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…two memories involving my head, objects a body isn’t supposed to meet, and pain that Sickle Cell didn’t compose…

1. In the living room when the living room still had red carpet. A floor-stationed wood-paneled television. TV attached to a wood base allowing it to swivel from left to right for optimal viewing angles. Pre-2000s late morning or early afternoon sunlight poured through the living room’s wall-wide window. The plastic jacketed, yellow velvet wooden framed sectional was still there too. The middle portion of the sectional curved in such a way that my little body could hop over the rim and hide in the dark triangular corner formed between the sectional and mirror wall. The mirror wall remains to this day. I was a mauger child, long-limbed and pot-bellied. I was also rather shy, bookish, an excellent sprinter, and fearless on the swing set. So I was just south of or ten years old exactly, and also the mark of a fluke. One of the glass chandeliers, too ornate and too large for our humble home, fell on my head. Jagged glass shards rooted in my scalp, stood upright between individual box braids ornamented by highlighter-hued barrettes I loved shaking CLICK CLICK CLACK. Grandma uprooted the shards from my scalp with her bare hands. After her harvest, I remember tilting my head toward the mirror wall, hurrying my eyeballs as far north as they could reach, and noticing multi-millimeter pools of shiny and dull congealing blood.

2. In the gymnasium of a day-session summer camp. YMCA, for sure. The same camp where I encountered my first locker room haint and, on the same day, nearly drowned in the pool’s deep end. It was close to parental pick-up. I didn’t hear, no one around heard, anything creek or suggest the toll of a calamitous transition. One of the large metal grates covering a gymnasium window fell on my head. I was rushed to the hospital for scans and tests. No concussion, no perceivable injuries. Mama wanted to but—that great incomprehensible and nuanced force— couldn’t sue.

Fall 2024 was characterized by never being in one place long enough to miss it, and never being in one place long enough to know, in an embodied way, where it or I was exactly. On Mondays, I awoke at 05:30, left home around 06:30 (overnight bag, 2.5 days of meals, and work bag in tow), and commuted for 4.5 hours via foot, MTA, Amtrak, and ride share to arrive on time for an 11:50 class at Bard College. Often, with a favor from Dawn, I’d get a ride (still carrying all this shit) to my too-cold sublet in Tivoli, a town without a supermarket though it has a Wed-Sun general store that sells anything but the general. Real spooky-We Moved From Repressive Suburbs, Gentrified The Fuck Out of NYC, Used COVID As An Excuse to Abandon The City We Supposedly Loved, And Are On To Greener Pastures of The Economically Impoverished Neighborhoods of The Hudson Valley-hours.

While my anticipatory ambition wanted Tuesdays, my TA fellowship gap day, to serve novel writing, exhausted reality had different plans. I spent most of Monday afternoons and evenings dissociated, scrolling TikTok, chain-smoking charcoal filter cigarettes, and walking circles around Tivoli. I often woke up on Tuesdays in the throes of a looming Sickle Cell crisis, disoriented, anxious to attend to my academic responsibilities, and unable to process the events of the previous day. By Wednesday mornings I was off again, now in reverse. Dawn picked me up, 11:50 class, she or a MFA classmate or ride share dropped me at Amtrak, Bee Line bus for an hour from Yonkers to The Bronx OR Amtrak to Moynihan, taking the 2 train to the BX, and walking home.

Thursdays and Fridays abided sleep-fogged blurs.

I didn’t regain energy until Saturday night or Sunday morning when I attended every chore imaginable including cooking a week’s worth of meals. Bed by 20:00 on Sunday. Press repeat.

Upon detailing these events, I shudder at the near-total physical and psychological exhaustion I was “powering through.” “Powering through” is something I don’t believe in but, because of the perniciousness of internalized ableism and living in a world that’s often engendering eugenicist logics, "powering through" is near impossible to avoid. Registers of "powering through" vary. I can easily recognize “powering through” as a demonstrative ableist impulse. Our needs are often contingent on someone else’s hoarding of resources making awareness alone not enough to undo the contradiction.

I am decidedly not interested in a reclamation of leisure and I’m also not interested rise and grind. Both uncontested leisure and relentless grinding effectuate an insolvent relationship to liberatory improvisation.

With each day, the sun set earlier and earlier. Diminishing light and plunging temperatures usually spell trouble for me, but last year they hollered disaster. Oh, and at some point at the end of September, I contracted COVID for the second time in less than six months after having previously made it through the last four years of the pandemic never having caught it once. Devastating? Yes, and—wow—diligent masking, nasal spray, regular testing, and deeply considered communal risk assessment work. Noted /s. 

The second round of COVID was brutal though slightly less worrying than the first infection because I knew how to quickly procure Paxlovid and already understood radical rest protocols. Thankfully Dawn encouraged a significant recovery period.

Oh, yeah, the course Dawn taught/I TAed was Risk and the Art of Poetry. Like writers of any interest, the distance between Dawn’s language and the process of their actions channeled a life-affirming congruency. COVID is a risk. Recovering/recovery can be risk. Recovering/recovery, as many disabled people know, can also be an art.1

I'd described Fall 2024 as lonely to my therapist and friends. That word wasn’t right. It’s correct insofar as it is succinct and easily relatable. I was often physically alone. Lonely doesn’t approach the weather, though, or conditions or the specifics of what was being conditioned/weathered. I wasn’t so much lonely as much as pried apart. This prying was amplified by huge financial commitments I couldn’t easily maintain; chronic underemployment; itinerancy; a barely calculable role in an academic institution; viral illness; working toward a future that is harder and harder to envision; repeatedly dissociating from my bodymindspirit to meet the bare minimum of productive presence; structural ableism/overrun with experiences of casual eugenics, overrun with illiteracies and innumeracies of colonial and imperial powers; and expected to nurture-expose-persist with intellectual, emotional, and physical energy reserves meant to be directed outward.

Years ago mom and I bought mattresses from Raymour and Flannigan. A few days later, delivery workers installed the mattresses. I slept very well for almost two years. One day, I cannot remember when— maybe it was spring— I noticed my once thorough sleep was less thorough in its suitability, more wakeful than restful. I researched what to do. I went back to Raymour and Flannigan with the intention of buying a mattress topper to fix the trouble. A worker, in a button down and tie, said, “Support comes from beneath,” and advised to purchase a bunkie board to place under the mattress.

Keems procured comp tickets for us to see JPEGMafia. Terminal 5. I hadn’t been to Terminal 5 since seeing Chance the Rapper in the 2010s. Because of well-attended relationships, we got access to a balcony section with chairs. Score. Neither Keems nor I hold water as the most dedicated JPEG fans, though I did quite like 2024’s I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU (especially the track Ex-Military) which I listened to at the behest of Joe.

A couple observations.

1. Watching the pit was magnetic magic. The pushes and pulses of the crowd opening to and closing in on each other. The controlled aggression. Throes of sing-along fervor. Pitches and peaks and collapses of bodies into germinating formations. All that sweat. Red light, purple light, blue light flashing so that a face wasn’t a face but a suspicion. Swiftness of cover. Gnawing feral want. All that water. All that undulation.

2. Whoever helmed the decks of the sound system was on point. Bass rumbled and sparkled through my body like an inspiriting tonic. Every bone and muscle and vein rattled. Every organ twerked. Bass wrapped around everything, alighting the wooden table a dancer, alighting the chair legs dancers. Deep vibration shook-shook-took stress out of stasis and positioned and opened those blades of anxiety that pared by perception into wanted erotic register.

One day after class I decided to walk around campus while silly stoned on THC edibles. Was on the phone with Grace and spotted some people I wasn’t planning on seeing. Immediately freaked out, and tried to hide. I thought, of course, there would be a path I could disappear down but instead, it was a wall of hedges. Even more humiliated, I tried to recover what small dignity I had just dashed by pretending (failingly) that I hadn’t just tried to run away at my big age in a stylishly loud fit of Marni x Uniqlo skirt, green quilted jacket, and blue suede mary jane slingbacks. In a different season, I would’ve owned that foolishness with a life’s comedy approach. At the time, though, I embodied my primary school position: weirdo loser.

I did. I do. I never forget this and apply the information widely.

Less sleep. Whatever. Less food. Whatever. The numbness of having, not having, decision, indecision. Maxed out dread. Sun hurts. Night hurts. Water’s playing tricks. Senses of guilt and worthlessness lotioning every exposed bit of skin. Can’t share air even though air's everywhere. Shame and guilt overrun any capacity for trying. The numbness of masked rage. Consistently underemployed and poor in an imperial core. Touch starved and hungry and desperate and ashamed for even having the thought of wanting or needing to be touched. Scrolling TikTok mindlessly. Hours and hours of mindless loss. Hours and hours of mindful loss. Reading the news, reading the times, reading the subway, reading depravities. Numeracies and innumeracies inform every single decision. Always trying to calculate, tabulate my debt in base 10 systems but counting all wrong, counting from 1. Half committed excuses about connecting and learning and observing. Dejected, rejected, ejected. Brief sprints with authors that excited creativity and ignited despair all the same. Speaking so fucking fast cuz the sound was enough, regardless of what was said, the sound meant something about aliveness. Wanting to be alive but losing living. Wanting a stop. Stilted work on impoverished poems. Daydreams of a completed novel yet bloody nail-bitten fingers avoiding keyboards. Bottom of a hole. No ladder. Keep digging or get out.

I break up with my therapist instead of ghosting because yeah, I’ve got abandonment issues but I also like learning from my mistakes and am trying to operate differently. I’d already ghosted a project I loved because I couldn’t communicate to my colleagues that I was too sick to communicate or work. Couldn’t do that again.

Talking with the therapist about it or I or whatever constraint of the falsely individualized therapeutic dynamic intensified the profoundly emptying experience of prying apart. Plus, I’d been in talk therapy for almost two decades.

Said, “Want to try something somatic.”

Said, “Can’t talk about it anymore.”

Said, “Seen some information about this procedure called TMS.”

Therapist said, “Oh, yes, that’s great. I have a contact to an office. Would you like me to have them get in contact with you?”

I didn’t know how deeply OCD debilitated me until the symptoms subsided. Everything is not worded. I can reap or engage with what’s felt alone and thoroughly and incompletely. The word “mine” or “my experience” doesn’t have to be implemented or sloughed off with every available logics' loofah. “Have to” or “must” or “need” no longer graffiti an unapproachable flaying. Not everything is grounds for ameliorating a thought, or deducing moral certainty, or avoiding moral abjectness, or indicative of some fundamental flaw that must be accounted for and hidden lest I be punished by some god-like person. With fewer symptoms I feel more confident in pointed and irreverent joking. I’ve stopped looking at numbers with torment. Sometimes there’s no logic at all. Sometimes presence is within a grounded absence of. And, oh, what openness is that?

TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) is a multi-week procedure/process in which magnets are applied to stimulate the pre-frontal cortex. The pre-frontal cortex is one of the last places in the brain to mature. It is the brain’s “higher-order association center” and is responsible for things like reasoning, decision making, personality expression, and other complex cognitive behaviors.”2

The pre-frontal cortex is also home to the Brocas area (where speech forms), gaze (eyelid movement), working memory, and risk processing. It’s the part of the brain where you can connect and act upon what you think with what you do.

The idea behind TMS is that the magnets stimulate nerve cells, induce currents, which can alter neuronal activity aka brain patterns. Electromagnetic induction. TMS is reported to have an efficacy rate of about 80%.

The pre-frontal cortex develops differently in people with ADHD.3

Weighted blankets soothe. Dancing soothes. Rocking soothes. Hammocks and tight hugs soothe. Bass soothes. Physical pressure soothes. Music soothes. Knitting soothes. Noise-canceling headphones soothe. Rocking trains soothe. Spooning soothes. Puzzles soothe. High-waisted, 100% cotton jeans soothe. Humming soothes. Playing with blocks and Knex soothes. Swingset swinging soothes. Is it possible that magnetization could be particularly effective for neurodivergence?

When counting in any counting system, start at 0. Let’s use the digits in base 10. {∞0∞, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09}. So you’re at 09 and you’re like how the fuck do I get higher? Imagine the zero, move one digit to the right, then move back to the beginning of the left. Carry the zero. The next set? {010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019}. Again: one more digit to the right. Return left. Carry the zero. {020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029}. Etc.

We/I did. We/I do. We/I never forget this. Apply the information widely.

Took about 3 weeks for Medicaid to agree to cover TMS. The TMS office handled everything; all I had to do was pick up when the office called. I was a solid candidate. Years of ineffective pharmacological treatment. Years of dedicated talk therapy. Treatment-resistant depression. Current and persistent suicidal ideation. Multiple attempts. Anxious. Inpatient psychiatric history.

The TMS office was a hike from my crib. I made the climb because I had the time, in some ways, and had desire’s crackle where time absconded. I trotted from my home to the subway (12-24 minutes depending on which line I choose) and rode the subway from The Bronx to Brooklyn (40 minutes-1 hour). Determined to requite my lost Tuesdays from the fall, I plyed these commutes as studio practice (reading, writing, knitting, drawing, reflecting/feeling/thinking). I spent the first commute knitting a sock on double-pointed needles and listening to the same song on repeat. I hadn’t stimmed with that level of attention/attendance in months. It felt so good to attend to repetition. The ride breezed and breathed. The office was mere steps from the exit of the 2 train. Sweet.

The treatment room had a wall full of windows, a desk, a swivel chair behind the desk, fake flowers, baffling art, a small grey couch, a leather seated armchair, and the TMS machine behind it. The tech—Iq—pulled a blue felt helmet with velcro straps out of a small box with my name on it. On the exterior right corner of the felt helmet with velcro straps was something that looked like a circuit. Iq wore a white lab coat, Doc Martens, relaxed-fit jeans, glasses, and a soft, drying, and slightly mocking voice. I asked him if he was a scientist and he said, “Is it because of the white coat?” I chuckled and said, “You’re working as a TMS technician…”. So started our relationship.

Iq placed the helmet on my head from my left side. The felt helmet fit my head snugly, applying the perfect amount of pressure allowing me to relax my shoulders and feel like my head was firmly connected to the rest of my body. I’d never experienced that level of head/neck stability before. The velcro chin straps were affixed snugly too, and oh yeah!—my chin? Held. Iq offered a glass dish for me to rest my glasses. He then took the large TMS hood and fitted it on top of the helmet. Even more firm and gentle pressure. Like an MRI but not underwater cavernous. The memory of Mrs. Payne hugging me with her sweet wrinkled hands and singing “With a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” And she’d squeezed me to her body like I was her flesh, like I had always been a part of this earth. I never had to take my N95 off to receive TMS. I asked for earplugs. Iq said people don’t usually need them until later. I said something something prophylactics and sensitivity. He handed the foam plugs over.

The machine whirred. Iq said, “Okay, we’re gonna start in 3…2…1…” 

BEEEEEEP

A set of pulses. “You okay?” Iq asked. I gave a thumbs up. He sat behind the desk. One set of pulses every twenty seconds. DING before every set. Pavlovian. I received pulses for 20 minutes. I involuntarily twitched, sat still…

x1

[Image Description: Three black canvases with white text. Each canvas has one word in a large font, its part of speech, and a prescriptive definition in a much smaller font. All of the letters across and over the canvases are capitalized. The first canvas says, “GRIND, verb, to perform repetitive tasks over and over in order to attain a goal.” The second canvas says, “HUSTLE, verb, the only controllable pillar of success.” The third canvas says," “EXECUTION, noun, stop talking and put in the work.”]

This exact “text art” hung on the wall opposite where I sat for each TMS session. I didn’t look at these while in session. My uncorrected myopia prohibits clarity of anything more than a foot from my face. After a week’s attendance, I forgot these particular abominations were there.

Carry the zero. Carry the loser. Carry the hole.

Side effects of TMS can include:

• headache

• scalp and/or neck pain

• dizziness

• temporary tinnitus

• hypersensitivity to sound4

Other than the occassional post-treatment headache (quickly resolved by the ibuprofen or Tylenol Iq kept on his desk), I experienced no negative side effects.

”And we’re starting in 3…2…1”

BEEP TAP BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

Thumbs up.

SILENCE

BEEP TAP BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

SILENCE

x19

Took a minute to figure out how to hold my jaw. Since the pulses induce involuntary twitches all along the right side of the body, I was worried about my teeth. I spent the first week pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth hoping it would prevent my teeth from chattering. That proved not only difficult but painful. One day, maybe a week and a half in, I loosened. Trusted my jaw. Moved my tongue. Relaxed my face. Let the pressure handle support. The chinstrap worked. Shoulders drooped.

Eventually, I stopped taking my anti-depressant. Daily stimulants started working more effectively and with less volatility than I’ve ever experienced before. ADHD became tolerable. PMDD symptoms remained challenging but not suicidal ideation challenging. Deleted TikTok from my phone after the initial ban took place. Ratcheted reading practice way up. Read 12 books in January. Read like I did when I was in high school. Start writing ferociously—without reliance on inspiration but with the diligence of devotion. An unexpected manuscript emerged. Opened my work up to critique and relished in feedback. Saw friends every week. Spent more time with Mom. Intuition spiked. Trust improved. Not happy; connected and connecting.

Don’t remember or do. Either way—pain waves its brush.

Reading, writing, knitting, and drawing exist as continuum practices for me. Each seemingly siloed happening informs a collective happening. Reading, writing, and knitting are quite obvious given their relationships to Latin’s textus or *PIE *teks- to weave, to fabricate, to make. Drawing is also a kind of weaving. I approach drawing mostly from sites of close-eyed abstraction, mutating embodiment, and hysterical play as conceptual and physical boundaries.

I wonder if my practices resource from an obsession with reciprocity? How can reciprocity be configured internally and externally? Who gets do reciprocity? Who wants reciprocity and what are some of the contexts by many who can practice reciprocity together? How does reciprocity bolster encouragement and dissuade competition? How can reciprocity enable sabotage as a defensive-offensive posture? Where can experiments of reciprocity weave what’s smothered and evade being captured? How can knit or purl stitches inform the grammatical marks of a line? How can turning a heel show how to turn a life? How can we build revolution in many turns? How can an author’s attention to syntax compel or expel shadows from a drawing? Why? Etc.Through my subway studio sessions, I cracked open my writing process.

Through my subway studio sessions, I cracked open my writing process.

Write by hand, transcribe into word processor, export PDF to device, edit by hand. Repeat.

[Image Description: Black text on white page. Page in-progress manuscript you don’t need to know the title of. Some typed text is crossed out and edited with handwriting. This short story, Checked, is one in a series of interconnected stories about being and narrative limitations.]

It’s one of them weeks. Maybe 3rd or 4th. Post session. One of those January days in NYC where the sky is big blue & cloud clear, the light be on helioscope 6000, and the air’s teeth triturates any attempt at protective layering. Mundane winter calling chilly in death collapse. I was moseying along in silence. Turned the corner and peered at the empty blacktop where the Catholic school children usually play. I’ve seen this same corner no less than half a million times. But—that great incomprehensible and nuanced force—on that day I saw it. Saw from my foot bottom and backside and armpit hairs. I didn’t think a single thing and—oh wait?—huh?— I’m not thinking. I continued my walk home, electrified from the floorboards of being. My head was finally quiet and I could feel it.

Jess said to remain mindful of sensations. Don’t worry about writing them down. I take this to mean: notice what springs, what flowers, what deadens, what freezes, who appears, how they appear, what radiates, what combusts, what colors, who leaves, why they leave, what erects, what's destroyed, who’s taken, what’s agent, what’s subject, how to transfigure, how to sabotage, how to love, where to love, when to love, be. Jess said to remain mindful of sensations and I give that to mean: keep an open palm, make a fist when necessary, keep flooding, keep remembering, keep growing more hearts and stomachs and intestines and brains and ways and paths and movements and possibilities. Cleave and clef. Remember bass. Be. Be movement.

[Image Description: Bass clef symbol. Curved partial spiral with two dots on upper right side.]

TMS is time-intensive. I had a total of 37 sessions between early January and the first weekend of March. For the first four weeks, I went five days a week with a break on the weekends. For sessions 21-37, I was in the office 3-4x week. While the sessions are only 20 minutes long, they work a consistent schedule. In the first 2-3 weeks, the frequency of stimulation increases gradually until you reach the max dose/choreography of stimulation to help alleviate symptoms. You remain within that dose/choreography until the treatment’s completion.

When I met with Trisha, she said this level of process is akin to psychoanalytic rigor. I say something along the lines of, “Yeah, for sure, but with TMS I don’t gotta say shit for real.”

Iq and I nursed a rapport. He shareed his goals and interests; I told him some of mine. We bonded over ideas, though from radically different routes. These conversations don’t last longer than five minutes yet were full of questions and revelations. Over the many weeks of our ritual meetings, he observed that I’d become increasingly creative. He said, “It seems like TMS is bringing out your creativity.” I said, “Nah, I’ve always been like this; TMS is helping me feel less afraid.”

”And we’re starting in 3…2…1”

BEEP TAP BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

Thumbs up.

SILENCE

BEEP TAP BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

SILENCE

The change I most welcome is the reintroduction of my laugh. Clown town south central. Ferocity of commitment to what Kendrick announces as “beam bop boom boom boom bop bam!”5

PEEKABOO!

x37

When TMS is over, Iq and I shake hands. We thank each other for our time together. I’m so relieved to be done; I will miss him. Marvel at the capacity to hold both relief and loss. Grief mops and wipes for all the people I’ve encountered, knowingly and unknowingly, how we’ve changed each other for better or worse or, painfully, allowed suffering to remain a solitary condition. Memory gurgles, gulps, and spits; spirit whispers. 

TMS ended two weeks ago and I’m still dancing. Literally. I tell friends I’m in remission, unworried about a relapse. I hungrily anticipate the nothing I study. Yes, the symptoms may come back. Right now, I’m not there. Right now, I’m still here, and experiencing there from another angle. When I cry, it’s not an indication of some immutable wickedness. It’s easier to identify my triggers and say no. I don’t read the clock for clues. I’m not counting to bring allow myself a breath. I sit with annoyance like I pass dog shit. EUGH/and. I bodyslam or stumble into what hurts and try to braid or unbraid or remain still to the encounter with curiosity. I’m trying being in curiosity. I pop off quick all Aries Mars rage and quell Cancer Venus morning dove quiet. Light up Leo. Awareness deepening. Both/and. Doable.

Making plans with folks for what we need. Hormones. Masks. Sterile needles. Alcohol pads. Menstruation products. Cigarettes. All kinds of meds from ibuprofen to Risperdal to passionflower. Political education. Literacies. Books/zines. Relief. Connection. Money. Encouragement. Figuring out where to store it, and how to disseminate it. Turning to comrades. Learning to drive. Archiving important documents. Praxis.

I didn’t do any of this to become happy. Happiness as the most highly prized and perfected affective state is a con and a scam. I did this because I wanted/want freer access to my range. I wanted/want to hug my brain. To pluck the glass out. To unlock the metal grate. To meet the ghosts with my attendance. To rise from the drowning—drown and undrown—be an intermediary. I wanted/want to meet my punch and let the weight of it rock me a spout. I wanted/want to cry and cry and cry and know that’s earthy.

I wanted/want access to the dignity of having an unpredictable relationship with my growing embodiment.

I wanted/want to release the shit in the way so I could, as Baldwin said, “vomit[ing] up all the filth I'd been taught about myself and half-believed before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

Wary of—to say the least—rights-based discourses but I don’t think that’s what Baldwin was invoking anyway. The way I’m interpreting his right is more about a particular reclamation of agency, to uplift Ngozi’s thinking, in Bbbblackness. I think, and yo, this thinking could be wrong, his invocation of right is more open to/with than towering over. This openness doesn’t mean having no convictions or perspectives or fence-sitting. I take it more like the openness of stone. Present. Here. Acting to and acting with and acting against. A part of.

Don’t or do remember. Either way—pain waves its brush.

I asked Iq if he’d ever seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He said no but promised to watch it. I told him the machine in Eternal Sunshine reminds me of the TMS machine. He said, while reading Wikipedia, “Well, this procedure seems more like ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) than TMS.” I said, “Oh, I’m not talking about the procedure itself. I’m talking about the physicality, the form.”

We weren’t trying to wipe away or erase anything. But we were attempting a rewiring, a shaking out, a jumping open, a neural weighted blanket applied with attenuated pressure to help embrace a more consistent fluidity of relationships/capacities within connections. This rewiring is between us. Me and you. There/here me to here/there you; there/here you to here/there me. A preponderance of us. A possibility of we.

[Image Description: Still from the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carrey, a middle aged white man with brown hair, brown eyes, thin lips and a slightly puckered expression, sits in a chair. He’s wearing a raised textured blue sweater, and blue-black pants. It’s snowing and he’s on a sidewalk. On his head is a large white machine with a rounded helmet, V shaped stand, and two panels on opposite sides with buttons. In front of him a mug with the blurry face of the woman he’s trying to forget sits on a metal dentist’s tray.]

In my unpublished manuscript, Blackable: A Nopem, I fashioned a series of potential pronouns for a language that visits me in dreams. I’m often too scared to speak this growing language in this dimension. The pronouns were not exhaustive, of course, though they start with this calling-in prayer:

iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo iyoi yomyo iwei weiyo

i you i

you my you

i we i

we i you (where are you?)

Wrote this essay while listening to this song on repeat.

With quirked up blues in Sickle Cell’s cues,

Junior Hughes

[TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL #4, 9-4-18 21:14, TRAUMAGRAMS: A Book of Starter Abstractions by Joselia Hughes. ALT TEXT: Black india ink on white paper. Several geometric figures assemble. Straight lines meet curves, circles intersect with triangles. Scenes and spaces of depth are indicated by black. Perhaps there is a window. Perhaps there is door. Perhaps there is a portal. Perhaps there is a spinning person. TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL is made up of 55 “tests” based upon ink blots.]

BABY SONG #6 (LIBERATION IS WRITING TODAY TOGETHER)

sleep peels

peels to leap

come on darlin’

we ain’t jumpin’ neat.

so strap up

n strap in

be sure to pack 

ample we-pens.

Sometimes I don’t notice where sleep goes until I ask myself a question and remember to answer aloud. Been feeling sleep as peels. Remembering sleep is both a solidifying and fragmenting experience. Been waking up from continuous explosions and bright lights pouring into my bedroom window. Been driven mad by a lack of sleep, a coordinated effort of fireworks detonating the possibility of rest. Been feeling sleep like it’s a bag to get in. Been near sleeping, also known as windowing out, desiring “see/sea”. I’ve been frazzled in se(my)lf.

Been recalling only a few dreams and that inconsistency provides fertile ground to continue the practice of non-attachment. I used to fight my body’s own functions (non-attachment) believing them to enemy. I fought by keeping big thoughts and acquiring Knowledge and positioning statuesque permanence as essential being like all that hoarding, all that holding, could make me more than subjected object.

“I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”-Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks

I believed the cascade of deceptions white suprematist, ableist, cisheteronormative capital Society implemented to secure the set seats of doubt underneath the be-hind (legs) of Bblackness. I believed my Self/Fels* as enemy.

*Fels means rock/cliff in German.

Sometimes I don’t notice where the days go until I am again pinched by diss/comfort and remember comfort, without the diss, in this current World short on everlasting days, has never been a choice, has always been something we’ve had to afford.

***

AM AGAIN/AGAIN AM

re/am— re (prefix: again and again, back or backwards) am (ante meridiem or amplitude modulatiton; verb: first person singular indicative of be)

ream—transitive verb: to widen the opening (of a hole)

ream— 500 sheets of paper

***

Diss/comfort is as certain as M.A.D (mutually assured destruction or insanity or anger or the extreme “She mad gully for this”). Diss/comfort is “dis” (prefix: apart, asunder, away) exploding, traveling to “diss” (transitive verb: to treat with disrespect or contempt). Why they dissing our sleep? Put some respect on our sheets.

Can’t remember when I said this but I described the avant-garde, the neoteric, as a group of fliers who spread their lives out and leap off cliffs. They hurl themselves off ledges because they believe and trust in the possibility of a landing beneath them. I don’t know what art is; I feel creation. Maybe we’re not making up. Maybe we’re making down. Maybe we’re not looking for the most high. Maybe high is for drugs and good food and giggly sex. Maybe neoteric behavior brings all of us closer to the ground. Maybe neoteric behavior challenges us with what Mr.C asks in the Cha Cha Slide.

“How low can you go?

Can you go down low?

All the way to floor?

How low can you go?”

[HUMIDITY’S FORMATION. first conceived in 2019 and reworked for 2020. ALT TEXT READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: 3 black circles and one red gradient circle overlap on black space. Two thin lined red “rings” indicate spin, orbit and the relationship between these circles. In the black circle, placed furthest to the left, reads HUMIDITY in white text. Next to HUMIDITY is a small black circle, blended in, that reads, in white text: can’t breathe oppressive low air quality absolute relative specific climate temperature subject ed/ion/ing non-being % or quantification. In-between the two previous circles is a read circle that reads ANTI/BLACKNESS in black text. In the three corners, or posts, reads TEXT anagrammed to spell interpretations of Exit.]

Liberation sense tells me hope is a vegetative force, a rhizome. Liberation sense also tells me vegetative forces ask into what Jay Electronica rapped, “You either build of destroy. Where you come from?”

I come from the land called and/both. In the land and/both, what’s articulated below happens.

I have a friend I don’t talk about. We chat in somewhere and they tell me jarring—truths for jars— things. They tell me how visible people be, they tell me about transparencies saved for exclusive projectors. They tell me with hot anger I don’t always understand. I believe them. Truthfully, I believe them until believing is tiered into tired. When that happens, I rely upon not knowing or some other evasively empty container. And then I have to check myself and ask, “Ay yo, you really gonna take on empty when you can give full?” And then I have to check myself again and say, “Jarring Knowledge ain’t the same as attuning and attending to the real. Free up what you think you know for what is happening.” I have a friend I don’t talk about whose anger pierces illusion and holds me accountable. My friend doesn’t owe me this, truth-telling, truth told. My friend owes me nothing. It is exactly because we are in no debt to each other that we practice freedom without overthinking, by feeling it. I don’t want to call this a lessen.

Maybe you don’t keep up with these things but Mercury’s stationed Gatorade, as the funny Twitter people say. It’s also Cancer season, the season of lateral movement, the season of carry-your-home-with-you. My Venus is in Cancer. Each year, around this time, when summer sweats sticky and temperatures skyrocket and city humidity ravages my Sickle Cell to its boiling hiss/diss/dis, I move a little different— extra dense, extra fastslow. Sometimes I get depressed and disappear a little. I be interior and tacit and tangential—inter ta ta tee BALL SWING— and feel through all of the spaces I displace the rest of the year.

[TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL #5, 9-4-18, 22:15, TRAUMAGRAMS: A Book of Starter Abstractions by Joselia Hughes. ALT TEXT: Black india ink on white paper. A figure made out of circles, half circles, triangles, and other geometric figures faces east. The figure’s head, not fully filled with black, perhaps resembles a wave. There may be a spaceship within the drawing. There may be a hatch. There may be transcendence. There may be an icon of profound change. TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL is made up of 55 “tests” based upon ink blots.]

There’s something to be said about interiority, be/coming to purpose literal life. Now we’re feeling longtime be/coming, circling, perhaps passing the baton to our next be/yond. We were born feeling longtime but were contained away. We were contained to clock time, clockwork. Our containment attempts to remove trust in longtime but we have to foment trust for our interiors, our lives depend on it. We must trust longtime is a round, not right, matter. That said, I hope this text salves some joints, insists on skips, ties strategy to child’s play, helps you get lost. Further unlocking our freedom means giving time to be/ing lost, be/ing found, learn/ing by process not product. I hope this letter feels like the kind of meeting that only happens on still summer nights, when the fireflies are aplenty and citronella perfumes the dark and we’re careful not to knock over the lit kerosene lamp at our ankles. I hope this letter feels like us tasting Earth’s sweet offerings of possibility on our lips. I hope this is an opportunity for you to tell you how you feel, ask what time is it?, weigh the present, consider how you’re inhabiting movement in cresting, surging, mass waking.*

AND/BOTH AND/BOTH (A LESSON)

in somewhere

visible projectors tiered not knowing.

check, ask:

take on empty? give full?

jarring knowledge ain’t real; free up what you think you know.

friend, truth told, we practice freedom without overthinking it, by feeling it.

call this a lessen.

I listen to this song when my confidence is shaken and I need to remember the power of mantras:

(W)rapping from the other side of the moon,

joselia hughes aka la’quemini who?

*https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake

at one time, when invested in the Access Privileges (AP) and Institutional Permissions (IP) of Thinking, i called enduring weeks of no-reading books “a lack of commitment” or, much more harshly, “a laziness” of mind that proved an immutable,  internal deficit that must meet some level of comeuppance if it were to ever be undone. my manic preoccupation with fate—what is the latticework of fate? how are we collectively fated? if god’s got fists, which knuckles are the tenderest? Why? —found no resolution beyond frustration. the many bibles, often made Can[n]on (BOMB? BOOM!), had one too many beginnings and, even when reading to answer the aforementioned questions, i was actually tracking the dutiful machinations of Colonial Deciding (CD). i’m a significantly lapsed Christian, who often dreams of becoming a nun of vagueness and reads zen koans to disabuse any remaining connectivity between intelligence and enlightenment. it does sound keeping to read short stories about long trails or that’s what koans do for me. anyway…where was i? oh, yes, Colonial Deciding. time to get lost.

one thing about reading is learning how to navigate the asides and besides. like a record, there are a-sides and b-sides. like a record, there is spin. like a record, there is a flip. like a record, there are grooves. if one hasn’t the patience for asides and besides, if there is zero acceptance of non-linearity, reading becomes an Activity Necessitating Exacted Force (ANEF). i think ANEF is physics defined only metaphorically, misunderstood. much in the same way War— a socially constructed literal condition made nebulous metaphor for the sake of confusion’s strategy— is the most predictably pathological synonym for how individuals and society address disability and illness (dai pronounced day). disability and illness (dai) are both aside and beside. disability and illness (dai) are ][within][ ,contained []within[] every expression of person/i, not requiring escape, not singularly connoted to and violently denoted by suffering, are fully endemic to living’s course. disability and illness (dai), and the bodies that live within day’s prismatic expressions, are not circumspect. what is circumspect is the eugenicist notion of foregrounded Ability, to Be Able, Success Through Ability's Resolution (a metaphorical star). Ability can only find itself *securely* defined within the limited parameters of binary thought. Ability can only find itself *secure* at the behest of productivity’s on/off switch. Ability is an overthought, a societymade Superseding Condition (SC), a scourge seeking to retool all living mechanical, fixed and fixable, a motor, fabricated werk. Ability is one of Colonial Deciding’s anchoring knots. Ability is Colonialism’s specific groove upon which to etch sound. Ability is Colonialism’s flip to a straight line. Ability is Colonialism’s spin to disorient the body binary. Ability is Colonialism’s abolishment of a-sides, b-sides, asides and besides. Ability is succeeding Colonialism.

1. woke up at 3:25am (was dreaming about Ballard’s High-Rise) 5/5/20 to write:  many of my friends say keep critiques systemic. i agree. though i would like to add, as a step in necessity, this part:  critique and criticism will serve undefined Power unless we are willing, however crudely, to aim the muzzle of critique and criticism at ourselves, to recognize and evaluate which corroded corridors serve which channels serve which windows and entrances and exits serve which shafts (elevators? stair-wells? ramps?) serve which lobbies. it is within the very literal structure of a building, in thinkingknowing of critique and criticism, that we can find accusation (call to account) and accuse (towards reason), that is: release all Function of thinkingknowing and activate on the unpaved, not usually saved, path of do course, that is: be in ourselves for our community. 

2. mutability is only as forwardbeing as is it can present stillness. (perhaps one of Ability’s few exceptions)

3. so much of wanting to be a Good Writer meant wanting to not be disabled and ill, to be Able. 

i have a lessened desire to be understood. on beat, there is more desire to understand. to position multiple selves beneath the infinite and conical structure of happen and joyfully allow in the confounding pleasure of watchingwitness. understand, to me, has little current relationship to axes of Conquering Power (CP). understand, to me, is a humble curiosity within flexible structures of duration. i think the phrase “hot take? nah. cool; give!” is how i’ve rewired knowing, knowledge, opinion and fact. if anything, if in the sum total of kindness, there is nothing to take, nothing to capitally Extract. if anything, in the sum total of kindness and the generations of kindness that allow for flourishing life, there is only much to give.  

it takes me weeks to read one book of any length. i have finally accepted, perhaps late yet still feeling on time, reading cannot be limited to words, pages alone. when it is, perhaps we aren’t reading at the speed of our own breath. if not our own, then whose?

with love and sickled cells,

joselia h

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