function as a “universal” language, it will have to adapt to function in the more equitable world we are building, not just the colonial one it forged.

Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

When we don’t ask people’s pronouns, we risk a lot more than misgendering them. We miss the opportunity to correct any misconceptions we may have about how people see themselves in the changing world, as they continue to educate themselves and realign their values. We miss the chance to rectify a dying system that dictates “men” one way and “women” the other, asking us to utterly deny how far we’ve come from those antiquated notions when we look at what people are actually doing in the twenty-first century, how we are actually living. Our world has grown diverse and broad. Redefining boundaries is what’s become interesting to us. Not reinstating traditions that didn’t have our best interests in mind to begin with.

Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

In my travels, I’ve noticed that white locals like to assume the reserve they notice in the people they consider the cultural fringe comes from an inferiority of experience. That, somehow, in our avoiding the spaces in which they feel most affirmed, we’re denying ourselves the opportunity to feel we’re a part of something. In reality, what they’ve missed is that many of us have moved on from feeling we need to be a part of the dominant conversation. That we have comfortably carved out our own. So comfortably, in fact, that our connection goes beyond shared age, language, socioeconomic background, or ability. This was the passport “whiteness” was meant to offer to all people of less melanated skin. A stamp of security. The stamp of the majority. But it hasn’t proved the case when it comes to whiteness and traveling.

Shayla Lawson, "Online (Montélimar, France)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

In my most romantic moments contemplating the internet, I’m in love with the organism that surrounds the organism of our bodies. The multicellular collection of microcosmic breadcrumbs we leave behind, that organize like mycelium to tell the stories of who we are more intricately than we could ever describe ourselves. When I stop thinking about the data collected of our life online as an invasion of our privacy, I think about it as a multifaceted, categorical collection of everything we’ve been, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve asked to become. Not just in the collection of what we share, but also in the recognition of what we respond to and who calls out to us.

Shayla Lawson, "Online (Montélimar, France)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

Everybody needs someone who sees in them the divine when they are struggling to make it out of their lowest point.

Shayla Lawson, "On Dancer (Bloomington, Indiana)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

[smokefalls]

Dying for me always had to be accompanied by the chaotic abyss of losing someone and the darkness that consumed you. Humbling yourself to losing, until it had stolen so much of you that everyone was worried about you by the time you decided to return to earth. I hate that, when I actually analyze the ways that I’ve been taught to process grief; I understand this too is unhealthy. […] What I had been taught about loss is that it must destroy you in order for it to have validity. What I have been taught about death is that it must surprise you in order for us to grieve it.

Shayla Lawson, "On Dancer (Bloomington, Indiana)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir