I went away this summer. I went to visit a place I have visited yearly since I was a young child. I went to visit a place and before it I was violently ill, with the virus that keeps ravaging us. It’s my third time getting this virus, and each time makes me more afraid than the last. I have friends who talk to me like I’m hysterical about this, chalk my fear up to just anxiety, but it’s not just anxiety. The fact that what I see and hear from disabled people is so different from the guidance from doctors is a split-screen that makes me often feel, quite literally, like I am not sane. I spent my time while ill sitting mostly in a chair on the front porch, head hot, waiting for the time to pass.
The trip that followed my illness felt like a slow and violent breaking, a worse version of a process that I have lived yearly since 2014, when I first started seeing it more clearly. It was hot and horrible. I don’t mean that it wasn’t lovely, because of course it was. It was just also awful, hateful, fearful. Another split-screen. I found myself swimming through it, half-numb, until the dissonance between the television and the internet grew so loud I spilled it in textual diatribes to my friends overseas.
Ever since I had a serious concussion several years ago, my head often goes hot like an overheating hard drive when I think too hard or feel intense emotion. These episodes don’t happen quite as often as they used to, but they still happen. In a hot place, so hot you don’t go out at midday, my head kept heating. It wasn’t a fever. It was grief.
This grief has come to me yearly, on my visits to this place, a place which I used to write about and have long since given up addressing. In the writing from back then, I called it “promiseland,” because it was a place full of promises, all of which (I was realizing) were already broken. I loved that place, I still do, but there’s no going back. Most of the pieces then were about the process of learning that, a way of working through grief.
The last real piece I wrote about it was seven years ago—half love letter, half elegy. I listed all the beautiful places, all the laughter I had had there. I wrote about the horrors and about complicity. And at the time I finished it:
still all I want is to lie down next to you and forget everything,
like water washing through desert limestone, I wish I could be that smooth, that fresh again.
Every year I am reminded that the part of me that wrote those lines is still alive. I wish there were a world—a fixed world—where we could all lie down next to these places—holy places, all of them—without fear, without death.
We live now, though. There is no forgetting.
Closing note
It’s been a slow week. I have mostly been digesting and recovering from this trip. Here are some other things I’ve been doing:
Sitting in parks, as is Montréal summer custom.
Drinking (and making) cold brew coffee.
(Re-)Reading:
“Algorithmic Realism” by Green & Viljoen
- ’s series on Bama Rush
Kitchen Table Translation, ed. Madhu Kaza
That’s all for today—