Juneteenth marks the day when the news of emancipation finally reached enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, more than two years after freedom had already been declared. It is a day about freedom delayed, freedom denied, and the terrible distance between what this country says and what Black people are forced to survive.

That is why, for me, Juneteenth has never been only a celebration. It is also a question. What does freedom mean in a city where so many Black people are still living without shelter, without safety, without enough people willing to look them in the eye? What does remembrance require of us if it does not ask us to do something with our hands, our money, our time, and our care?

Which is why, for the eighth year, my foundation, We Have Stories, is raising money to support unhoused Black people in New York City. This year, we are trying to raise $20,000 so we can provide 100 people with care packages and direct cash support. These packages include socks, toiletries, snacks, water bottles, personal care items, and other essentials that many of us use without thinking, but that can mean a great deal to someone trying to survive without stable housing.

Right now, we are at $7,000 of our $20,000 goal, and I am asking every person reading this to donate $5.

I know that sounds like a small ask to some, but small asks become powerful when enough people decide that they are not too small to answer. Realistically, I also know how the internet works. Maybe 2% of the people who open this will actually give. I have talked about that before with my dear friend Robert Jones Jr., about how hard it is to get people to give. Especially when people often donate when they can connect the need to a face, to a name, to some immediate story that makes the suffering close enough to touch.

The difficult thing is that I do not take pictures of the people we serve (safety, anonymity, and respect). I take pictures of the care packages, the tables, the supplies, the bags being packed, the items being purchased, the people showing up to do the work. But I will not ask someone living through one of the hardest moments of their life to become evidence for someone else’s compassion. I do not want their pain turned into a poster. I do not want their circumstance reduced to proof.

But I do have stories.

Last Juneteenth, we were in East Harlem, handing out care packages from my car. Robert was there with me, along with the illustrator and author Nikkolas Smith. They had gotten out to distribute packages while I waited nearby, watching people come up, receive what we had, and continue on through the day.

A few feet away, I noticed an unhoused Black woman in a wheelchair. She looked to be in her sixties. As we were giving packages to other people, she started rolling away from us.

At first I was confused. She had seen us. She was close enough to know we were handing out supplies. She could have asked. She could have waited. But instead, she turned herself away, and rolled toward the distance.

So I got out of the car, grabbed a care package, and brought it over to her.

I said, “Hey, wait a second.”

She looked up at me, startled. I asked why she hadn’t waited.

And she said, “I just figured I had missed something everyone else knew about already. There’s usually nothing good for me left. I don’t think anybody even sees me, so I was trying not to be disappointed I guess. It’s hard out here.”

I gave her the package, smiled as best I could, went back to the car, and started to cry.

Because what do you do with a statement like that? What do you do when someone tells you, plainly, without performance or self-pity, that life has taught them not to expect kindness? What do you do when a Black woman in a wheelchair, living outside in one of the richest cities on earth, has learned to protect herself by assuming that whatever good is being offered in front of her must not be meant for her?

You do the only thing you can do. You refuse to let that be the end of the story.

That is what this fundraiser is for. Yes, it is for socks and soap and snacks and water and cash, because people need material support, not just sentiment. But it is also for the moment when someone who has been trained by this world to expect nothing is reminded, even briefly, that they have not disappeared from the human family.

This year, we want to reach 100 unhoused Black New Yorkers. We are already at $7,000, which means we have made real progress, but we still have $13,000 to raise.

If you can donate $5, please do it today. If you can give more, give more. If you cannot give, send this to someone who can. I am not asking because $5 solves homelessness, or because one care package can undo the cruelty of a city that has allowed so many people to fall through its hands. I am asking because the fact that we cannot do everything has never absolved us from doing something.

https://wehavestories.org/juneteenth-fund

Give A Hand

A shareable social media graphic to get others to donate:

The first thing America takes from people is not their freedom. It is their specificity.

Before the cell, before the cot, before the fluorescent light that never becomes morning or night in any honest way, before the meal tray, before the unanswered request for medicine, before the phone call in which a child tries to sound brave for a father he cannot reach, there is a quieter theft upon which every machinery of punishment depends. The institutions relieve people of their name, their history, their ordinary belovedness. A mother becomes a detainee. A father becomes an “alien.” A student becomes a case. A worker becomes a bed. A neighbor becomes a threat.

The language changes first because the language must prepare the public for what the body is about to endure.

Outside Delaney Hall, in Newark, a young boy reportedly told New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill that his father, held inside the facility, was not receiving medication for diabetes. In the same gathering of families and advocates, a woman named Jennifer Faura said her husband had been detained about a week earlier. He worked two jobs, she said. He paid taxes. He should be free.

There is, in that boy’s testimony, everything the state hopes to erase. Not a platform. Not a slogan. Not an ideology. A child with a father. A body needing medicine. A family discovering that America’s promises are far more fragile when spoken with an accent, carried in brown skin, or placed in the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Most Americans have never heard of Delaney Hall, which is part of its power. It is not hidden in some desert beyond the edge of America, where the nation prefers to imagine its cruelties belong. It sits at 451 Doremus Avenue in Newark, New Jersey, a 1,000-bed facility operated by GEO Group for ICE, near an airport, a port, warehouses, trucks, and the ordinary commerce of a country that has always known how to conduct business beside suffering.

Newark is not incidental to this story. It is a Black city, an immigrant city, a working city, a city that knows what it means to be described as disorderly by people who profit from order. As of 2024, Newark had about 310,000 residents; more than a third were born outside the United States, Black residents made up the largest racial group, and more than a third of the city was Hispanic.

It matters that Delaney Hall is there, in a city whose history has been shaped by policing, migration, rebellion, abandonment, and survival. It matters that the cage was placed among people who know what the state sounds like when it calls pain a security problem. It matters that, in Newark, the concept of “public safety” is a haunting.

In July 1967, after John William Smith, a Black cab driver, was beaten and arrested by white police officers, Newark erupted; the governor called in state troopers and the National Guard, and by the time the violence ended, twenty-six people were dead and hundreds were injured. Every textbook history of such uprisings begins with the broken window, the burning building, the rock thrown, the curfew imposed. The truer history begins earlier, with the years in which people were told to endure what officials later called unrest only when the endurance ended.

That is one reason Delaney Hall feels so old.

The building may be modern. The contract may be new. The agency may be called ICE. The governor may be a Democrat. The president may be Donald Trump. But the pattern is older than all of them: first the state creates a population whose suffering can be described as necessary; then it builds an institution to contain them; then it punishes the people who gather to say that what is happening inside must be seen.

Delaney Hall is not simply a place. It is an arrangement.

It is the arrangement of private profit and public force, of federal brutality and state cooperation, of anti-immigrant panic and liberal management, of bureaucratic directive and human hunger. It is a building, yes, but it is also a language. It teaches the country how to speak about people it has decided not to love.

GEO Group’s public description of Delaney Hall is a document of almost obscene serenity. The company says it provides, on behalf of ICE, around-the-clock access to medical care, legal and family visitation, dietician-approved meals, religious accommodations, recreation, and other services. It says its support includes the “exclusive use” of the facility by ICE, along with security, maintenance, food services, medical care, and legal counsel.

This is how the cage speaks when it speaks for itself.

It does not say hunger. It says meals.

It does not say separation. It says visitation.

It does not say prison. It says facility.

It does not say captive. It says client.

It does not say profit. It says support services.

Against this official language stand the allegations from inside. Human Rights Watch reported that more than 300 women and men detained at Delaney Hall had reportedly been on a labor and hunger strike since May 22, citing medical neglect, lack of sanitation, spoiled food, denial of bond, and coercion to sign legal documents that could result in deportation. New Jersey’s own lawsuit against GEO Group says state health inspectors were permitted only a limited inspection on May 28 and then barred from crucial areas, including the medical unit, sleeping areas, bathing areas, and toileting areas.

Think about that for a moment: the state of New Jersey says its own health inspectors were blocked from seeing the places where detained people sleep, bathe, use the toilet, and seek medical care. The state says detainees and advocates reported metallic-tasting water, denial of medical care or necessary medication, the spread of illnesses such as flu or COVID-19, and even a report of a detainee taken to University Hospital with tuberculosis.

There is no moral universe in which this is an administrative dispute.

There is no decent society in which people must refuse food before anyone believes they are being harmed. Hunger is the last option of the confined. When a person in custody refuses to eat, the body becomes affidavit, courtroom, witness stand, and alarm. The stomach begins to testify because every other testimony has failed.

The Department of Homeland Security has denied allegations of substandard conditions and disputed reports of a hunger strike. GEO’s website offers its own polished assurances about medical access, meals, legal visits, and humane services. A reader is therefore invited to choose between two Americas: the America of the brochure and the America of the blocked inspection; the America of dietician-approved meals and the America where members of Congress say detainees described spoiled food, inadequate care, and living conditions that “shock the conscience.”

This choice is not new. America has always produced documents insisting upon its innocence. The slaveholder had ledgers. The Indian agent had treaties. The segregationist had statutes. The prison contractor has compliance words. Each age believes itself too modern to be brutal in the old ways, and so brutality changes its clothes.

What makes Delaney Hall unbearable is not that it represents a departure from American history. It is that it represents its continuation.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first significant federal law restricting immigration into the United States, barred Chinese laborers on the premise that their arrival endangered the “good order” of certain localities. There it is again, the old phrase in its old costume: good order. The country did not need to say hatred. It said order. It did not need to say race. It said labor. It did not need to say racism. It said law.

During World War II, Ellis Island, now remembered in the national imagination as a gateway of welcome, also functioned as a detention site. After Pearl Harbor, roughly 100 Japanese New Yorkers were rounded up by FBI agents and confined there; as the war progressed, larger numbers of Germans were also detained, and the island continued to hold unauthorized immigrants and others who could not land under U.S. law and could not be deported.

The American camp is never only one place. It is a recurring answer to the question of what the country does with people it hates.

Sometimes the justification is race. Sometimes war. Sometimes labor. Sometimes national security. Sometimes crime. Sometimes the border. The names change. The paperwork changes. The uniforms change. The logic remains with a terrible fidelity: identify a population as dangerous, suspend the ordinary claims of empathy, build a place to hold them, and insist that the holding is not cruelty but necessity.

Donald Trump did not invent that logic. This must be said because history is not served by pretending that fascism arrived one morning as a stranger. Trump inherited a nation already fluent in confinement, already practiced in deportation, already invested in private punishment, already skilled at transforming categories of people into problems to be solved by force. But Trump did what authoritarians do when they recognize a country’s buried appetite: he gave it permission to speak plainly. He made the cruelty proud. He understood that the raid, the masked agent, the detention center, the deportation flight, and the protester struck or gassed outside the gate are not merely policies or incidents. They are lessons.

The lesson is domination.

The lesson is that the state can do this in public.

The lesson is that the state can do this in Newark.

The United States already operates the world’s largest immigration detention system, with beds in roughly 200 facilities, including privately operated detention centers, local jails, juvenile detention centers, field offices, and family residential centers. Delaney Hall belongs to this system, but it also clarifies it, because there is something especially revealing about a billion-dollar cage in a blue state, in a Democratic governor’s New Jersey, in a city of immigrants, during a hunger strike, while officials say they oppose the facility and still move to secure the space around it.

The ACLU of New Jersey said the Delaney Hall contract is valued at $1 billion over fifteen years for 1,000 beds, a deal that would multiply immigration detention capacity in New Jersey fourfold. The arithmetic has the clean cruelty of a spreadsheet: a billion dollars, a thousand beds, fifteen years. One can almost hear the body disappearing into the math.

All while the state helps.

After days of protests outside Delaney Hall, Governor Sherrill ordered New Jersey State Police to take control outside the facility. AP reported that state police set up designated protest zones and vehicle checkpoints, while ICE agents who had been clashing with protesters moved inside the perimeter fence. Sherrill, a Democratic governor, said the situation had become unsafe and that the state needed to “lower the temperature.”

One has to linger over that phrase.

Lower the temperature.

It sounds reasonable. It sounds adult. It sounds like the a governor wishing to avoid catastrophe. But the sentence also performs a deception, because it refuses to ask who lit the fire. Was the temperature raised by the families who came because their loved ones said they were hungry, sick, and neglected? Was it raised by advocates who blocked vehicles because they believed people were disappearing behind the gate? Or was the temperature raised by a federal deportation machine, by ICE, by GEO Group, by the Trump administration, by the billion-dollar contract, by the blocked inspection, by the state’s inability or unwillingness to stop it all before people began starving to be heard?

This is the lie at the heart of Delaney Hall. Not necessarily a lie that can be reduced to one knowingly false sentence, though there are statements that deserve ruthless scrutiny. It is a governing lie, a civic lie, a lie told through barricades and press conferences and police lines. It is the lie that says the state can protect protest by moving it away from the thing being protested. It is the lie that says free speech remains free when confined to a zone where it cannot interrupt the machine. It is the lie that says a Democratic governor can oppose the camp in soundbites while her troopers help secure the conditions under which the camp continues to operate.

A protest zone outside a detention center is not neutral.

It is an instruction.

It tells the detainee: we hear you, but not enough to stop this. It tells ICE: continue. It tells the contractor: the contract lives. It tells the public: order has been restored. It tells the protester: your conscience may exist only where it is least inconvenient.

The proof came in the most devastating sentence of the week. Reuters reported that after state police expanded the restricted area around Delaney Hall and family visits resumed, a DHS spokesperson said operations would “continue as normal.”

With Delaney Hall secure, ICE operations continue as normal.

That sentence should shame everyone who helped make it true.

The governor said she did not want to give ICE a pretext to expand operations in New Jersey. Her defenders might say this was strategy, an attempt to prevent federal escalation, to protect protesters from worse violence, to preserve enough calm for oversight and inspection. That argument is not unserious, and as an honest writer, I must admit as much. But the people inside Delaney Hall were not starving as a theoretical matter. The question is not whether the governor’s fear of ICE escalation was real. The question is what kind of politics results when fear of a greater violence becomes the justification for administering a smaller one.

Because state force did arrive. ABC News reported that New Jersey State Police riot and mounted units faced off with protesters outside Delaney Hall, that tear gas was deployed, and that protesters were pushed back. AP published photographs of law enforcement officers in riot gear standing off against anti-ICE protesters and walking through tear gas chemical irritant during clashes outside the detention center. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka condemned the use of riot gear, flash-bangs, tear gas, and similar tactics against lawfully assembled protesters, warning that such behavior must not be replicated by state or local police.

There are few rituals more American than this: the suffering, then the witness, then the police.

Inside, detained people say they are hungry and sick. Outside, families and neighbors gather so the hunger cannot be buried. Then the state arrives to manage the gathering, and before long the management of the gathering becomes the story. The smoke in the street becomes more legible to the public than the hunger in the cell. The blocked road becomes more urgent than the blocked inspection. The anger outside becomes easier to condemn than the conditions inside.

The state would prefer that we recognize only the disruption.

This, too, is old. America has always been more offended by the interruption of injustice than by injustice itself. The sit-in offended the moderate more than the lunch counter. The march offended the mayor more than segregation. The uprising offended the newspapers more than the police beating that helped ignite it. Again and again, the country’s institutions teach the public to mourn broken windows with more discipline than broken bodies.

This is why Delaney Hall is not only an immigration story. It is a story about visibility, language, and the state’s ancient hunger to decide which suffering counts as violence.

ICE is violence.

Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Not as a slogan detached from fact. ICE is violence because its purpose is to seize, confine, separate, deport, and terrorize human beings whose lives have been made vulnerable by law. Its defenders will speak of procedure, warrants, removals, enforcement priorities, public safety. But every violent system has procedures. Every violent system has clerks. Every violent system has a vocabulary that allows decent people to participate without naming what they are participating in.

The Trump administration understands this and has turned it into theater. The cruelty is not an accidental excess of the policy; the cruelty is communication. It tells immigrants to be afraid. It tells citizens to look away. It tells local officials to comply. It tells protesters that their bodies, too, may be disciplined if they interfere with the spectacle of removal.

But Trumpism does not sustain itself alone. It requires institutions beyond Trump. It requires private corporations willing to turn detention into revenue. It requires courts that move slowly enough for suffering to become moot. It requires police willing to call their obedience neutrality. It requires Democratic officials who understand the horror, condemn the horror, sue over the horror, and still send troopers to make sure the road outside the horror can be cleared.

That is the architecture.

No single brick explains the cage. The cage exists because each brick consents to the weight placed upon it.

The child is the part the architecture cannot fully digest. So is Jennifer Faura. So is every family member who stands outside a facility designed to make love irrelevant. The family insists upon a words older than the state’s understanding. Husband. Father. Wife. Child. Neighbor. Worker. Student. Friend. These are dangerous words because they restore what the system must remove.

Specificity.

Every system of domination depends upon abstraction, and every movement for liberation begins by returning the stolen name. The enslaved were property but were also mothers, carpenters, poets, rebels, children of God. The incarcerated are criminals until they are sons, daughters, survivors, people harmed long before they harmed anyone else. The migrant is illegal until he is the man who works two jobs, until she is the pregnant woman asking for care, until they are the person refusing food because hunger has become the final instrument of speech.

Delaney Hall must be closed, but closure alone will not dismantle what built it. The architecture will look for another address. It will move to another city, another warehouse, another county jail, another contract, another governor’s press conference. It will speak again in the language of order. It will say facility. It will say safety. It will say temporary. It will say humane. It will say normal.

This is why the demand must be larger than inspection, though inspection is necessary. Larger than visitation, though visitation is necessary. Larger than better food, though no human being should ever have to beg for edible food while in government custody. Larger than medical care, though denial of medical care is a form of torture no civilized society can tolerate. The demand must be for an end to the power that makes immigrant detention seem natural in the first place.

The people inside Delaney Hall have refused food because they believe their bodies may be the last evidence they possess. They have made a sermon of hunger. This is a terrible thing to ask of a body. Hunger strips the person down to the oldest human fact: the need to live. To refuse food in captivity is to say that one’s life is already being taken, and that the taking must be made visible.

The state would like that sermon contained.

We cannot allow that to happen.

There is no peace at the gate of a place where people are starving to be believed. There is no order worthy of the name if its first function is to keep the train of degradation running on time. There is no free speech in a protest zone designed to make protest harmless. There is no dignity in a billion-dollar cage.

Someday, perhaps, people will ask what happened in Newark. They will ask how an immigration detention center operated by a private prison company came to sit in a Black and immigrant city under a billion-dollar contract. They will ask how people inside could report spoiled food, medical neglect, unsafe water, disease, retaliation, and blocked access to care while officials argued about the safety of the street outside. They will ask why a Democratic governor who said she wanted the facility closed sent state police to secure the perimeter. They will ask why ICE called continuity normal and why so many people believed that normal was a thing worth defending.

And when they ask, we should not be allowed the comfort of saying we did not know.

We know.

We know there is a place called Delaney Hall. We know it sits in Newark. We know people inside have cried out. We know the state heard them. We know what the state moved to protect first.

Not the people. The operation.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider preordering my novel Everything’s Not Lost or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

A few years ago, I wrote Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood, a book that emerged from a question I had been carrying for years: what does patriarchy actually do to us?

We often talk about patriarchy as though it is merely a system that harms women, and of course it does. It structures inequity, violence, and exclusion in ways that have shaped societies for centuries. But what interested me while writing the book was the exploration of how patriarchy also leaves deep wounds on the people it trains to uphold it. It teaches boys that vulnerability is weakness, that care is feminine, that dominance is strength, that intimacy must be earned through performance rather than honesty. It narrows the emotional vocabulary available to men and then punishes them for being unable to express what they feel.

What I tried to explore in that book, through essays, poetry, reporting, and personal reflection, was not merely how patriarchy operates in the world around us, but how it operates within us. How it shapes our relationships, our friendships, our understanding of love, our ideas about success, and even our capacity to understand ourselves.

But writing a book about these questions does not place you beyond them.

In many ways, the book was less a declaration than a document of an ongoing struggle. It was written by a man trying to make sense of the lessons he inherited and the damage some of those lessons caused, both to himself and, at times, to others. I have been wrong in my life. I have seen the world too narrowly. I have carried assumptions that needed to be challenged and behaviors that needed to change. The work of writing has often been less about teaching than it has been about giving myself a place to interrogate who I am and who I hope to become.

That is part of why I recently joined The New York Times for a conversation about what many people are calling a crisis of masculinity.

I am increasingly convinced that many of our conversations about men begin in the wrong place. We ask why men are lonely, angry, withdrawn, or susceptible to the promises of the manosphere without first asking what conditions produced that loneliness, that anger, that hunger for belonging. We talk about outcomes while avoiding the architecture that helped create them.

The conversation touches on many of those questions, but it is also, for me, a continuation of the same inquiry that led to Patriarchy Blues years ago. How do we become better men? How do we resist the versions of masculinity that require domination, emotional isolation, or certainty at all costs? How do we build lives rooted in care, accountability, and genuine connection?

I do not claim to have answers. In fact, I distrust anyone who approaches these questions with too much certainty.

What I have is curiosity, a willingness to examine my own contradictions, and a belief that growth requires honesty before it requires expertise.

A few options to tune into the conversation in these ways:

Read: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/opinion/young-men-masculinity-crisis.html

Watch:

Listen:

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider preordering my novel Everything’s Not Lost or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

I have to be honest, I’ve been struggling lately in the way I imagine many of you have been struggling, which is to say I have been waking each morning into the unbearable mathematics of human suffering. Too many bodies beneath too much rubble. Too many people pushing their lives in shopping carts through cities that no longer know how to look them in the eye. Too many prayers sitting unanswered in hospital rooms and shelters and eviction courts and subway stations at three in the morning. Some days it feels like the whole world is asking the human spirit to bench press grief until its arms give out.

But I’m going to come back to that in a second because there is an update I need to provide first.

*****

For the eighth year in a row, we organized our Women’s History Month mutual aid effort to support women living in shelters, and before anything else I want to thank everyone who donated, shared the fundraiser, or simply allowed themselves to care in a time that increasingly punishes people for feeling too much. Together, we raised over $13,000. Below are photos of some of the hygiene products, food, clothing, and other essentials purchased and distributed through this effort.

I apologize for taking so long to share this update. The truth is that when the fundraiser ended, I found myself sitting with a sadness I could not immediately explain.

Not because people failed to show up. People did show up. Generously. Tenderly. But because we did not reach our goal of $20,000, and because after the money was distributed it vanished almost instantly into the ordinary costs of survival. Hygiene products. Baby formula. Boots. Food. I remember looking at our bank account afterward and thinking about how frightening it is that in America the feeling of being human can disappear over something as small as shampoo. How quickly a life can begin unraveling because somebody cannot afford to remain clean, remain fed, remain housed, remain safe.

I think what saddened me was not simply that the need was large. I have known the need was large for years. I’ve understood this sort of need since I was a boy watching my mother boil water on the stove so I could have a warm bath. I think what saddened me was realizing how quickly suffering absorbs generosity in this country.

You gather thousands of dollars and within days it is gone because the wound itself is so enormous.

And lately the wound seems to be everywhere.

You open your phone and watch children carried from collapsed buildings overseas while commentators debate whether their deaths are politically inconvenient. You walk through New York City and pass men sleeping beneath scaffolding while luxury towers rise above them like monuments erected to the worship of indifference. You see a woman on the subway carrying everything she owns in garbage bags, stopping every few minutes to readjust the weight of them on her shoulder as though personhood itself has become something physically heavy to carry in this country. You stand in line at a pharmacy and overhear someone quietly asking which prescription they can afford to leave behind.

And after a while, if you are not careful, the sheer volume of suffering begins to alter your relationship to feeling itself.

I think many people are living with this now. Not hopelessness exactly. Something perhaps more dangerous. A slow emotional starvation. We are witnessing so much catastrophe at once that people are beginning to lose faith in the usefulness of tenderness. Climate collapse. Fascism. Loneliness. War. Poverty. Economic terror. Spiritual exhaustion. Human suffering arrives now in such relentless quantities that many people have unconsciously started training themselves not to feel too deeply because to feel everything would shatter them.

There are days lately when I can feel this happening inside myself.

There are days when I walk home through this city and feel something in me trying to retreat from the world emotionally because remaining open to this much pain begins to feel unbearable after a while. I think that is the part people rarely confess publicly.

Caring hurts. Paying attention hurts.

Which is why I understand exactly why people choose numbness. Numbness can feel like survival. But I also think numbness is what these systems are counting on.

Cruel societies do not survive merely because of wealth or violence. They survive because ordinary people eventually begin believing another person’s suffering is not their concern. They survive because exhaustion convinces people that empathy is naïve. They survive because human beings become so overwhelmed by the scale of pain surrounding them that they stop believing small acts of care matter at all.

And yet if you look honestly at how most people survive difficult periods in their lives, it is almost never institutions that save them first.

It is another person.

Someone pays for groceries, someone sends money for medication, someone offers a couch, someone calls at the right moment, someone sends a few dollars at the very moment someone else was praying someone would help.

I think often now about what this era is doing to the human spirit. We are living in a culture that rewards detachment because detachment is profitable. Everything encourages us not to look too closely. Not to feel too deeply. Not to become too burdened by the suffering of strangers. Human beings are increasingly taught to experience tragedy as spectators instead of participants in one another’s lives. And once suffering becomes ordinary enough, once abandonment begins feeling natural enough, almost any cruelty becomes possible.

That frightens me more than the cruelty itself sometimes.

Because I think the greatest crisis facing this country is no longer merely political. I think it is a crisis of feeling. A crisis of imagination. A crisis of responsibility. We are losing the ability to believe we belong to one another.

And maybe that is why this work continues to matter to me.

I don’t believe mutual aid alone can save the world. It cannot. These fundraisers will not end homelessness or violence or poverty. But I do believe there is something sacred in refusing to surrender entirely to indifference. I believe there is something radical in deciding another person’s suffering is your concern even when the world insists it should not be. I believe there is something profoundly human in trying to lessen the burden another person carries through this life, even slightly.

Maybe that is what I have been trying to build all these years through my books, my speaking engagements, my social media posts, all of it. Not a brand. Not an audience. A reminder. A reminder that people do not survive alone. A reminder that consciousness without tenderness eventually curdles into performance. A reminder that love is not merely a feeling but a form of labor. A form of protection. Sometimes even a form of resistance.

And maybe that reminder is more to me than any of you reading this.

Because when it’s all said and done, I think the question is ultimately what kind of people we will allow suffering to turn us into.

Anyway, thank you all for continuing to show up in the ways that you do. For sharing. For donating. For reading the books. For allowing me space inside your attention spans during a time where everyone is overwhelmed and exhausted and fighting to hold onto their humanity. I do not take lightly the fact that so many of you continue walking beside me through these questions, these efforts, and these attempts to make something gentler out of a world that often feels committed to the opposite.

In the coming weeks, we will begin fundraising again for our annual Juneteenth mutual aid effort (feel free to get a jump on that if you like) supporting one hundred unhoused people throughout New York City, as we have done for the past several years. And I hope some of you will continue walking with us in this work. I’ll also be writing more short stories and cultural and political essays with greater frequency, as I did in the past, now that some of my bandwidth has opened up. Be on the lookout for those.

Photos from our donation this year:

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider preordering my novel Everything’s Not Lost or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

***Trigger warning: Essay contains conversation around gun violence.***

***Spoiler warning also for those who haven’t seen the film.***

For the last month or so, friends kept asking me whether I had seen The Drama. They asked the way people ask about a car wreck they survived, or a confession they have not yet recovered from. Eager to discuss it, but strangely unwilling to tell me why. I assumed, at first, that it was because the film possessed all the ingredients of something I would naturally enjoy on the surface: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, A24, and the familiar architecture of a romantic comedy dressed in expensive sadness and beautiful lighting. It seemed assembled, almost scientifically, to be my type of movie.

Still, life has a way of delaying even the things meant for us. My schedule kept me from seeing it in theaters, and by the time I finally sat down to watch it at home, the conversation surrounding the film had already hardened into discourse—to which I’m late.

But within minutes of watching it, I understood why so many people had insisted I see it. Because the questions at the center of the film are the very questions that have animated much of my work as a writer. And, as expected, I was fascinated immediately by the dynamics between the characters, though not for the reasons many might expect.

The Drama is ultimately a film about gun violence, though it does not begin as one, nor market itself as such (purposely). It begins as a film about intimacy, about the stories people tell in order to be loved, about the fantasy that romance is the place where we become fully known. Emma and Charlie are days away from marriage. They are preparing to enter that terrifying arrangement where two people promise not only to love who the other person is, but to keep loving them as they are revealed.

Then comes the dinner.

What should be another ordinary ritual on the road to a wedding—a meal tasting, a few glasses of wine, friends gathered around—becomes the room where everyone’s morality is placed on trial. Rachel, the maid of honor, and wife of Charlie’s friend, Mike, proposes that each of them confess the worst thing they have ever done. It is the kind of game people play when they believe that naming a sin proves they have already survived it.

Mike admits to using a past girlfriend as a shield against a dog. Rachel follows with a story so rotten it should curdle the air: as a child, she locked a mentally disabled boy in a closet inside an abandoned RV and left him there. Charlie confesses that he bullied a boy so viciously that his family moved away.

These are not harmless admissions. They are not eccentric blemishes from otherwise decent people. They are acts of cowardice, cruelty, and harm. They have victims attached to them. Bodies attached to them. Memories attached to them.

Then Emma speaks.

She tells them that when she was fifteen, she was lonely, bullied, isolated, and friendless, and so she planned and nearly carried out a school shooting. She practiced with her father’s rifle. She moved close enough to violence that the thought itself became a permanent wound in the story of who she was. But she did not do it.

That distinction matters.

It does not erase the horror of what she planned. It does not make the fantasy innocent. It does not ask anyone to pretend that the idea itself was not terrifying. But it matters that she stopped. It matters that the threshold was not crossed. It matters that the girl who imagined catastrophe did not become the author of one. Instead she actually became an advocate against such atrocities.

And still, the room changes—as do her relationships to everyone there—including her husband-to-be.

The people around Emma do not merely hear what she almost did. They begin to transform her into what they fear she could have been. The woman before them disappears, and in her place they construct a symbol: danger, contamination, deception, monstrosity. Suddenly, every memory must be reexamined. Every tenderness becomes suspect. Every intimacy is dragged backward through the revelation and made unstable.

That is when the film begins doing its most unsettling work. The real drama is not only Emma’s confession. It is the moral behavior of everyone who receives it.

Charlie’s reaction is the most intimate failure. He loves Emma, or believes he does, but he has loved her partly as a story he could understand. Once the story changes, his love begins to panic. Robert Pattinson plays Charlie’s unraveling as a kind of wounded self-absorption. His horror is understandable, but it also becomes narcissistic. He begins to behave as though Emma’s past is something that has happened primarily to him.

He cannot hold both truths at once: that Emma once imagined something horrific, and that Emma also became someone who did not do it. Someone who lived beyond it. Someone who worked to become otherwise.

The film is sharpest when it allows that discomfort to sit without resolving it too quickly. Charlie is not wrong to be shaken. But being shaken is not the same as being wise. His fear removes almost all moral clarity. In fact, the more frightened he becomes, the less curious he is about the child Emma once was. He is less interested in the conditions that produced her despair than in the instability this revelation creates inside the fantasy of the woman he thought he was marrying.

Mike’s presence is quieter but no less revealing. His own confession does not haunt the room for long. Neither does Charlie’s. Neither, in any meaningful way, does Rachel’s. All three have confessed to things they actually did. Yet Emma’s unrealized violence becomes the sin that consumes them all.

This asymmetry is the film’s deepest provocation.

Their harms are treated as chapters. Emma’s almost-harm is treated as destiny.

And then there is the larger and consistent issue of Rachel.

Rachel is, to me, the film’s most quietly terrifying character because she embodies a form of moral superiority so common in American life that many people mistake it for righteousness. She does not merely condemn Emma. She needs Emma to remain condemned.

Rachel’s own act is heinous. Locking a disabled child away and abandoning him is not a childish mistake in the sentimental sense. It is cruelty. It is violence. It should trouble the room. It should trouble her. It should trouble us as viewers. But Rachel has already found a way to narrate her cruelty as something that belongs safely to the past, something that does not permanently define her.

Emma is granted no such mercy. This is the moral arithmetic the film exposes: some people are allowed to have pasts, while others are made into them.

Rachel’s outrage has context. Her life has been touched by gun violence, having a cousin who is wheelchair bound because of a shooting. That pain is real. The film does not ask us to dismiss it, nor should we. But sometimes people use their wounds to justify denying humanity to someone else.

Rachel cannot see Emma’s transformation because Rachel is too invested in Emma’s damnation. Emma must remain irredeemable so Rachel can remain righteous.

This is one of the film’s most piercing observations about a particular kind of white womanhood: not white womanhood as mere identity, but as performance, as social position, as moral theater. Rachel represents the woman fluent in the language of care while remaining dependent upon the preservation of her own innocence. The woman who can commit harm and still be read as fragile. The woman whose tears can reorganize a room. The woman whose cruelty arrives dressed as concern.

Rachel’s mental and emotional violence against Emma is fine because it is respectable.

Emma’s pain is not.

And race cannot be ignored here. Emma is a Black woman whose adolescence is not incidental to the story. She was a Black girl at fifteen, bullied and isolated, growing up in a country that rarely allows Black children the full protection of childhood. Their anger is adultified. Their fear is criminalized. Their sadness is misread as attitude. Their collapse is interpreted as threat long before it is recognized as suffering.

Had Emma been white, I suspect many viewers would reach more quickly for the language of tragedy. They would ask who failed her. What signs were missed. What loneliness had swallowed her so completely. What cruelty had gathered around a child until violence began to appear, in her imagination, like a language.

But because Emma is Black, another reflex enters the room. Her pain is more easily turned into danger. Her despair is more easily made monstrous. Her teenage brokenness is more easily treated as proof of an essential defect.

This does not absolve Emma. It contextualizes her. And there is a difference between context and excuse.

America hates context because it implicates more than the individual. It implicates the school. The family. The internet. The community. The gun. The nation. It implicates every structure that leaves young people alone with humiliation and then pretends to be shocked when humiliation begins searching for a weapon.

Emma is a victim, too. Not in a way that erases the terror of what she planned. Not in a way that asks us to sentimentalize her. But she is a victim of a country that has normalized violence so completely that children breathe it before they can name it. We teach young people active-shooter drills before we teach them how to metabolize grief. We broadcast death until it becomes weather. We turn domination into politics, humiliation into entertainment, cruelty into sport. We hand children a culture saturated with guns, grievance, spectacle, and despair, then act bewildered when some of them begin to confuse destruction with agency.

That is the wound at the center of The Drama. Emma does not emerge from nowhere. No child does. The film presents her as hurt and alienated, but it also presents something more important: she is reachable. The worst thing inside her does not become the only thing inside her. The violent thought does not become the totality of her life.

She changes.

And how does that change begin?

Not through punishment.

Not through shame.

Not through Rachel’s condemnation.

Not through Charlie’s fear.

She changes because people intervene.

A boy befriends her in high school. Then others do. Community enters the room where loneliness had been whispering. Human connection interrupts the fantasy of destruction. And that is the part of the film that reached me most deeply because it speaks directly to the reason I write books for young people.

Because I believe in intervention.

The sort of interventions that happen invisibly every day between human beings. A teacher noticing that a student has stopped speaking. A friend sitting beside the person everyone else avoids. A mentor recognizing rage as grief before the world labels it danger. A novel reaching a teenager at the precise moment they are beginning to disappear inside themselves.

A single moment can stand between a person and the abyss.

The totality of a person is not their worst thought. Not their worst impulse. Not the self they nearly became when they were lonely, humiliated, untreated, unseen, and spiritually cornered. We are responsible for what we do, yes. Accountability matters. But responsibility should not require us to pretend that human beings are frozen forever at the site of their greatest failure.

Emma’s life after fifteen matters. Who she became matters. Her friendships matter. Her refusal to become the thing she once imagined matters. Her transformation is not a decorative detail in the story. It is the story. It is the evidence that intervention can work. It is the evidence that a child who had destruction planted inside her spirit did not have to remain loyal to that destruction forever.

And this is where Rachel’s moral superiority becomes not only cruel, but dangerous. Because if Rachel’s worldview wins, then growth means nothing. Repair means nothing. Transformation means nothing. A person can spend years becoming better and still be dragged back, endlessly, to the worst version of themselves.

That is not justice.

That is vengeance dressed in moral language.

We live in a culture increasingly fluent in condemnation and increasingly illiterate in mercy. We know how to identify harm. We do not always know how to imagine what comes after it. We know how to exile. We do not know how to restore. We know how to say, “That was wrong,” which is necessary. But too often we stop there, as though naming wrongness completes the moral task.

It does not.

The harder question is what we do with the person who has done wrong, or nearly done wrong, or imagined wrong, and then lived long enough to become ashamed, accountable, changed.

The answer cannot be simple forgiveness. Forgiveness cannot be demanded. Forgiveness cannot be performed on behalf of victims. Forgiveness cannot become another way of rushing past harm because discomfort makes us impatient.

But neither can the answer be permanent disposability.

There must be some moral language between absolution and damnation. Some place where accountability and transformation can stand in the same room. Some way of saying: what you almost did was horrifying, and the fact that you did not do it matters. Who you were at fifteen matters, and who you became afterward matters too. The danger was real, but so is the distance you traveled from it.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider preordering my novel Everything’s Not Lost or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe inaccess, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

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I wrote the poem below because I have grown tired of being summoned.

There is, now, a peculiar demand placed upon the human voice. It is no longer enough to feel, or to witness, or even to understand. Trump, Iran, the economy, climate disasters, and so on. One must respond. Immediately. Publicly. Endlessly. The world has mistaken reaction for revelation, and in doing so, has begun to starve itself of anything resembling truth.

And for a Black writer, this demand is not new. It is only newly dressed. This country has always required something of our mouths, something of our bodies. It has asked us, again and again, to produce. To perform. To translate our pain into something consumable. To make a spectacle of survival and call it contribution. There is a long history here, one that hums beneath every expectation placed upon so many of us, that insists our voices exist not as vessels of truth, but as sources of content.

I have been told, in ways both subtle and crude, that to exist as a writer is to produce. That silence is negligence. That to wait is to fall behind. But I have learned that there is a violence in this insistence, a soft but unrelenting coercion that asks not for your voice, but for its constant availability. And availability is not the same as honesty.

What I know, and what I am still learning, is that the voice is not a faucet. It does not turn on because it is needed, or because it is expected, or because there is an audience waiting with open hands and short attention spans. The voice is something far more fragile, and far more dangerous than that. It requires time. It requires stillness. It requires a kind of courage that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with refusal.

I wrote this poem because I wanted to mark that refusal.

Not as rebellion for its own sake, but as a necessary condition for a better future. Because if I speak before I have listened, if I offer language before it has earned its shape, then I am not adding to the world. I am merely echoing it. And the world, as it stands, has no shortage of echoes.

Become unusable.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider preordering my novel Everything’s Not Lost or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe inaccess, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

I’m going to keep this short.

For the past eight years, I’ve organized mutual aid efforts that are about one simple thing, getting money directly to people who need it, when they need it. A lot of you have been part of that with me. Together, we’ve raised a few million dollars. And still, lately, the ground is shifting in a way that makes everything more urgent.

Over the last few months, I’ve been on the phone with a number of the shelters we’ve partnered with over the years. And everyone has the same tone. The kind where you can hear the pause before they answer my typical question of, “How are things right now?” Across the board, they’ve all said some version of the same thing. Since Trump took office, they’ve seen funding drop. In some cases, by as much as 25%.

That is a heartbreaking number. It means fewer beds. It means staff stretched thinner. It means calls that used to end with “come in” now ending with “we’re full.” It means someone being told there is no help waiting for them.

This is the context for why I do this every year during Women’s History Month, raising money specifically for women’s shelters. I didn’t start it on time this year. There’s been so much happening that it felt, for a moment, like one more ask might just disappear into everything else people are holding. But the reality is, the need didn’t slow down. It never does.

So I’m starting it now. Consider this extending Women’s History Month.

We are raising $20,000. The ask is three dollars.

There are over 95,000 of you subscribed here. About 30,000 typically open my emails. If even 30% of you give three dollars, we can support two shelters with hygiene products, food, and clothing.

What your three dollars becomes is not abstract. It becomes the daily basics for these women that many of us take for granted.

I keep thinking about those conversations, about how consistent they’ve been, how none of them felt like outliers. Just people doing their best with less than they need.

If you’ve ever trusted me when I say something matters, I’m asking you to act on that now.

Start with three.

Donate to Women In Need

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Time is the rarest gift we are given, and the only one we are trained not to notice as it disappears. We speak of it casually, as if it belongs to us, as if it can be managed, saved, made more efficient, as if it is not, in fact, the substance of our lives. But time does not bend to intention. It yields to structure.

And if I am honest about the structure of my own life, the truth is both simple and unbearable.

I was thinking about time recently while on a trip to Los Angeles with my godbrother. He lives in Texas. I live in New York City. Somewhere along the way, we learned to call that distance normal. We learned to call absence adulthood. We have both been living the lives we were told to build, working, moving, accomplishing, always in motion and rarely in the same place.

He was sitting across from me, close enough that I could see what time had changed since the last time I had been this near. Not in any grand way, not in the kind of change that announces itself, but in the faint places. Along his chin, where the hair had begun to gray in small, deliberate patches. At his temples, where the dark had given way, not all at once, but steadily, as if time had been returning to claim something it had left behind. I noticed it before I meant to. The way you notice something you cannot unknow. And once I saw it, I could not stop seeing it.

It unsettled me, not because of what it said about him, but because of what it said about us. About how long it had been since I had really looked at him. Not through a screen, not in passing, not in the brief and hurried exchanges we call staying in touch, but like this, in stillness, with nothing between us but the space we had chosen to share. The gray had not arrived suddenly. It had come slowly, over days I had not witnessed, across months I had not been present for, inside a life I was supposed to be a part of.

And sitting there, I realized that what I was seeing was not just age. It was time I had not lived with him.

Somewhere in the middle of that realization, I began to do the math, not as an exercise but as a kind of reckoning. If we see each other twice a year, as we typically do, and if each visit lasts four days, that is eight days a year. From now until eighty, if we are fortunate enough to reach it, that is three hundred and thirty six days. Less than a single year of my remaining life spent in the physical presence of someone I love.

It is a number that resists comprehension until you allow it to settle into the body. It holds the conversations we will not have, the ordinary afternoons that will never arrive, the slow and necessary work of knowing another person that is supposed to make a life feel shared. Sitting there with him, I understood that this distance was not accidental. It was not simply the byproduct of growing older. It was the result of how our lives have been arranged, how our time has been claimed, how our attention has been directed away from one another and toward something else entirely.

What unsettled me most was not the smallness of that number, but how familiar it felt. Because this is not simply a matter of me and him. It is a pattern so ordinary we have stopped recognizing it as a pattern at all. It is the friend you promise to see more often and somehow never do. It is the parent whose voice becomes something you hear mostly through a device. It is the child who grows in increments you witness only in photographs. It is the partner you share a home with but not a day, passing each other in the narrow hours between obligation and exhaustion, speaking in logistics instead of love.

We have been taught to accept this thinning of our lives as the price of being adults, as though distance were inevitable and not arranged, as though absence were natural and not produced. We say we are busy, and what we mean is that our time no longer belongs to us. We say we are tired, and what we mean is that something has taken more from us than we ever intended to give. The language softens the reality, but the reality remains. The people we love are reduced to appointments. Presence becomes something scheduled, negotiated, postponed.

And the hours of our lives, the very substance of what it means to live, are spent elsewhere, in service of demands we did not fully choose but have come to obey.

If this were only my story, it might be easier to dismiss. But it is not. It is everywhere, visible in the grief of missed moments and the practiced acceptance of lives lived at a distance from what matters most. We feel it, even when we cannot name it. We carry it, even when we pretend not to notice. And once you begin to see it, once you allow yourself to ask why so much of your life has been given over to everything except the people and the presence you claim to value, the question that emerges is not only personal. It is structural. It is societal.

Your time was taken—shaped, measured, and accounted for long before you were ever asked what you believed a life should be.

This is not new. It is only more refined. There has always been a relationship between power and the control of human time, between wealth and the ability to decide how other people live their days. What has changed is not the impulse, but the method. Where control was once visible, it is now ambient. Where it once required force, it now requires belief. We have inherited a system that has learned how to extract not only labor, but attention, not only effort, but identity. And because it no longer announces itself as domination, we have learned to call it normal.

This recognition returned to me again, in a different place, under a different kind of weight. I was in Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book, moving through a city that still carries the memory of what it has endured. Not memory as something distant, but memory as something unsettled, close to the surface.

We passed the street now named for Heather Heyer, and I found myself slowing without quite deciding to. She was twenty-two years old when she was killed, standing with others who had gathered to oppose white supremacists who had come to the city to defend a monument to the Confederacy. A car was driven into a crowd of those protestors. Her life ended there, in the middle of a street that had become, for a moment, a line between what this country has been and what it insists on becoming.

Her name remains. Fixed to the street. Offered as a marker, a memory, a gesture toward acknowledgment.

And yet, as I stood there, I watched people move through that space with a kind of practiced ease. They paused, some of them, to take a photograph. They looked, briefly, as one does when encountering something one knows is important. And then they continued on, returning to the rhythm of their day, as though the meaning of that place could be absorbed in a glance.

It was not indifference I saw, but something more difficult to name. A distance that did not feel chosen so much as learned. As though we have been taught how long to linger in the presence of tragedy, and how quickly to move beyond it.

And I began to wonder what it means to name a place after a life if we are not prepared to give that life any of our time. Because not enough time has passed for what happened there to become history in any meaningful sense. Not enough time has passed for the forces that produced it to have disappeared. And yet we move as though it has. We move as though remembrance requires only recognition, not responsibility.

It is a peculiar thing, to stand in a place where someone stood and refused, where someone believed that their presence mattered enough to risk, and to feel how quickly the world resumes its motion. How efficiently it returns to its routines. How little interruption it allows.

And I understood then that this, too, is part of the structure. Not only the taking of our time, but the shaping of how we remember, how we respond, how long we are permitted to feel before we are expected to move on. Because to truly honor a life like hers would require more than acknowledgment. It would require time. It would require attention. It would require a willingness to remain present in a way that disrupts the very flow we have been taught to maintain.

But interruption is costly in a world that depends on our constant movement.

And so we keep moving.

We are told, very early, that to work is to live. That to build is to become. That if we give ourselves over to effort, discipline, and sacrifice, we will one day arrive at a place where life finally belongs to us. But the conditions under which we are asked to give ourselves away are not neutral. They are engineered. And the more faithfully you follow their instructions, the less of your life you seem to possess.

This is the gentle lie we inherit. Work hard. Build something. Earn your freedom. It sounds reasonable because it contains just enough truth to be believed. But if you measure your life not in achievements but in presence, the promise begins to collapse. The harder we work, the less time we seem to have. The more we achieve, the further we drift from the very things we were told we were working for. We spend our lives moving toward a life we never quite arrive at.

What is being extracted from us is not simply labor. It is time, yes, but also attention. It is the capacity to be present. It is the emotional and intellectual energy required to sustain connection. Our days are scheduled before we can inhabit them. Our attention is captured and redirected in ways we barely perceive. Our emotions are engaged, provoked, and exhausted by forces that profit from our engagement but remain indifferent to our well-being.

Work consumes the day. Screens consume the night. And exhaustion consumes what remains. The tragedy is not that we are tired. It is that we have built a world in which exhaustion is the price of participation, and called that freedom.

In such a world, we are not merely workers. We are resources. Our lives are not simply lived; they are harvested. Our time cultivated. Our attention managed. Our energy extracted in steady, predictable yields.

We like to imagine that we are free because no one is standing over us, but control has evolved. It no longer requires spectacle. It requires systems. The farmer does not chase the field. The farmer studies it, organizes it, optimizes its output. What we call modern life increasingly resembles this logic. Our habits are tracked. Our behaviors predicted. Our desires shaped in advance. We are not outside this system. We are inside it, and in many ways, we are it.

This system does not merely benefit from your absence. It requires it.

A system that requires you to spend the majority of your life away from the people you love is not a neutral system. It is a system that has already decided what your life is worth, and it has decided that you are worth more as output than as a human being.

There are those for whom your life is valuable only once it has been converted into output. For whom your exhaustion is not tragedy, but efficiency. For whom the distance between you and the people you love is not unfortunate, but useful. They do not need your presence. They require only your production. The field does not need to be loved. It needs to produce.

The cost of this arrangement is not abstract. It is visible in the lives we are living and, more painfully, in the lives we are not. It is in the birthdays missed and the calls postponed. It is in the conversations that never deepen because there is no time for depth. It is in the slow fading of relationships that once defined us. My godbrother’s gray hair did not arrive all at once. It arrived in the days that belonged to something else.

Families become occasions. Friendships become threads. Joy becomes something you schedule, if you can find the time.

And still, we participate. Not because we do not care, but because we have been taught to equate our worth with our output. To rest feels like failure. To pause feels like risk. We are told that to fall behind is to disappear, and so we run, often without asking who set the pace.

This is not a failure of character. It is a condition of living within a system that depends on our compliance. A system that does not require our hatred, only our belief.

We have mistaken being allowed to survive for being allowed to live.

What we are living through is not merely economic. It is spiritual. It asks what a life is for.

What is a life if it is spent preparing to live. What is success if it leaves you with no time to recognize it. What is the value of accomplishment if it costs you the presence of those who would have given it meaning.

These are not abstract questions. They are the questions that sat with me in Los Angeles, in the quiet space between recognition and refusal, as I looked at my godbrother and understood how little time we actually have.

And yet, to see the structure is to loosen its hold.

This does not require a grand rebellion. It asks for something more difficult. It asks for attention. For honesty. For the courage to reorder our lives, even in small ways, around what we claim to love.

To choose presence where we have been trained to choose productivity.
To insist on connection where we have been taught to accept distance.
To refuse, even imperfectly, to measure our lives only by what we produce.

Because we do not have as much time as we think. The number will always be smaller. The days will always be fewer. And no system, no matter how powerful, can return to you what it has already taken.

We have been taught to spend our lives as though they were currency, as though time were something to be exchanged, invested, optimized. But time is not money. It does not accumulate. It does not replenish. It does not forgive.

And one day, without announcement, you will run out of it.

Not in some distant, abstract way, but in the most ordinary moment. A conversation you did not have. A visit you postponed. A person you loved whom you assumed would still be there when you finally had the time.

And what will remain then is not what you built, or what you earned, or what you managed to produce. What will remain is what you were present for. What you held onto. Who you chose, and who you allowed yourself to be chosen by.

Everything else will reveal itself for what it always was.

Not your life.

Just what it cost you.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider preordering my novel Everything’s Not Lost or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

Today, my picture book, Planting Hope enters the world.

The title itself was very intentional to say plainly. Because in a moment when so much feels uncertain, releasing a book about hope doesn’t feel sentimental. It feels necessary.

Planting Hope is a picture book about a young boy named Henry who learns to garden alongside his mother. He struggles at first. His plant does not grow the way he wants it to. He watches others succeed and begins to doubt himself. His mother teaches him that plants need more than water and sunlight. They need patience. They need care. They need belief in growth before it’s visible.

When his mother becomes ill and her own future feels uncertain, that lesson of care becomes something deeper. The garden becomes a space where Henry learns that hope is not pretending everything is fine. Hope is choosing to tend to what you love even when outcomes are unclear.

This is a story about family, community, and resilience. While it’s for children, I also believe it’s for the adults reading beside them. It’s about how growth happens slowly. About how healing takes time. About how love is something we practice.

And it’s available today. You can order here.

Buy Planting Hope

If you believe children deserve stories that center emotional honesty and tenderness, I hope you will buy Planting Hope now. Gift it. Bring it into classrooms. Request it at your local library. Early support shapes how far a book travels. It influences how many copies are printed, where it is placed in stores, and how visible it remains in the weeks ahead.

You can also consider donating a copy to The Lisa Libraries, which distributes books to hospitals, schools, and other spaces for children:

The Lisa Libraries
Ellen Luksberg, Executive Director
77 Cornell Street, Room 109
Kingston, NY 12401

But that’s not all folks!!!

I have another story coming that continues this conversation about hope in a different register.

Everything’s Not Lost is a young adult novel about Ella Washington, a sixteen year old Black girl living with bipolar disorder who is trying to find her footing after the unexpected death of her sister. The world around her continues moving. School expectations continue. Relationships continue. But internally she feels suspended between memory and forward motion.

The novel follows Ella as she navigates grief, survivor’s guilt, complicated friendships, family strain, and the difficult work of allowing community to support her. It’s about the courage required to remain present in your life when pain makes retreat feel easier. The novel doesn’t offer easy healing. It offers honest healing.

It’s available now for preorder here.

Preorder Everything's Not Lost

If Planting Hope teaches children how to nurture something fragile, Everything’s Not Lost asks what it takes to rise when you feel submerged.

Preorders for this novel matter deeply. Preorders influence print runs, marketing support, bookstore placement, and long term visibility. They tell publishers and retailers that a story centered on grief, mental health, community, and resilience deserves investment and space.

If you want stories about healing to reach the young people who need them, the most direct way to make that happen is to support them early.

So today I am asking two things. Buy Planting Hope. Celebrate its release. Help it travel. And preorder Everything’s Not Lost. Help ensure it arrives with the strength and visibility it deserves.

Preorder Everything's Not Lost

Buy Planting Hope

Hope is not passive.

It grows because we choose to tend it.

The observer came on a weekday morning, when the sky was an unambitious gray and the school groups had yet to overtake the space. The entrance gate accepted him the way it accepted everyone else, with its polite click and its little lie of welcome, as though the place beyond did not keep anything, as though it only displayed.

He moved through the zoo with no haste. People mistake slowness for leisure, for retirement, for a life with nothing urgent left to do. They did not see the kind of attention that tightened his stillness, the way a hand can appear relaxed while holding a blade.

The first thing he noticed was the map. Not the animals, not even the smell of warm hay and wet soil, but the painted pathways that pretended to be choices. Colored lines. Small icons. The map took what lived and turned it into destinations. Here for lions. Here for gorillas. Here for “North American Plains,” as if plains were a neighborhood you could stroll through between popcorn and a gift shop.

He watched families look at the map with the softness of trust. He watched parents steer strollers toward the promise of something big. He watched teenagers drift in packs, loose-limbed, half bored, half hungry for a moment worth a social media post. He watched the zoo keepers, too, and understood them at once. Their bodies carried the practiced authority of people who are always near a door with a key. Their faces carried the calm of those who learn to stand beside suffering without wearing it.

He walked until the air changed.

The buffalo enclosure did not announce itself with grandeur. It did not need to. The land around it was arranged to feel like a memory that could be purchased: a stretch of dirt, a scatter of rock, a fence meant to look less like a fence. The painted sign offered a name, offered numbers, offered assurances. A species. A weight range. A lifespan. Information in tidy blocks, as if facts could replace the intimacy of encounter.

The animal lay down in a depression of earth as though it had been poured there. Its body was so vast it made the enclosure look minuscule, like a toy pen meant for a dog. The buffalo’s back rose and fell slowly, with that patient labor of lungs that had no reason to rush. Its fur held the season. Its hide held weather.

It was not a creature built for a rectangle.

The observer watched the buffalo without blinking for a long time. He watched the way the animal’s ear twitched, once, at a sound too distant for most humans to register. He watched the brief quiver of skin over shoulder muscle, the small tightening under the ribs. He watched the eyes, not searching for expression but taking inventory. The buffalo looked out at the world with a steadiness that did not beg for interpretation.

A man beside him whispered to a child, “That’s a big one,” and the child said, “Is it sad?” and the father laughed like the idea of sadness was a silly question.

The observer did not look at them. He did not judge them. He stepped closer to the barrier.

The barrier was meant to feel humane. That was the word people used. Humane. It was high enough to prevent impulse, transparent enough to pretend it was not there. Still, it functioned like a wall. It declared: you belong here. It declared: it belongs there. And as always, the declaration was made by the side holding the keys.

He placed his palm on the barrier.

The surface was cool. Smooth. Clean in the way public surfaces are clean, wiped often, touched constantly, still never truly unowned. He noticed his pulse in his wrist and was mildly annoyed by it. His hand stayed there longer than a casual touch would allow. He held it as if listening. His fingers spread slightly, measuring without tools.

His other hand hovered near the opening where visitors sometimes reached through to throw a piece of apple or a handful of pellets. The zoo discouraged it. The zoo, like every institution, discouraged the kind of intimacy it could not control.

He reached anyway.

It was a small movement, easy to miss. A slow extension of the arm, a measured bend at the waist. His fingertips made contact with coarse fur that held dust and warmth. The buffalo did not startle. It did not turn.

He withdrew his hand and looked at the tips of his fingers as though he expected to find something there, as though touch left residue that could be examined.

Behind him, a woman held up her phone and said, “Okay, stay still,” and a man smiled in obedience.

The observer stayed still for a different reason.

He thought of the ways we arrange our witnesses. A fence. A plaque. A scheduled feeding time. A carefully designed line of sight. We believe, sincerely, that seeing is the same as understanding. We believe, too, that if the cages looked clean and the visitors look pleased, then the captivity could be interpreted as care.

He watched the buffalo’s breath again. Inhale. Exhale. A rhythm that did not belong to anyone else.

It was then he noticed the old Native American man, Eli Red Feather.

Not at first. At first he registered only a shift in the air, a change in the way nearby bodies behaved. People stepped around the old man without meeting his eyes. That is how public grief is treated. It is an inconvenience and an accusation at once. It asks strangers to become responsible for what they would rather pretend is private.

Eli stood close to the barrier, closer than comfort allowed, as if distance might be mistaken for permission. His shoulders were narrow, his coat too large, the sleeves swallowing his wrists. He did not sway, but he carried the slight forward pitch of someone who has lived long enough for the world to feel downhill.

He was crying.

Not a single tear, not something cinematic. He was sobbing in the terrible hurting way, like a person who cannot lie to his own body anymore. His face tightened and released in waves. His breath caught, then broke. His eyes fixed on the buffalo as if he were watching a relative sleep in a place they did not choose.

The observer watched him cry for several seconds, long enough to decide it was not illness and not confusion. The grief had structure. The grief had purpose.

No one stopped. People looked away and kept walking, dragging children toward the next exhibit, toward the next story they could consume without being changed by it.

The observer turned his body toward Eli and spoke.

His voice was gentle in volume and plain in shape, but there was an absence inside it, a missing social padding that we often depend on. He did not soften the question with apologies. He did not lead with concern the way people do when they want to protect themselves from whatever answer might come.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

Eli did not answer right away. He pressed his knuckles briefly to his mouth, as if he could keep the sound in. As if grief could be swallowed and made polite. His eyes stayed on the buffalo.

The buffalo shifted its head slightly, the way a continent moves, slowly enough for people to miss the fact that something has changed.

The observer waited. He waited with the patience of someone who did not fear silence. He waited as though the answer mattered more than the comfort.

At last Eli breathed in, unsteady, and his voice came out roughened by tears.

“You ever look at something,” he began, “and feel like it remembers what you forgot?”

The observer said nothing.

Eli stared at the buffalo, and the air between them filled with the beginning of a story that did not yet know it was a test.

He cleared his throat, though the sound he wanted to remove was not there. It was lower, settled somewhere behind the ribs, a thing that did not obey small gestures of order. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and left the tears where they were, shining. He did not look at the man who had asked the question. He looked only at the buffalo, as if speaking to it were easier, or more honest.

“They weren’t meant for this,” he said.

The words were simple, almost childlike in their directness, and yet they carried a finality that made them heavy. He nodded once toward the enclosure, toward the measured dirt and the arranged rock, toward the careful suggestion of land. “They were meant to move. Meant to make the ground remember them.”

The observer followed his gaze. He noted how the man said meant, not supposed. There was intention in the word, a sense of design that did not belong to any one hand.

“My people followed them,” Eli continued. “Not chased. Followed. That’s different. You follow something when it feeds you without asking permission. When it teaches you where water is. When it teaches you when to stop.”

He inhaled and the breath shook. He did not apologize for it.

“Everything we used came from them. Meat. Hide. Bone. Tools. Songs.” He paused, then added, quieter, “Stories.”

The observer noticed the way the word settled. Stories were not an afterthought. They were counted among necessities.

The buffalo lifted its head slightly, nostrils flaring, as though it had caught a scent that belonged to another time. Eli watched the movement with such intensity it was as if he believed the animal might recognize him, might know the shape of his watching.

“They didn’t just kill them,” he said then, and his voice sharpened, not with anger but with clarity. “They planned it. Paid for it. For rifles and money and power. When the ground is black and red with bodies— it’s always about power.”

He turned now, just slightly, enough to let the observer see the lines cut deep into his face, the grooves made by years of sun and cold and endurance. His eyes were dark and bright at once, alive with something that had refused to dim.

“They knew if the buffalo were gone, we would have nowhere to go. No way to live the way we had been living. No way to feed ourselves without asking.”

The observer considered this. He considered the elegance of the strategy, the efficiency. Remove the condition for life and the life follows it into collapse. No spectacle required. No single villain to name.

“So yes,” Eli said, answering something the observer had not yet asked, “it worked.”

He laughed once, a short sound with no humor in it. “It worked so well that now they put one in a cage and call it saving.”

He gestured toward the sign with its clean lettering and its numbers, its careful promises. The sign did not mention blood. It did not mention winter. It did not mention children learning hunger as a language.

“They tell you it’s protected,” he said. “They tell you it’s lucky to be alive.”

He leaned closer to the barrier, close enough that the lines of his face seemed to echo the roughness of the buffalo’s fur. “But what kind of life is this, where everything you were built to do has been made impossible?”

The observer remained silent. Silence, he had learned, was often the only way to let a truth continue speaking without interruption.

Eli swallowed and his voice softened, not in retreat but in exhaustion. “I don’t cry because it’s gone,” he said. “I cry because it’s still here. Because they let it live like this and expect gratitude.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, they were fixed on the buffalo with something like apology.

“I see him in there,” he said, “and I see us. Still breathing. Still counted. Still fenced in by somebody else’s idea of mercy.”

The buffalo shifted again, pressing its weight into the earth, carving the shallow depression a little deeper with its mass. The ground accepted it. The enclosure did not change.

The observer felt something register, not as emotion but as alignment. A pattern completed. The story had moved from loss to method, from grief to design.

He asked his next question carefully, as though the shape of it mattered.

“And did your people end,” he said, “when the buffalo were gone?”

Eli shook his head before the sentence was finished.

“No,” he said. “We just learned to become ghosts in our own home.”

They stood together then, Eli and the observer, watching the buffalo breathe inside a future that had been narrowed for it, the air thick with a history that refused to stay quiet.

Eli’s answer did not settle into the air. It lingered, heavy, like a smell that tells you something has happened even if you arrived too late to see it. The observer felt the weight of it as information, arranged and precise. Not a wound, but a map of how wounds were made.

Neither of them noticed Marcus Bell, at first, the young Black man in the zoo uniform a few steps away, the one who had stopped scrolling on his phone and started listening.

Marcus had learned to tell time by the gaps between tasks.

There were the loud minutes, when children pressed against the railings and parents asked questions they did not want answered honestly. There were the slow minutes, when the animals slept and the pathways emptied and the job became less about supervision than presence. It was during one of those slower stretches that he leaned against the low wall near the enclosure and took out his phone.

He kept the sound off. He always did.

The video had been circulating for days, reappearing in different edits, different captions, the same few seconds looped until meaning began to thin. A line of world leaders stood stiffly in front of a backdrop too neutral to belong to any one country. Their faces wore the careful expressions of people trying not to betray fear or excitement or ignorance. Behind them, blurred almost beyond usefulness, were shapes that cameras refused to clarify.

The headline read: CONTACT CONTINUES. NO THREAT IDENTIFIED.

What none of them said was how long the conversation was expected to last.

Another line underneath, smaller, less confident: NO PHYSICAL DESCRIPTIONS RELEASED.

Marcus watched long enough to notice what the video did not show. No panic. No crowds. No fire. Just men and women in suits explaining that things were under control. That humanity had been noticed. That conversations were happening.

He snorted quietly and slid the phone back into his pocket.

He couldn’t believe that with everything happening, he still had to come to work. That anyone still had to go to work.

Marcus had not meant to listen. It happened the way listening often did, by accident first and then by choice.

He caught the end of a sentence about cages. About intent. About false mercy. Marcus felt the familiar tightening in his chest, the one that came when history brushed too close to the present.

Seeing the tears streaking down Eli’s cheeks, Marcus cleared his throat softly.

“Sir,” he said, not yet choosing which man he was addressing, “everything okay here?”

Both men turned toward him.

For a moment, Marcus felt the strange sensation of having walked into something already underway, something that did not need him and yet might make room. He stood in his uniform, his name stitched cleanly over his chest, aware of how it marked him as belonging and separate at the same time.

Marcus did not expect an answer right away. He had learned that questions, when placed carefully, needed room to decide whether they would be taken up or left alone. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, posture neutral, the kind of stance that suggested help without authority.

Eli gazed at him for what felt like an eternity.

“I’m fine,” he eventually said, though the words were shaped more like a boundary than reassurance. His voice had steadied. The crying had rearranged itself into something firmer. “Just looking.”

Marcus nodded. He followed the man’s gaze to the buffalo, to the enormous body arranged inside limits no one mentioned out loud. He felt the familiar pull of the enclosure, the way it asked him to see this as normal because it had been made clean and named.

The other man, the one Marcus could not quite place, watched him with an attention that made Marcus suddenly aware of his own breathing. Not scrutinized. Considered.

Marcus shifted his weight and spoke again, quieter now. “That happens to people sometimes,” he said, nodding toward the buffalo. “First time seeing one up close. Or the first time it really lands.”

Eli let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it had contained any amusement.

“It landed a long time ago,” he said.

Marcus accepted that. He had learned not to argue with the timing of grief.

They stood like that for a moment, the three of them forming an uneven line before the barrier. Marcus noticed how the other man positioned himself. Not beside the Eli in solidarity. Not opposite him in challenge. Somewhere slightly apart, as if distance itself were part of his listening.

Marcus spoke again, because the silence had begun to press.

“You know,” he said, “buffalo always remind me of how when I was a kid, my grandfather would tell me about the history of pigeons.”

Eli turned his head just enough to acknowledge him.

“They weren’t always pests,” Marcus said. “That’s the part people forget.”

He kept his eyes on the enclosure, speaking the way you do when you don’t want to be interrupted by your own feelings. “They brought them here on purpose. Trained them. Relied on them. Used pigeons to send messages to places they couldn’t reach themselves.”

The word relied settled between them.

“They carried what mattered,” Marcus went on. “Information. Direction. Time. They fed people, too. Kept things moving when nothing else could.”

Eli watched him closely now.

“And then,” Marcus said, “once they’d done the work, once there were easier ways, faster ways, they stopped being useful.”

He glanced toward the open sky beyond the enclosure, where a few birds circled lazily, unremarkable, uncounted.

“That’s when the language changed,” he said. “All of a sudden they were dirty. Loud. In the way. A problem nobody remembered asking them to solve in the first place.”

He exhaled through his nose. “People talk like they just showed up one day and became a nuisance. Like they weren’t invited. Like pigeons didn’t basically build our modern systems on their backs.”

Eli said nothing, but his face had gone very still.

“Now all around the country, we treat them like shit,” Marcus continued. “Rats with wings—or whatever people say.”

The observer asked, gently, “Was anyone punished for treating them that way?”

Marcus let out a soft laugh.

“No,” he said. “That’s never how it works.”

“How does it work, then?” the observer asked.

Marcus thought of monuments. Of apologies that arrived too late to be useful. Of how easily necessity was rewritten as accident.

“It works like this,” he said. “Once you stop needing something, you stop remembering what it gave you. You call what happened unavoidable. You say it was another time.”

He shrugged, small, almost weary. “People say a lot of things once they’re standing on what survived.”

The buffalo exhaled heavily, a sound that seemed too large for the space it occupied. Marcus felt it in his chest. He wondered, briefly, if animals noticed the way humans talked about them in the past tense even when they were still breathing.

Eli spoke then. “They always say nobody knew,” he said. “But somebody always knew enough to benefit.”

The observer nodded once, as if something had been confirmed.

Marcus found himself studying that nod. It was too precise, too complete, as though it closed a loop Marcus had not seen opened.

“You work here?” Eli asked.

Marcus tapped the name stitched above his pocket. “Yeah. Most days.”

“And what do you think,” the observer asked, turning to Marcus now, “of a place like this?”

The question felt heavier than it should have. Marcus chose his words carefully.

“I think it keeps the lights on,” he said. “I think it pays my rent. I think it tells itself a good story about why it exists.”

He paused, then added, “I also think it asks animals to forgive us without ever asking if they should.”

Eli nodded slowly.

The observer watched both of them, his expression unreadable, his attention unwavering.

The zoo noise swelled around them and then receded, like a tide that did not care who was standing where. Marcus felt the shape of the conversation shifting. He could not have said how, only that something had moved from sharing into weighing.

The observer drew a breath, steady and deliberate, as though preparing to ask something that did not belong to small talk or kindness.

Marcus did not know it yet, but the next question would not be about animals at all. The observer was no longer listening for understanding.

The observer waited until the space between them settled. He did not rush the moment, did not press while the words were still warm from being spoken. He had learned, somewhere far from this place, that answers offered too quickly often arrived incomplete.

When he spoke again, his voice carried the same calm it had from the beginning, but now there was a subtle narrowing to it, a focus that drew the air inward.

“What does a society like this deserves to become?”

Neither Marcus nor Eli answered at once.

The question did not sound rhetorical. It did not sound angry. It sounded like a request for assessment, the kind made by someone who believed evaluation was possible if the right evidence was gathered.

Eli rested both hands on the barrier now. His fingers curled around the edge with an intimacy that suggested familiarity, as though he had held worse things than this and survived them.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that it is a society that knows how to keep going.”

Marcus watched him closely. He had learned that the first sentence people offered was rarely the one they meant most.

“It learns,” Eli continued. “It changes its language when the old words start to sound bad. It replaces killing with policy. Theft with law. Cages with care.”

He looked at the buffalo again. “It survives by making survival smaller for everyone else.”

The observer nodded, as if this were a known category.

“And should it remain?” he asked.

Marcus felt something tighten in his chest. The question moved past opinion and into territory people usually avoided unless they were sure of power. It was the kind of question that governments disguised with committees and time.

Eli did not bristle. He did not retreat. He considered.

“I don’t believe in erasing,” he said. “I believe in remembering so hard it hurts.”

He turned then, finally meeting the observer’s eyes. “If a society is willing to be changed by what it remembers, then maybe it earns the right to keep breathing.”

Marcus swallowed. He recognized the weight of that maybe.

“And if it isn’t?” the observer asked.

Silence spread again, thick and deliberate.

Marcus felt the pull of the question turning toward him, and he did not pretend not to notice. He had spent his life learning how to speak without inviting punishment, how to tell the truth sideways when necessary. This did not feel like one of those moments.

“I think,” he said, “that asking whether it should remain assumes somebody’s listening.”

The observer’s attention sharpened.

“I work here,” Marcus went on. “Inside something I didn’t build. Something that tells itself it’s doing good because it’s still standing.”

He gestured toward the enclosure, toward the pathways, toward the signs that promised education and protection. “I don’t get to decide if it exists. I decide whether I show up. Whether I stay awake. Whether I try to make it less cruel from the inside.”

He paused, then said, quieter, “Walking away was never really an option for people like me. So staying becomes a kind of resistance I guess.”

Eli looked at Marcus with something like approval. Not pride. Recognition.

The observer did not answer. He did not nod. He looked past Marcus, briefly, as though noting something that would not be explained.

He absorbed their words without reaction. No nod. No frown.

“What would you say,” he asked, “to those who argue that the harm is outweighed by the continuation?”

Another silence.

The buffalo rose then, slowly, with the careful effort of something immense lifting itself inside a space too small to honor it. Its hooves pressed into the earth, deepening the impressions already there. It stood facing away from them, body turned toward the back of the enclosure, as though the conversation did not require its attention.

The observer watched the movement with a gaze that held neither pity nor indifference. Only measure.

He did not wait to hear their final answers. He had already spent longer here than planned. Instead, he said, “Thank you.”

Then he turned and walked away.

He moved through the crowd with an ease that did not require space to be cleared. People stepped aside without noticing they had done so. A stroller rolled past him. A child tugged at a sleeve. He passed through it all untouched, unclaimed.

Marcus watched him go until he disappeared into the curve of the path. Something about the man’s departure unsettled him. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was not. The leaving carried no signal. No resolution.

Outside the gate, the air loosened.

The zoo released people the way it had taken them in, without ceremony. The sounds shifted first. Less echo. More wind. The low, continuous murmur of traffic beyond the trees. The observer stepped onto the path that curved through the park and felt the change register in his body before it registered in his thoughts.

Here there were no plaques.

The grass was worn thin in places, packed down by feet and seasons. A bench sagged slightly at the center, its paint chipped where too many hands had rested. The park did not pretend to be untouched. It did not offer instruction. It simply existed, open to use and misuse alike.

An old woman stood near the bench with a paper bag folded tight against her hip. She moved slowly, not from frailty but from care, as though the pace itself were a decision. Her coat was buttoned crookedly. One glove was missing.

She reached into the bag and scattered a handful of crumbs.

The pigeons came at once.

They gathered without hesitation, bodies brushing, wings bumping, heads dipping and lifting in quick, practiced motions. They moved with the confidence of creatures who had learned exactly how much fear was necessary and how much was waste. None of them startled when people passed. None of them mistook abundance for danger.

The observer stopped at the edge of the path.

He watched the way the pigeons crowded in, the way their numbers made them bold. He watched the woman smile, a small private curve of the mouth, as though she were feeding something in herself as much as them. He watched crumbs disappear into beaks, into gullets, into continuity.

Once, long ago by human measure, there had been so many pigeons that the sky itself had seemed occupied. That fact existed now only as language, as metaphor, as warning. These birds were not those birds. And yet they were.

The woman reached into the bag again.

The observer did not step closer. He did not reach out. He kept his hands at his sides and observed the pattern as it repeated. Feed. Gather. Survive. Leave traces too small to record.

He thought of the buffalo, its immense body breathing inside limits that had been drawn by others. He thought of Eli’s tears, the way grief had sharpened into clarity. He thought of Marcus, standing inside an institution and choosing to remain awake.

The pigeons pecked and cooed, unbothered by thought.

A child ran past, scattering a few of them. They lifted briefly, a burst of wings, then settled again as soon as the ground was offered back to them.

The woman folded the bag closed. There were no crumbs left.

She nodded to no one in particular and walked away.

The pigeons lingered a moment longer, then dispersed, each one moving off with the casual certainty of a creature that did not believe the future needed permission.

The observer stayed where he was.

He did not make a note. He did not draw a conclusion. He let the image stand as it was. Abundance held lightly. Survival negotiated daily. A species not yet finished deciding what it would become.

Above him, the sky remained undecided.

He turned then and continued down the path, carrying with him not a verdict, but enough information to make one.

The test, he knew, was still ongoing. And it was not designed to announce when it had ended.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

I learned a long time ago that you do not begin the work because you expect applause. You begin it because there is a silence in the room that feels dangerous. You begin it because there are gaps in the story of a people, and if no one dares to step into them, the lie becomes permanent.

But I am grateful when my work is seen. And this is why I am honored to have been included among WayMaker’s Top 50. A list of Black leaders creating change in culture, business, and community. I am specifically on the list under the category of Cultural Storyteller, along with one of my favorite directors and showrunners, Mara Brock Akil.

Writing, for me, has never been separate from community. The page is only one kind of gathering. A classroom is another. A mutual aid drive is another. A conversation that refuses to look away is another still. Each is an attempt to close the distance between who we are told we are and who we know ourselves to be.

This sort of work demands too much honesty for obsession with recognition. But I would be lying if I said it does not matter, even a little, when someone does see you. When someone recognizes the labor, the risk, the insistence on truth. It is not about spotlight. It is about confirmation that the effort is reaching beyond the noise.

So I am thankful. Thankful to be named. Thankful to be read. Thankful to be in community with people who believe that stories can repair what systems have fractured.

We continue, not because we are watched, but because we are needed. And still, it is good to know that someone, somewhere, is paying attention.

You can view the list of all 50 Waymakers here.

The first text I saw this morning, the one that told me Jesse Jackson had died, came from my mother.

There was no paragraph. No reflection. No explanation. Just a photograph of him and a text bubble that simply said: RIP.

I do not know that my mother and I have ever sat down and had a formal conversation about Jesse Jackson. I am certain his name has drifted through the house over the years, mentioned in passing, folded into the larger weather of politics and church and memory. But with that photo, she did not have to say anything else. She did not have to explain who he was or why he mattered. The image was enough. Of course I should know who he is automatically. Of course most Black people should know who he is automatically. That is the measure of the man. He was not trivia. He was atmosphere.

You cannot have a conversation about modern Black political power without saying the name Jesse Jackson.

To attempt it would be like telling the story of a river while pretending not to see the bend that helped change its course. He stood beside Dr. King in the 1960s, yes. That is the photograph most people remember. But what distinguished him was not proximity to greatness. It was his refusal to let that greatness calcify into nostalgia. He would not allow the movement to become a museum piece. He carried its fire out of the streets and into the arena of national power, where fire is far less welcome.

He built organizations. He ran for president when the idea of a Black man doing so seriously was treated as even more of a fantasy or threat. And in doing so, he forced this country to confront a simple fact: we were not petitioning to be included as guests in someone else’s democracy. We were insisting on being recognized as stakeholders in a nation built in no small part by our labor and our blood.

For many Black Americans, he represented something deeply personal. He represented audacity. He represented the belief that our lives, our votes, our labor, and our dreams were not marginal but central to the American story. When he ran in 1984 and 1988, he did more than campaign. He altered the psychological landscape. In living rooms and barbershops and sanctuaries, people who had been told all their lives to lower their expectations watched a Black man compete on a national stage not as a symbol but as a strategist. That shift cannot be quantified in polling data. It can only be measured in the quiet recalibration of possibility inside the minds of children and their parents.

He spoke the language of hope, but it was not a decorative hope. It was not the kind that fits neatly on a bumper sticker. It was organized hope. It was hope that demanded policy, demanded budgets, demanded accountability. He believed poor people deserved power, not pity. He understood that racism, militarism, and economic exploitation were not separate afflictions but braided together in the architecture of the nation. And he said so plainly, even when plain speech cost him favor.

There will be, as there always is, an effort now to smooth him out. To reduce him to a few agreeable phrases. To remember him in ways that do not trouble anyone’s conscience. But Jesse Jackson was never meant to be harmless. He was imperfect. He was controversial. He was human. And yet he was also a bridge between the era of marching and the era of governing, between the pulpit and the ballot box. He helped transform protest into infrastructure.

My mother did not have to write an essay in her text message. She did not have to explain the stakes. The photograph was enough because his life had already done the explaining. It had already imprinted itself on a generation that understood, without rehearsal, what he meant.

To many of us, his life was a reminder that progress is not gifted. It is insisted upon. It is insisted upon by those willing to risk ridicule, willing to endure contradiction, willing to stand in rooms that were not built for them and refuse to leave quietly. His passing closes a chapter, but it does not absolve us of the work that chapter demands we continue.

The photo was enough. The name is enough. And the insistence he embodied remains.

Rest in power, Rev. Jesse Jackson.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

I saw a video of a Latino ICE agent targeting a protester because of his accent. The man said, simply: you have an accent too. I sat with that moment for a long time. This story was born from that recognition.

The order comes before anything has gone wrong.

That is the first lie.

The crowd is standing still when the canisters go up. People are holding signs at waist level, the way you hold a child’s drawing when you want to be careful with it. A woman is passing out water from a plastic crate. A man kneels to tie his daughter’s shoe, her small foot lifted like an offering. Someone is filming—not shouting, not rushing—just holding the phone steady, as if steadiness itself might be a form of protection.

“This is an unlawful assembly,” the loudspeaker says, flat and early.

Aníbal Reyes hears the word assembly and feels something in him settle, the way a lock clicks into place. Assembly is what they call people before they call them a problem. Assembly is how you make bodies sound temporary. Assembly is always a green light.

He does not look at the faces when the command is given. He looks at the space between them—the gaps, the breathing room, the imagined exits. Training teaches you to see emptiness before you see flesh. Emptiness is where force likes to go first.

“Proceed,” the voice says in his earpiece.

The canisters lift cleanly from the line, silver and quick, arcing past cardboard signs and raised hands and landing where the bodies are densest. They hit the pavement and spin. They hiss. The sound is small, almost polite, the way something dangerous often is at first.

The gas blooms.

White, then thicker. It spreads low before it rises. It moves like it knows where to go. It finds mouths. It finds eyes. It settles into the soft places first.

Someone coughs. Someone drops a sign. The chant breaks apart before it finishes forming. A child cries out once, and then the sound is swallowed by the burning.

Aníbal raises his weapon.

Rubber bullets are supposed to be merciful. That is the second lie.

He fires into the legs first, the way the manual instructs, but his aim drifts. It always does when he hears the accents. The rolled r. The flattened vowel. The sound that lives too close to his own mouth.

“¡Oye!” someone shouts. “¡Hay niños aquí!”

Children.

Aníbal does not stop.

An older man stumbles forward, hands up, eyes already red, already ruined. “No estamos haciendo nada,” the man says, and the words land wrong in Aníbal’s ear. Too familiar. Too close to home.

Aníbal adjusts his grip and fires again.

The older man goes down hard, the sound of his body hitting pavement sharp and final as punctuation. Around him the crowd breaks into panic with nowhere to go. The gas thickens. People run into each other. A pregnant woman falls, but no one helps, because helping requires sight, and sight is gone.

“Back up!” Aníbal shouts, though there is nowhere to back up to. He likes the sound of command in his mouth. It fills a space that used to ache for power.

Suddenly, in the distant fog of gas, a woman screams his name.

“¡Aníbal!”

He does not know her. He is certain of that. But she says it with the cadence of recognition, the way you say a name you have been holding for a long time.

“¡Aníbal!”

He flinches.

The sound cuts through the gear, the helmet, the practiced distance. It reaches something unarmored. He fires again, too fast this time, the shot going wide and striking a teenager in the shoulder. The boy spins, surprised, as if tapped rather than struck, and then the pain catches up to him and he folds inward, arms tight around himself.

“Move!” Aníbal yells. “Get back!”

A woman with gray threaded through her hair suddenly walks out of the fog and past the boy who runs without even looking at her. She is small. She is the only person not panicking. She does not move.

“You don’t have to do this,” she says, in English this time, careful, measured. “Papi. You don’t have to.”

Papi.

The word lands heavier than any projectile.

Aníbal fires the gas launcher at her feet.

She disappears into the white.

Later—much later—he will tell himself that he did not know if she fell. That he could not see. That he did not see where she went because visibility was compromised.

That is the third lie.

*****

By nightfall the footage of ICE’s earlier operation is everywhere.

The comments split like a fault line. Some people are screaming that anyone who ran deserved what they got, that protests are chaos by default, that order has to look like force to count as order. Others watch the same clips and say it was excessive, say you can hear the moment the line tips from control into punishment, say you don’t fire gas into a crowd with strollers and call it restraint.

Aníbal watches none of it.

He drives to the hotel with the windows down despite the cold, the gas still clinging to his clothes, his hair, the soft skin behind his ears. His eyes burn. He does not blink. Blinking feels like a concession.

The room is quiet when he enters. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that has learned how to wait.

He stands in the kitchenette for a long time without turning on the light. The dark presses against him, intimate, familiar. He can still hear the hiss of the canisters if he listens for it. He can still feel the recoil in his hands.

In the sink, the faucet drips.

One drop. Then another.

He does not remember turning it on.

“Stop,” he says aloud, to the room, to himself, to whatever might be listening.

The drip continues.

He goes to the bathroom and scrubs his hands until the skin is raw. The smell lingers anyway. It always does. There are some things soap will not argue with.

When he looks up, the mirror is fogged.

He wipes it with his sleeve.

For a moment, there is nothing there but his own face. It’s older than he remembers, the lines around his mouth fixed into something close to disdain.

Then suddenly the space is filled with gas fog, curling inward, gathering shape.

There is a man standing behind him in the mirror.

Aníbal spins.

The bathroom is empty.

His heart hammers, loud and unruly. He presses a hand to the sink to steady himself. His reflection stares back, wide-eyed now, almost pleading.

He does not look again.

He turns off the light and goes to bed without eating.

Sleep does not come easy. When it does, it brings no mercy.

*****

Aníbal dreams he is standing in a field he does not recognize. The ground is dry and cracked, the earth split open like a mouth that has been screaming too long. The sky hangs low and colorless, neither day nor night.

Someone is digging.

The sound of the shovel is steady, patient. Each strike lands with purpose.

Aníbal turns toward it.

The man digging is old, but not fragile. His back is straight. His hands are strong. His clothes are worn thin in places that speak of work done over lifetimes, not years. He moves like someone who knows the weight of the ground and does not resent it.

“You’re late,” the man says, without looking up. Aníbal has not heard this accent since he was a boy visiting family in Puerto Plata.

“Who are you?” Aníbal asks.

The man stops digging. He rests his hands on the shovel handle and finally turns.

His face is Aníbal’s face and not his face at all. The bones are familiar. The eyes are not. They are dark and bright at the same time, holding more than one century in them.

“You don’t recognize me,” the man says. It is not a question.

“I don’t—”

“I know,” the man says. “They worked hard on that.”

The wind moves through the field, carrying with it a sound like distant voices. Like prayer misremembered.

“What do you want?” Aníbal asks.

The man smiles, and there is no kindness in it.

“I want you to look,” he says.

He steps aside.

Aníbal sees then that the hole the man was digging is not empty.

Bodies fill it. Men. Women. Children. Their faces are turned upward, mouths open, eyes clouded. Some are dressed in clothes Aníbal recognizes from the protest. Others wear garments older than the nation that taught him to pull a trigger.

“I don’t know these people,” Aníbal says.

The man’s smile fades.

“That,” he says, “is the problem.”

Aníbal wakes gasping, the sheets twisted around his legs like restraints.

The room smells faintly of soil.

*****

The man does not leave when Aníbal awakens.

He appears in reflective surfaces first. The vending machine windows at the ICE field office. The black screen of Aníbal’s phone. Always watching. Always waiting.

“You’re not real,” Aníbal tells him the third time he sees him, standing calm and solid in the glass of a conference room.

The man tilts his head.

“¿Estás seguro?” He clicks his teeth three times. “You put on a uniform every day that says otherwise.”

Aníbal stops attending briefings. He keeps his head down. He volunteers for overtime. He stays in motion because motion has always been his alibi.

It does not help.

The man begins to speak when Aníbal is in the field.

He speaks during raids, he speaks over gas, he speaks louder than the screams. His voice threading through the chaos.

“Listen to how the gringos say your name,” the man whispers as Aníbal cuffs a woman whose hands are shaking too badly to resist.

Aníbal tightens the cuffs.

“You wear the badge like a mask,” the man says. “But the face underneath still belongs to us. Tu familia.”

“Shut up,” Aníbal mutters.

Another agent looks at him, confused.

“You say something, Reyes?” the agent asks.

Aníbal shakes his head.

The next time Aníbal sees him, it is in a hallway.

Aníbal turns the corner and there he is.

Not reflected. Not implied. Standing fully in the world as if he has paid rent here.

The ancestor is holding a small object in his hand.

A coin, maybe. A medallion. Something round that catches the window light and throws it back with contempt.

Aníbal stops so hard his sunglasses nearly fly off.

“What are you doing here?” he whispers.

Two agents pass behind him, laughing softly at something on a phone. They do not react. They do not glance up. They do not see the man holding the medallion at all.

The ancestor’s eyes follow the agents the way a hawk follows a field mouse: without hurry, without doubt.

Aníbal’s mouth goes dry.

“Why are you in my head?”

The ancestor shifts the object in his palm. The light flickers across it.

“Is that where you put everyone?” he asks. “In your head. So you can pretend your world is clean.”

Aníbal swallows. The hallway tilts slightly, or maybe his body does.

“What is that in your hand?”

The ancestor holds it up.

It is not a coin. It is thinner, darker, with a surface that seems to drink light as well as reflect it. The edges are smooth, worn by fingers that have needed it. On one side, an emblem: a bird in mid-flight, wings spread. On the other, a set of marks that are not letters and not quite symbols. Something between. Something that feels like it predates the rules of this place.

Aníbal’s stomach tightens with recognition he cannot name.

The ancestor’s face is unreadable.

“This is something I kept,” he says. “Even when they told me to forget.”

“They?” Aníbal says, though he somehow knows the answer will hurt.

The ancestor’s gaze sharpens.

“I used to wonder whether they invented forgetting.” he says softly. “But I realized on the other side, they just perfected it. Polished it. Made it policy.”

Aníbal’s radio crackles. A voice calls his name. “Reyes. You coming to get briefed on this sweep or what?”

He touches his earpiece without looking away from the ancestor. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m coming.”

The ancestor steps aside as if granting him passage.

Aníbal walks forward.

The moment he passes the ancestor, a cold shoots through his ribs, like a hand entering him. His breath catches. His vision stutters. Just a fraction. Then steadies.

He reaches the stairwell and grips the railing.

His hand comes away damp.

He looks down.

Not sweat.

Wet soil.

Dark and granular, lodged beneath his nails as if he has been digging.

He scrubs his hand against his pants, but the dirt clings, as though it has found its rightful place.

*****

The sweep was routine. That is what they call it.

Routine, as if repetition makes cruelty less deliberate.

Aníbal and two others move through a set of offices where people have been called in for “processing.” The word processing is a machine word, a word designed to keep guilt from catching on skin.

The people sit in rows of plastic chairs. Some have folders in their laps. Some have children leaning against them, small heads heavy with exhaustion. The room is too cold. It’s late-winter, but the air conditioner runs without mercy, a steady reminder that comfort belongs to the building, not the bodies inside it.

Another agent—a man with a buzzcut and a celtic cross tattoo on his neck—leans down toward a woman holding a toddler.

“You got ID?” he asks.

The woman nods, fumbling with a wallet. Her hands shake.

The toddler looks up at Aníbal. Big eyes. No understanding yet of what uniforms mean.

The ancestor suddenly appears behind the toddler’s chair.

Aníbal stiffens.

The ancestor’s hand rests lightly on the back of the chair, possessive and tender at once, the way you might touch something you love and cannot save.

“Look,” he says without moving his mouth.

Aníbal tries not to.

But the child turns, as if hearing something, and fixes his gaze on empty air—the spot where the ancestor stands.

The toddler’s face scrunches.

He begins to cry.

A sharp, startled wail that lifts the room’s attention like a sheet snapped in the wind.

“Hey, hey,” the mother whispers, panicked. “No llores. No llores, mi amor.”

The toddler reaches one small hand toward the ancestor.

His fingers grasp at nothing.

The ancestor’s eyes narrow, surprised.

“You see him?” Aníbal breathes, barely audible.

The toddler continues crying, body stiffening as if resisting a cold that is not the air conditioner.

The ancestor’s gaze slides to Aníbal.

“You thought I was only yours,” he says quietly. “But I’m older than your private shame.”

The other agent straightens, annoyed. “Kid’s wound up,” he mutters. “Reyes, why can you people can never shut your children up?”

You people.

The phrase slices through Aníbal, not because it is new, but because it names what he has been trying to hide: that he has made himself into an exception, an individual, a man detached from any “you.”

Aníbal takes one step forward, then stops.

The ancestor’s voice comes low and precise.

“Do you hear him?” he asks. “Do you hear how easily he says it? Like the world gave him permission. Like you gave him permission.”

Aníbal’s jaw tightens.

He wants to correct the other agent, to say Don’t talk to her like that. He wants to say She’s a mother. He wants to say We are not supposed to—

But his mouth does what it always does when confronted with the cost: it stays closed.

Silence has always been his favorite weapon.

The ancestor watches him choose it.

*****

That night the power goes out.

Not the whole neighborhood. Not the whole city. Just Aníbal’s hotel room.

The front desk attendant can’t explain it, but promises to send a technician soon. Aníbal checks his phone for service alerts. The screen is black. Not asleep. Black. Dead.

He tries the light switch again, as if insistence can become electricity.

Nothing.

In the dark, the drip from the faucet is louder. More deliberate. Like a countdown.

He moves carefully, shoulders tense, hands open in front of him.

His room is familiar in the way a lie is familiar—you live in it long enough and it starts to feel like the truth.

He bumps the edge of the counter and swears under his breath.

“¡Coño!”

A few feet away, a small sound.

A scrape.

He freezes.

There is no TV light. No streetlight spill through the blinds. The darkness is thick, almost textured.

“Who’s there?” he calls, trying to sound like command and not fear.

No answer.

He steps forward, one foot at a time, as though approaching an animal that might bolt.

Then he sees it.

In the center of the living room, a rectangle of light on the floor, pale and steady as moonlight.

But the moon is not in the room.

The light is coming from the object the ancestor held—except now it is not in his hand.

It is on Aníbal’s floor.

He does not remember bringing it to the hotel.

The object hums softly, a vibration that seems to come up through the floorboards and into his bones.

He crouches and reaches toward it.

The moment his fingers hover over the surface, the light intensifies, and something changes in the air. Pressure, like the moment before thunder.

The ancestor’s voice fills the room.

Not from behind him, not from a corner, but from everywhere at once.

“Now,” the ancestor says. “Since you keep refusing to see.”

The rectangle of light expands, stretching across the room like a sheet being pulled taut.

The walls fall away.

Not collapse—fall away—as if the room has been peeled back to reveal what it was always hiding.

Aníbal is no longer in the hotel.

He is standing in a long room made of stone and heat. The air is thick with sweat and breath. Bodies press close together in the dim light: men, women, children. Some are sitting. Some are standing. Some are leaning against each other in exhaustion that looks like resignation.

The smell hits him hard: urine, fear, something metallic.

A detention center.

Not the modern kind with fluorescent lights and plastic chairs, but an older version. Older in architecture. Older in cruelty. A place built to hold people until they become smaller than themselves.

Aníbal stumbles backward.

His boot kicks something.

A chain.

He looks down.

A line of iron runs across the floor, anchored into the stone. Shackles hang from it like fruit.

“Where—” his voice cracks. “Where am I?”

The ancestor steps into view, solid as any living man.

“You’re where I was,” he says.

Aníbal stares.

“Let me go,” he whispers.

The ancestor lifts his chin slightly, as if listening to a distant sound.

“Listen,” he says.

Aníbal hears it then: voices beyond the wall. Men talking in a language that is not Spanish and not English, but something that feels like Spanish’s ancestor—rougher, older, with consonants that hit the air like stones.

The language is Taíno.

He catches fragments: orders, counts, laughter that does not belong in a place like this.

“What is this?” Aníbal asks, dizzy.

“A processing room,” the ancestor says. “A place that predates your badge and tear gas.”

Aníbal’s throat tightens.

“You are detained,” he says, as if naming it will make it comprehensible.

The ancestor’s eyes sharpen with something like pity.

“Just like I was captured,” he corrects. “And then sold. And then used. And then discarded. In that order.”

Aníbal opens his mouth, closes it.

The room shifts slightly, as though time itself is turning a page.

A young man is dragged in—barefoot, wrists raw, eyes wild. He looks around and meets Aníbal’s gaze.

The young man’s face is Aníbal’s face.

Not exactly. But close enough to steal breath.

Aníbal recoils.

“That’s—” he starts.

“That’s me,” the ancestor says. “Before I became the ghost you keep trying to run from.”

The younger version of the ancestor is shoved into a corner. Someone yells. Someone laughs. The sound of a strike. Flesh meeting fist echoes off stone.

Aníbal flinches as if hit.

He turns to the ancestor.

“Why are you showing me this?”

The ancestor steps closer until his face is inches from Aníbal’s.

“So you will stop pretending you are new,” he says. “So you will stop pretending you invented survival by betraying it.”

Aníbal’s hands tremble.

“I didn’t do this to you,” he whispers.

The ancestor’s expression hardens.

“No,” he says. “You do it to them.”

The room shudders.

The stone walls blur.

The air thins, then thickens again.

Now they are in a different place: a crowded ship hold, bodies stacked like cargo, the sea’s groan above them. A woman whispers prayers. A man vomits and sobs. A child’s eyes stare into nothing with the calm of shock.

Aníbal’s stomach lurches.

“You think borders began with paperwork,” the ancestor says. “But borders began with chains.”

The scene shifts again, faster now, like the object on the floor is pulling them through time the way a hook pulls fish through water.

A plantation-like field. A man cutting cane under a sun that does not forgive. An overseer’s shout. A whip crack. Blood beading on skin. A woman singing low, the song not hope but a ledger. Names, losses, a way to remember what the world wants erased.

And then: An old packing shed at the edge of grape fields. A strike. Farmworkers holding signs where their tools should be. Sheriffs with batons. Tear gas, even then, drifting low through the vines, filling lungs already burned by dust and chemicals. A newspaper headline calling workers “agitators.” A hard line of police.

Then: a modern detention center. Fluorescent light. Plastic blankets. Cages. A child’s small hands gripping chain-link.

Aníbal’s knees buckle.

He falls to the ground.

The ancestor stands over him.

“Do you feel it?” he asks.

Aníbal can barely breathe.

The air tastes like the protest gas now, sharp and chemical. His eyes burn. His chest tightens with remembered coughing.

“It’s not—” he chokes. “It’s not the same—”

The ancestor’s voice cuts through him.

“It’s always the same,” he says. “Only the uniforms change.”

Aníbal looks up, desperate.

“I’m doing my job,” he says, the phrase out of his mouth before he can stop it, as automatic as breathing.

The ancestor’s face does not move.

“That’s what they said while they fed me to the ground,” he replies. “That’s what they said while they renamed me. That’s what they said while they burned my language out of my mouth.”

Aníbal’s eyes flood with tears he refuses to let fall.

“You have to understand,” he whispers.

The ancestor crouches, close enough that Aníbal can smell earth on him, can feel the cold of him.

“Understand,” the ancestor repeats, tasting the word like something foreign.

Aníbal’s shoulders shake, whether from fear or fury he cannot tell.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he says. “If I don’t do it, someone else will. Someone worse.”

The ancestor’s gaze goes very still.

“Then why is it always you who chooses to be the one?” he asks.

Aníbal has no answer.

The ancestor rises.

He gestures toward the modern scene—the cages, the child’s hands, the plastic blankets shining like cheap salvation.

“Look at that child,” he says.

Aníbal looks.

The child turns his head, and the child’s face is the toddler’s face from the office earlier.

Same eyes. Same bewildered fear.

The child’s mouth moves, silent at first, then the sound breaks through like a radio catching signal.

“¿Dónde está mi mamá?”

Aníbal’s throat closes.

The ancestor’s voice is quiet now, almost tender.

“That child is asking where it began. Doesn’t care about the first border or first nation,” he says. “He wants his mother.”

Aníbal squeezes his eyes shut.

“Stop,” he whispers.

“Open them,” the ancestor says.

Aníbal opens his eyes.

The child is looking directly at him now.

Not through him. Not past him.

At him.

And the child says, in careful English, as if trying to obey the rules of a world that has already betrayed him:

“Why are you doing this?”

Aníbal’s breath leaves him in a broken sound.

He shakes his head, helpless.

“I’m—” he starts.

But the word sorry will not come.

Because sorry would require admitting a self capable of harm.

And Aníbal has built his entire life around not being that self, even while he performs that harm.

The ancestor steps between him and the child.

“You hear him?” he asks Aníbal. “This is the reckoning. Not for the state. The state will keep eating.”

The ancestor pauses for a moment.

“This is for you. For the part of you that still knows what a mouth is for besides orders.”

The light flickers.

The scenes dissolve.

Aníbal is back in his hotel room.

The power is still out.

He is on his knees, hands on the floor like a man praying to something he does not respect.

The object—dark, humming—rests in front of him.

He reaches out and grabs it, as if he can crush it, break it, throw it away.

The surface is cold.

Not cold like metal.

Cold like a grave.

A voice whispers from inside it, not the ancestor’s voice this time.

A chorus, faint but clear, layered with accents and ages and tongues.

Names.

Not spoken in a roll call way. Not bureaucratic.

Names spoken like candles being lit.

Aníbal’s fingers tighten around the object until his knuckles ache.

“Make it stop,” he whispers.

The ancestor appears in the doorway, watching.

“It won’t,” he says. “Not until you stop.”

Aníbal lifts his head, eyes burning.

“What do you want me to do?” he snaps. “Quit? Walk away? And then what? They’ll replace me tomorrow.”

The ancestor’s expression is calm, almost sad.

“Yes,” he says. “They will.”

Aníbal’s face twists.

“So what difference does it make?”

The ancestor steps into the room, slow and deliberate.

He points at the object in Aníbal’s hand.

“That difference,” he says. “That you will no longer be the hand holding the chain. That you will no longer be the mouth saying proceed. That you will no longer be the man who hears his own accent and decides it deserves pain.”

Aníbal’s chest rises and falls hard, as if he has been running.

He looks down at the object again.

It hums.

The names inside it continue.

Then, soft as a blade entering skin, the ancestor says:

“You think the haunting is punishment.”

Aníbal looks up.

The ancestor’s eyes hold him like a vice.

“No,” he continues. “The haunting is an invitation. To be human again. And you keep refusing.”

Aníbal’s lips tremble.

He hates the ancestor in that moment, hates him with the heat of a man confronted with himself.

But beneath the hate, beneath the fear, something else stirs.

Not goodness.

Not yet.

Something smaller. Older. A splinter of memory.

His mother’s voice, years ago, saying his name the way the woman at the protest did—as if it belonged to a whole family, not just one man.

A cousin’s laugh at a quinceañera.

The smell of mangú on a Sunday.

The sensation of being held, of being claimed by people who did not need paperwork to love him.

He closes his eyes.

The names continue.

When he opens them again, the ancestor is gone.

*****

There is another protest the next day at noon.

Same plaza. Same banners. New faces layered over old grief. Someone has chalked names of those murdered by ICE into the pavement, the letters already smudged by shoes, by wind, by the world’s negotiation with memory.

Aníbal stands at the edge of it, unmarked, anonymous. The object firmly in his palm. For the first time, he hears the chant not as noise but as breath. Collective, fragile, sustained.

No gas. No bullets.

Just voices.

The ancestor stands beside him, fully visible now, though no one else reacts. Aníbal’s presence feels heavier here, as if the ground recognizes him.

A woman steps onto a makeshift platform. She speaks into a megaphone, voice trembling but steady.

“They want us to believe this is inevitable,” she says. “They want us to believe harm is just how things are done.”

Murmurs of agreement ripple through the crowd.

Aníbal feels the object grow warmer in his hand.

The ancestor watches the woman, eyes unreadable.

“They will let some of us speak,” he says. “They just don’t let it change anything.”

Aníbal steps forward.

The movement feels enormous, like stepping off a ledge.

He does not climb the platform. He does not ask for the megaphone. He stands among the people and lifts the object into the air.

It hums louder now.

The sound is not electronic. It is not mechanical.

It sounds like breath moving through a throat that has waited too long to speak.

The chanting falters.

Heads turn.

Someone points.

“What is that?” a man asks.

Aníbal opens his mouth.

For a moment, nothing comes out.

The ancestor leans close.

Aníbal’s voice shakes.

“My name is Aníbal Reyes,” he says. “I was an agent of this state.”

A hush falls.

Someone swears softly.

A woman near the front stiffens, eyes narrowing. A man pulls his child closer.

Aníbal does not look away.

“I hurt people here,” he continues. “I hurt them on purpose. I hid behind policy and called it duty. I heard my own accent and chose violence.”

The words feel like knives leaving him, each one cutting something loose.

“I am not asking for forgiveness,” he says. “I don’t deserve it.”

The object pulses.

A low sound rolls outward, not loud but pervasive, like pressure change before a storm.

Aníbal lifts the object higher.

“It carries names,” he says. “Not numbers. Not cases. Names.”

The hum sharpens.

The first name slips free, audible now, clear as a bell.

Keith Porter.

Renee Nicole Good.

Genry Ruiz Guillen.

Nhon Ngọc Nguyen.

Then another.

Then another.

The air fills with them.

Names spoken aloud—not by Aníbal alone, but by the object itself, projecting something older than speech: testimony.

People gasp.

Someone begins to cry.

A woman collapses to her knees when a name matches the one stitched into her memory.

The ancestor’s face tightens with something like relief and something like grief renewed.

“They are not gone,” he says. “They are unfiled.”

Sirens wail at the edge of the plaza.

Aníbal does not turn.

“I thought that leaving would change nothing,” he says. “But staying made me a weapon.”

The crowd shifts, uncertain, electrified.

“I won’t be that again,” Aníbal says. “And I won’t be quiet.”

The object grows hot now, almost unbearable.

The ancestor grips Aníbal’s wrist.

“You cannot carry them forever,” the ancestor says. “This is not about martyrdom. This is about reckoning.”

Aníbal meets his gaze.

“Okay,” he says.

He slams the object onto the platform.

The sound is not an explosion.

It is a rupture.

Light fractures outward, not blinding but revealing. The chalked names flare. The cracks in the concrete widen, thin at first, then deeper, as if the ground itself is opening its mouth.

The air thickens with voices.

Not screams.

Witnesses.

The sirens cut off abruptly.

The ICE agents at the perimeter freeze, hands hovering near weapons they suddenly cannot lift. Their radios hiss and go dead. Their commands dissolve in their throats.

The ancestor stands tall now, luminous with something like recognition.

“This,” he says, “is what happens when the dead refuse to be processed.”

The plaza trembles.

Not violently. Deliberately.

The cracks in the ground trace shapes—borders undone, cages unwelded, lines erased.

The names rise one final time, a chorus cresting and breaking.

Then silence.

The light fades.

The pavement settles.

The chalk names remain.

Aníbal drops to his knees.

The object is gone.

So is the ancestor.

The crowd stands stunned, breathing together, unsure what, exactly, they have witnessed.

Aníbal looks up.

A child stands in front of him—the same age as the toddler from the office, eyes wide, steady.

“Are you okay?” the child asks.

Aníbal swallows.

“I don’t know,” he says.

The child nods, as if this is an acceptable answer.

*****

They arrest Aníbal an hour later.

Not for what happened in the plaza. There is no law for that.

They arrest him for insubordination. For breach. For “conduct unbecoming.”

The paperwork is thick. The language careful.

In the holding room, alone at last, Aníbal feels the quiet differently now.

Not empty.

Full.

The ancestor appears one final time, sitting across from him.

“You chose late,” the ancestor says. “But you chose.”

Aníbal meets his eyes.

“I won’t be redeemed,” he says.

The ancestor nods.

“No,” he agrees. “But you will be remembered correctly.”

The ancestor stands.

“When they tell this story,” he adds, “they will try to make you complicated.”

Aníbal huffs a bitter laugh.

“Let them,” he says.

The ancestor’s gaze is steady, final.

“You were simple,” he says. “You did harm. Then you stopped.”

The holding room light flickers.

When it steadies, the ancestor is gone.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

This is the first of what will be several short stories I’ll be sharing each month. For this first month, they’ll all be free to read. Going forward, I’ll offer one free short story each month, with the rest reserved for paid subscribers. If the work resonates with you, I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting this space.

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The room is dressed for gentleness.

White cloths on round tables. Water in squat glasses sweating into neat circles. A platform lifted only a foot, as if no one should have to look up too far. There are origami centerpieces, obviously cheaper than flowers. There are little tent cards that say WELCOME: MLK FOREVER in a font that isn’t much better than comic sans.

Amara sits with her back straight, not out of pride, but out of habit. Her body learned early what it means to keep itself from spilling ease in front of these folks. Her badge is clipped to her sweater at the collarbone, her name printed in black and too large, as if to help people pronounce her existence. She does not look at it. She knows who she is. That is not the problem.

Someone in HR has decided that the company will honor Martin Luther King Jr. today, and the company has decided that honoring means a free lunch.

There is a screen behind the podium showing a loop of photographs: King at a microphone, King smiling, King with his mouth open mid-sentence, King in grainy black and white, smoothed into a legend. Between the photographs, phrases appear like fortunes:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness.

I have a dream.

Love is the only force.

Each line arrives clean and exits clean. No blood. No dirt under the nails. No argument.

Amara watches the words float up and away, like steam from the food trays being rolled along the side wall. Chicken cut into obedient squares. Green beans laid straight. Overly saucy macaroni and cheese. Rolls shining with something buttery and false.

All she can think is, “These motherfuckers really bought toned-down soul food.”

The people at her table speak quietly, as if church has moved into the workplace for an hour. A man with a soft jaw says he is grateful the company “makes space for this.” A woman with a silver necklace says she loves that quote about dreams. Someone else says they took their kid to volunteer this weekend because it felt “like the right thing to do.” The words right, grateful, space, float between them and settle on the tablecloth. No one asks what they mean.

Still, Amara smiles when she must.

She is not here because she believes the company can honor a man it would have written up for sharing his political views. She is here because absence gets noticed in places like this. Absence becomes a story they tell about you. She didn’t even come. She isn’t a team player. She doesn’t engage. She doesn’t appreciate what we try to do for her. They write you in a small, clear script and then hold you to it.

So she sits.

At the front of the room, a white woman in a pale blazer approaches the podium like she is approaching a sleeping child. The woman is someone from marketing. She is known for having a voice that could sell calm to a storm. She is praised for being thoughtful. She is praised for being measured. She is praised for being the kind of person who can talk about hard things without making anyone feel uncomfortable.

The microphone makes a small hum as she adjusts it. The room quiets in practiced unison.

“Happy MLK Day, everyone,” the woman says, smiling. “Thank you for being here.”

Applause rises at once, not because it is earned yet, but because it is scheduled.

Amara feels her mouth tighten the way it does when she tastes something that is sour. She takes a sip of water. The glass leaves a cold mark on her lips.

The speaker begins with the dream.

She speaks of unity and hope and the power of kindness. She speaks of the courage to imagine a better world, of the strength it takes to love in the face of hate. She says King’s words still inspire us. She says we can each make a difference in our communities. She says kindness is how to honor his legacy. She says today is a reminder to be nicer to one another.

There is a pause after each sentence, as if the woman expects the room to nod along, and it does. Heads dip. Eyes soften. Someone murmurs “Mm.” Someone else smiles with their whole face, relieved to be moved without being asked to move.

Amara looks at the screen behind the speaker. A photo of King appears. He is at a podium, his face set in a seriousness that does not ask for permission. The photo is familiar, but it is the kind of familiarity that is a form of distance. People recognize him the way they recognize a landmark. They do not have to know anything about it to take a picture.

The speaker says, “Dr. King taught us that hate cannot drive out hate.”

Amara hears the word taught, and something in her chest flinches. As if King were a lesson plan, as if he were a friendly instructor with a warm hand on your shoulder. As if the man who had been stalked, threatened, scolded by newspapers, abandoned by allies, then assassinated, had simply shown up to teach a class on kindness.

She thinks of a video she saw about a young man who was blinded by ICE in Minnesota, of a three-year-old Palestinian girl, an amputee Ms. Rachel had on her show, of her grandfather whose shoe repair shop had been set ablaze in Orangeburg, South Carolina before she was born. Then she thinks of a phrase she read once, years ago: A time to break silence.

She thinks of silence not as the absence of sound but as a piece of furniture. Something placed in the room, heavy and normal, meant to hold you in place. Silence as a chair you are expected to sit in.

The speaker continues. “He believed in peaceful protest. He believed in bringing people together. He believed in equality.”

Believed.

The verbs are soft. The verbs are past tense, even in present tense. Believed like a bedtime story, believed like a myth. Believed like a man who is safely dead and therefore safe to quote.

Amara watches the audience. Most of them are listening with the same expression they wear in meetings when someone explains a new initiative: attentive, polite, ready to agree. She can almost see the slide deck in their minds. She can almost hear the follow-up email: Thank you for attending our MLK Day luncheon.

She looks down at her plate. The chicken has cooled. The green beans have gone limp. She pushes a fork into the roll and tears it open. The steam is gone.

Her phone is face down beside her napkin. It vibrates, but she does not pick it up. She knows what the notification likely is. A friend texting a video of a mother holding a child’s shoe like it is a relic. A message in a signal group about raids in the early morning. Another voice memo from her mother, “I respect that you care so much. But what if they take you, too? Not every protest needs you.”

The room, meanwhile, is warmed by the lie that nothing urgent is happening.

The speaker says, “In times like these, it can feel overwhelming. But we can choose love. We can choose to listen. We can choose to come together.”

She chooses love.

Amara hears it and feels heat rise in her throat, not anger, but a pre-anger, a warning flare. Love becomes a club in the hands of people who want you to be quiet. Love becomes a leash. Love becomes the word they hand you when they don’t want you to snatch justice.

She has seen it before.

In high school assemblies where they played the “I Have a Dream” speech and then sent them back to classrooms with lies they called textbooks. In college seminars where the professor praised King’s rhetoric but did not name the war he condemned. In corporate trainings where diversity meant smiling and learning everyone’s favorite food. In conversations where people loved King so much they didn’t have to do anything he asked.

It’s not new, but something about today makes it sharper.

Maybe it’s the timing. Maybe it’s the way the world has grown so loud with suffering that any attempt to quiet it feels violent. Maybe it’s the way her own life has taught her that the body can only hold so much unsaid before it begins to break in other ways.

The speaker tells a story about a volunteer project. She describes painting a community center in a “rough neighborhood.” She describes the joy of giving back. She says, “Dr. King reminds us to consider our neighbors.”

Applause again, a gentle rain.

Amara rolls her eyes. “Them niggas ain’t neighbors to no one in here.”

She thinks of service, and she thinks of the way service is used as a substitute for change. Paint the wall instead of questioning why the building is crumbling. Donate a coat instead of asking why people are cold. Give back, give back, as if you took something, as if the hunger is your fault.

She looks at the banner near the entrance: MLK DAY OF SERVICE. The word service is large. The words capitalism, genocide, colonialism are nowhere.

On the screen, another quote appears: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The room hums with agreement. It’s the kind of agreement that costs nothing.

Amara holds her fork in her hand and imagines standing. Not in a cinematic way. Not with music swelling. She imagines the simple act of rising from her chair, the way her knees might crack, the way the tablecloth might shift, the way a few heads might turn with mild annoyance.

She imagines speaking.

Not shouting. Not pleading. Not begging them to see. Just saying what is true.

She imagines the silence that would follow.

She imagines the email afterward.

She imagines her manager’s face, the one that tries to look concerned even when it’s only calculating.

She imagines consequences.

And then, deeper than consequence, she imagines what it costs her to keep sitting.

The speaker says, “Let’s all remember to keep dreaming. Let’s keep working together to make Dr. King proud.”

Make him proud.

As if the dead are supervisors. As if King is waiting with a clipboard, grading their kindness.

Amara’s mouth goes dry. She takes another sip of water, but the water does not help. It only makes her aware of thirst.

Her hands begin to shake, small, almost invisible. She presses her palms against her thighs under the table. The fabric of her pants is warm. The warmth anchors her for a moment.

The speaker says, “Thank you.”

The room applauds, relieved. People like applause because it ends things.

The speaker steps back from the podium, smiling as if she has done something brave.

Someone at the Amara’s table leans toward her and says, quietly, “That was really nice, right, Aymeera?”

Amara feels a tingle up her spine.

It’s not the fact that the woman who just butchered her name has worked with her for over six years. But rather that word.

Nice.

She hears the word and feels it land like a hand on the back of her neck.

She pushes her chair back.

The sound is small, but it cuts.

A few heads at the table turn. A few eyebrows lift. Someone pauses mid-chew. The room is still applauding, but the applause thins, like a song fading out.

She stands.

She does not do it quickly. She does not do it dramatically. She stands the way a tree stands, because that is what it is made to do. Her feet press into the carpet. The carpet is thick, meant to soften everything.

Amara begins walking toward the podium.

At first, the audience thinks she is going to the restroom. Then they think she is going to congratulate the speaker. Then they realize she is walking too straight, too deliberate, and the air changes. Confusion gathers. A hush arrives before anyone asks for it.

The marketing woman steps aside as the Amara approaches, smiling uncertainly, still in performance. But the woman dare not stop Amara if she feels called to say something—not on one of the Black people days.

Amara steps up to the microphone.

She looks out at them.

So many faces. Some curious. Some tight. Some already defensive, though she has not spoken yet. Some relieved, as if they hope she will say something humorous, something that will allow them to laugh and return to comfort. Some afraid, not of her, but of what she might force them to feel.

She adjusts the microphone slightly. It squeaks. The sound makes a few people flinch.

She breathes in.

The room waits.

Amara says, “Good afternoon.”

Her voice is steady. That steadiness surprises her. It’s not that she isn’t afraid. It’s that her fear has found a purpose and therefore has less room to roam.

She looks at the screen behind her, at King’s face, and she speaks as if she is speaking to him, not for him.

“I listened to what was said,” she begins, “and I want to add a few things that were missed.”

No one laughs.

Amara continues anyway.

“Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is not a holiday mascot. He is not a quote you can paste onto a slideshow to make yourselves feel aligned. He was a man who told the truth about this country’s violence, and he paid for it.”

She pauses. Not for effect. To make sure the words land.

She says, “He spoke against the Vietnam War. He called it out as a moral catastrophe. He said our nation was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Which people barely bring up because it’s not safe. It doesn’t let anyone go back to work feeling happy.”

A ripple moves through the room. Like wind through dry leaves.

She watches their faces change. The ones who did not know look startled, as if she is revealing something improper. The ones who did know look away, as if knowledge is a stain.

She says, “He linked war abroad to poverty at home. He said you cannot bomb people and then claim to love justice. He said you cannot spend on death and then pretend you do not have money for the living.”

The marketing woman stands near the podium, hands clasped, smile gone. Her eyes are wide. Her body is still, as if she is trying to disappear.

Amara continues.

“And he did not just believe in ‘love’ the way we like to say it now. Love wasn’t a decoration for him. Love was a demand. Love was what required him to name violence, not soften it.”

She feels her heart beating hard, but her voice stays even.

Amara says, “It’s easy to celebrate him when he’s reduced to dreams. It’s harder to sit with what he actually asked. He asked people to break their silence. He asked them to choose conscience over convenience.”

She looks at them again, letting her gaze move table to table.

She says, “And I am telling you, as we sit here eating lunch, the world is not quiet. People are being killed. People are being displaced. People are being hunted by policies and borders and uniforms. Children are learning the sound of drones and sirens and boots on stairs. Families are learning what it means to be made illegal.”

The room is so still she can hear a fork drop, soft against a plate.

She continues, “Gaza. Sudan. ICE raids. These aren’t separate from King. They are exactly what he was talking about when he said a nation that spends more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

A few people shift in their chairs. A man in the back clears his throat.

She did not stand up here to soothe them.

“You cannot honor him and refuse his critique. You cannot quote him and ignore what he said about empire and money and war. That’s not honoring. That’s laundering.”

The word laundering sits in the air.

She says, “What we did today, what we often do, is take the sharp parts of him and hide them so we can feel like good people without changing anything.”

She pauses again. She feels tears begin to gather behind her eyes, but she won’t let them fall. Not because tears would be weakness, but because tears can become a distraction. She doesn’t want them to focus on her feeling. She wants them to focus on the truth.

She says, more quietly now, “He wasn’t asking to be honored. He was asking to be heard.”

Amara stands very still. Her hands rest lightly on the podium. She can feel the polished wood. The podium is warm from the marketing woman’s hands. The warmth makes her think of how easily things pass from one person to another. A microphone. A message. A lie.

She says, “So I am asking you, on this day, to stop using his name as a lullaby. Stop using him as proof that you are good. He wasn’t killed for comforting you. He was killed because he troubled you with truth.”

No one speaks.

She looks at King’s photograph behind her. His face remains serious, unamused by their silence, but unafraid of it too.

Amara says, “That’s all.”

She steps back from the microphone.

For a moment, nothing happens.

Not even a cough.

The room does not clap. The room does not boo. The room simply stays suspended, as if everyone is waiting for someone else to decide what the correct response is.

She watches a few people glance at each other. She watches a manager’s eyes flick toward the HR table. She watches the marketing woman swallow hard, as if she has been slapped.

She expects, briefly, for a man with a title to stand and speak. She expects someone to say something about “keeping it respectful.” She expects the language of containment to arrive and wrap the room back into safety.

But none of that comes.

The silence expands.

Amara steps down from the platform.

Her shoes sink slightly into the carpet with each step, as if the building itself wants to swallow her.

She walks past her table. Someone there looks up at her with wide eyes, as if she has burned their invisible rule book. Another person keeps staring at their plate, as if the chicken can erase what happened. Someone’s mouth opens as if to speak, then closes. The words die before they are born.

She does not stop.

She walks toward the exit.

The banner near the doorway still reads MLK DAY OF SERVICE. The words are unchanged. She passes beneath them as if walking out from under a low ceiling.

In the lobby outside the ballroom, the air is cooler. The hotel smells like citrus cleaner and old perfume. People move through the space with coats on their arms and phones in their hands, not knowing what happened in the room behind the closed doors.

She stands still for a moment, just breathing.

Her heart is still pounding, but now it feels like a drum that has returned to its proper place in her body. Not panic. Rhythm.

Amara thinks, briefly, of the people inside. She thinks of their discomfort. She thinks of their silence. She thinks of how tonight, some of them will sit around their kitchen table and tell the story of the Black woman who “lost it.”

She reaches for the name badge pinned to her sweater, pulls it off gently, and stares at it for a moment. Then her mouth slowly curls into the widest smile she’s ever had in this building.

She tosses the name badge into a trash can near the front door.

Then she walks into the cold.

No applause follows.

It is enough.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

The song I was listening to when writing them:

Song on the Beach - Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

My Friends,

The holidays have a way of revealing what we are made of.

It is a season when the contradictions of this country sit close to the surface. Abundance beside absence. Celebration beside quiet panic. Children waiting for joy while adults calculate what must be sacrificed to make room for it. In moments like that, one begins to understand that care is never abstract. It is always specific. It is always costly. It always asks something of us.

This year we brought our annual care to Gladys Books & Wine.

I had only been in Gladys Books twice before holding our holiday mutual aid event there, but from the moment I first walked in, I know I wanted to support the space. Especially because it was touted as being a Black woman queer-owned establishment. But beyond that, there was something in the name, in the intention, that felt familiar. Then I learned that the owner was someone I already knew—Tiffany Dockery. And then I learned the deeper truth.

The store exists in honor of her grandmother, Gladys. A woman whose life, like so many grandmothers’ lives, was not recorded in headlines but preserved in practice. Books passed down. Doors kept open. People welcomed in.

That was another moment when I felt my own grandmother, Thelma, whispering quietly over my shoulder.

My mutual organization, We Have Stories, exists because of Thelma. Because of what she survived. Because of what she gave without calling it generosity. Because she understood, long before there was language for it, that survival is communal. That no one gets through this world alone, no matter how loudly the culture insists otherwise. Much of what I do now is an attempt to keep her present, not as memory alone, but as instruction.

Standing in a space named for another grandmother, doing work animated by the same impulse, felt less like coincidence than inheritance. As though Gladys and Thelma were continuing a conversation through us. As though they were reminding us that love, if it is to mean anything, must take form.

So on Christmas Eve, together, we gave away over $50,000 in mutual aid. More than $30,000 in books and toys. Over $20,000 in direct cash support. More than 200 families were met in a moment when the world feels increasingly unlivable for those without cushion or protection.

This is not a small thing, not in a year like this one. A year in which the cost of living has risen beyond reason, houselessness has become impossible to ignore, and cruelty has once again been given permission to speak plainly. A year in which systems reveal, without shame, who they are designed to abandon. In such a time, mutual aid is not sentimental. It is defiant. It is the refusal to accept that suffering must be normalized.

Over the course of 2025, we gave away more than $150,000 in mutual aid. But numbers alone cannot account for what this represents. What matters is the insistence. The insistence that we are responsible for one another. The insistence that our ancestors did not endure what they endured so that we might become indifferent.

This feels like the right way to close the giving year. Not with declarations of victory, but with resolve. With gratitude. With the understanding that the work continues, because it must.

You can see the rest of Sayra’s wonderful photos from the event here.

With Love,
Fred

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

We’ve raised $15,000 of $30,000 to buy toys, books, coats, and give financial help to 200 families for the eighth year in a row.

I want to start there, not because it’s impressive, but because it’s real. It means in the past few days, people stopped in the middle of everything else they’re carrying, and chose to care. That matters more to me than the number itself.

But I also want to be honest about where we are.

We’re only halfway to our $30,000 goal, and we have literally only two days left. If we don’t make it, parts of what we planned simply won’t happen. That’s not a metaphor. It’s not urgency theater. It’s just the reality of trying to take care of people in a moment when everything feels stacked against them.

This is our eighth year doing Christmas Eve mutual aid. Eight years of toys for kids. Eight years of coats when the cold sets in. Eight years of food, of small financial relief, of families getting through a day that can feel especially cruel when you’re already struggling. This year, we’re trying to support 200 families.

Help Families

And the backdrop matters.

Donald Trump is waging war on marginalized people. The cost of living keeps rising while wages don’t. Houselessness has exploded in ways that are visible on every block if you’re willing to look. ICE continues to terrorize families. We are still watching genocide unfold in real time, funded and defended by governments that still expect us to go about our days like this is normal. Every headline feels heavier than the last. Every system feels more openly hostile. There’s a particular kind of numbness that sets in when the harm is constant and the scale is so large you don’t know where to put your hands.

I feel that numbness too. It’s hard to find it in me to write—let alone continue to ask people to donate to help strangers. But what mutual aid does, at its best, is interrupt the heaviness.

Not by pretending things aren’t bad, but by refusing to let that be the end of the story. It creates a small, concrete place where the answer isn’t despair or scrolling or rage alone, but action. Someone eats. Someone stays warm. A child feels joy for a moment. A family breathes a little easier.

That may sound small compared to everything we’re up against. It’s not. It’s how people survive.

If you’ve been reading my work, supporting it, sharing it, or just staying in conversation with me this year, I want you to know how deeply thankful I am. This mutual aid effort is the last thing I’m asking for this year, and I’m asking because the moment is here and the window is closing.

If you have five dollars, it helps. Truly. If you have more, it helps even more.
If you don’t have anything to give, I still mean it when I say thank you for being here.

Help Families

Also, if you want to let more people know what’s going on so they can support as well—there’s a flyer about the effort below that you can share on social media or print and give to folks.

Help Families

I am eighteen, a few weeks from my high school graduation, and the floor of Red Lobster is carpeted in a gray that pretends it is neutral. The lights hang low, forgiving no one. Butter lives in the air here. Salt does too. It coats everything, even the way I breathe. Ironically, it never smells much of fish. I am carrying plates past a table of four, smiling with my mouth only, my body moving on a practiced path that knows where not to bump, where not to spill. My hands are steady. That surprises my coworkers. Everything else is not.

The woman at the table is asking for more biscuits. The man is laughing loudly, his laugh cracking open and spilling across the room like something dropped. I nod. I always nod. My voice comes out even, polite, trained. I hear myself say Of course as if it belongs to someone else. My body is here, but my mind is miles away. It is somewhere north and south at the same time. It is in Scarsdale and it is in the Bronx. It is holding plates and holding a breath it does not want to let go of.

Calvary Hospital keeps appearing behind my eyes. White walls. Quiet halls. The smell that is not quite medicine and not quite death but knows both intimately. My grandmother is there. My best friend. She is dying slowly of her second battle with breast cancer, which is its own kind of cruelty, because slow dying gives you time to think, and time costs money, and we do not have it. Every hour she stays there feels borrowed. Every minute feels like a bill we cannot pay.

I set the plates down. Lobster tails glisten under the lights, pink and split open, butter pooling. Someone says thank you. Someone says can I get another drink. I nod again. I am nodding myself thin.

I am supposed to be at the hospital. I am supposed to be sitting at her bedside, watching her chest rise and fall, counting each one as if the number would hold her here. I am supposed to be memorizing her face while it is still hers. Instead I am here, working hours into the night after school, refilling water glasses, wiping crumbs, doing math in my head that never comes out right. I am saving for something I do not want to buy. I am saving for goodbye.

Hospice costs money. Funerals cost more. Grief, it turns out, is not free.

I turn toward the kitchen. The swing doors breathe in and out, in and out, like something alive. The heat hits me first. The clatter follows. Plates collide. Pans scream. Orders are shouted and caught midair. This is where the noise lives, where you come when you want to disappear for just a second. I lean forward, checking the heat lamp, scanning for the ticket number I memorized because I have to keep moving. If I stop, everything else will catch up.

That is when I see them.

My classmate and coworker, Dwayne, is standing near the office. He has his phone in his hand, which is wrong already because we are not supposed to have them out. His shoulders are tight. His face is doing something I have never seen it do before. Our manager, Kelvin, is beside him, leaning down slightly, listening too closely. They are both looking at me. Not past me. Not through me. At me.

Something shifts in my chest. It is small at first, like a warning knock.

Kelvin calls my name. My name sounds strange in his mouth, heavier than it should be. I take a step forward. The plate in my hands tilts just a little. I correct it without thinking.

Dwayne looks at me and then looks away. His eyes are wet. That is when I know. I know before he opens his mouth. I know before the words come out crooked and careful, as if they might break if he is not gentle enough.

Your mom just called, he says.

The room narrows. The sounds stretch thin. The kitchen becomes distant, like it is underwater. I am suddenly aware of every smell at once. Butter. Shrimp. Burnt bread. Cleaning solution. Sweat. I am aware of the rubber matting beneath my feet, tacky with grease, holding the imprint of a hundred nights like this.

He does not rush. He does not have to. The words arrive anyway.

Your grandmother passed away.

The sentence lands and the world does not end, which feels like a betrayal. Instead, gravity remembers me. It pulls hard. My knees give first. The plate slips from my hands, falls, shatters. The sound is sharp and wet and wrong. Food splatters across the floor. Something cracks inside me that makes no noise at all.

I am on the ground before I understand that I am falling. The gray carpet presses into my palms. The smell rushes up and fills my mouth. Someone gasps. Someone swears. Someone says my name again, softer this time, as if volume might have caused this.

I am crying, but it feels delayed, like it had to travel a long distance to reach me. My chest caves inward. My throat burns. I see her face then, clear as if she is standing in front of me, not in a hospital bed miles away. I see her hands. I hear her voice. I think of all the hours I traded for tips, all the nights I was not there. I think of the money still missing, the bills that will not stop coming just because she has stopped breathing.

The kitchen smells stay with me. The sound of the plate breaking stays. I know, even now, that this moment will never leave me. I know that years from now, I will still be able to stand in this place without being here, feel the rubber flooring under my knees, hear the crash, smell the butter, and be eighteen again, holding food meant for strangers while my best friend is leaving the world.

************

There are days that arrive as days do, without announcement, and there are days that arrive already carrying something with them. Today is such a day. The calendar does not distinguish it from any other. The clock does not hesitate. And yet the body knows. The body receives the date not as information but as weight.

It has been nearly twenty years since my grandmother died, and still, on her birthday, the floor seems to give way in the same manner it did that night at Red Lobster. Not in memory. In sensation. The drop is immediate. Familiar. The years do not intervene. They do not buffer the fall. What I feel is not similar to what I felt then. It is the same.

This sameness unsettles me. It challenges the assurances we are given about time, about distance, about the supposed mercy of years. We are told that time moves forward, that it carries us away from what once undid us, that it leaves things behind. We are told that what recedes grows quieter. But the body tells a different story. The body keeps its own calendar. It refuses to forget what it once learned how to feel.

It is tempting to call this memory, but memory implies distance, a looking back from somewhere safe. What happens on days like this is not recollection but return. When one of her favorite Al Green songs finds me unguarded, I hear the vinyl turning steadily in her living room, I am not thinking about her dancing. I am there again. The furniture shifts to make room for her movement. The air changes. The room I am currently in loses its authority. Time loosens its grip.

The body arrives before the mind can object. The temperature changes. Something drops in the chest. The throat tightens around a sound that does not belong to the present moment. The calendar insists it has been decades. The body refuses to negotiate.

This is not unique to grief. Grief is simply my most honest example. The same thing happens with love. With joy. With fear. A song can return you to your first love with such precision it feels surgical. The opening notes play and suddenly you are younger, standing in a different room, with a different posture, believing things you no longer believe. The years between collapse. You are not remembering who you were. You are briefly being who you were.

Taste works the same way. You eat something you have not eaten in years and the mouth recognizes it instantly. A kitchen appears. A table. Someone who once fed you. Someone you once needed. The feeling arrives intact. Not dulled. Not archived. Whole.

Even places behave this way. A certain carpet. A certain smell. Butter in the air. The sound of a plate breaking where it should not. These details do not age. They wait. And when they return, they do not knock.

We like to believe we govern our interior lives, that we can choose when to feel and when to remain intact. But these moments reveal the fiction in that belief. We do not decide when we return. We are summoned. The invitation is not optional.

The body is how this happens. The body does not distinguish between past and present the way the mind insists on doing. It recognizes rhythm, pressure, frequency. It remembers what it learned when it first learned it. This is why the reaction is physical before it is conceptual. The body has already arrived by the time the mind begins to ask what year it is.

I do not believe this means we are trapped in the past. That accusation misunderstands what is actually occurring. This is not stagnation. It is motion. It is evidence that something reached us deeply enough to remain reachable. That we were changed in ways that time did not undo.

We are taught to equate growth with distance. To grow, we are told, is to leave things behind. To heal is to feel less. To mature is to be less affected. But what if maturity is not insulation? What if it is capacity? The capacity to hold more than one time at once. The capacity to feel without breaking. The capacity to return without being lost.

There is a loneliness to this, because the world does not move when you do. The room remains the same. The day continues. No one announces that you have briefly been relocated. You are expected to keep standing even as part of you is somewhere else entirely. But perhaps this is depth.

To live fully is to accept interruption. To accept that certain songs will always undo you. That certain dates will always carry weight. That certain moments will never become stationary. This is not because you have failed to move on. It is because you allowed yourself to be marked.

Time, then, is not the neutral force we imagine. It does not dissolve emotion. It rearranges it. It gives it new entrances, new disguises, new ways of arriving. The idea that time heals all wounds is less an observation than a wish. What time actually does is make room.

This is why grief still finds me years later, especially on my grandmother’s birthday. And why joy does too. And love. And longing. These emotions are not fixed to their original moments. They travel. They migrate. They wait.

Perhaps this is what it means to be human: to live in layered time, to carry many versions of ourselves within us, each waiting for the right sound, the right taste, the right room to surface. None of these selves disappear. They remain reachable.

Because by the end of the day, the song will fade. The date will pass. The floor will be solid again. And yet something will remain altered. You will know, again, that time is not as simple as it pretends to be. That emotions move more freely than bodies do. That love does not recognize expiration dates.

Our emotional lives are not straight lines but constellations, lighting up in response to whatever draws near. And perhaps that is the real work of time—not to make us forget, but to teach us how to carry what has touched us without dropping it, even when the floor gives way.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

Thank You, Erykah

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.

I have been thinking a lot about presence as this year folds into its final weeks. Not the presence that appears in self-help books, morning mantras, or in filtered Instagram captions that often offer comfort without weight. I mean the older kind of presence. The kind that asks a person to sit fully inside their own life. The kind that asks for vulnerability, patience, and the courage to feel something without immediately turning it into something consumable. A presence that stands like a witness and says I am here, even when the world keeps insisting that we perform instead of live.

I keep returning to a simple question. What does it mean to be present in a time when everything pushes us toward performance and harm. Because we are not only performing for attention anymore. We are performing for survival. We are performing for safety in a country where people are being deported without warning. We are performing for stability in a world where the cost of groceries and rent feels like a punishment for existing. We are performing for a sense of belonging in a time when genocide streams across our screens in real time and people debate the value of human life as if it were a theory.

In a world like this, presence becomes political survival. Presence becomes a refusal. Presence becomes a way to say I will not disappear inside your systems or your screens or your expectations.

Living inside so much crisis can make a person forget that the first place presence disappears is within ourselves. Before the world erodes our communities it erodes our attention and our inner steadiness.

Some of these thoughts began after a few long talks with one of my closest friends, my brother . A few weeks ago he stepped away from using social media for anything other than promotional and sharing needs. He did not leave because he was angry. He did not leave because of the community he had found on the platforms. He left because he wanted his life to belong to him again. He wanted to feel his days without the constant pressure to perform them. He wanted vinyls, movies, and books that he tells his closest friends about—as opposed to the tens of thousands of people who follow him.

I witnessed a similar decision years ago from another dear brother, I watched him reclaim parts of himself that the world kept tugging at. He went even further than most by deleting his social media accounts entirely, a choice that felt less like disappearance and more like a return to himself.

Watching Joel, Robert, and others choose that path has made me look at myself. I have had to admit how much of my own interior world I have handed over to the endless machine of production.

When you make a living as a writer today, performance becomes part of the job whether you agree to it or not. A book is not simply a book. It becomes a project with links, rollouts, announcements, campaigns, algorithms, and a series of quiet hopes that people will pre-order or share. Even a Substack post becomes something more than a piece of writing. It becomes a call for support and a reminder that this work only continues if people see value in it. And when paid subscribers fall, it does not feel like a business shift. It feels like a verdict about whether your work matters (I see this as I currently hemorrhage paid subscribers, ha).

Performance follows you everywhere. You walk into a room that is supposed to hold art or curiosity or joy and the conversation shifts toward follower counts, bestseller lists, awards, and which agency represents you. People talk about belonging as if it can be measured through metrics. As if the proof of a writer is in the numbers rather than the soul of the work.

But this pressure does not belong only to writers and artists. It belongs to all of us now. We live in a culture that rewards constant visibility. We live in a time when silence is treated like apathy and stillness is treated like laziness. Privacy becomes suspicion. Thoughtfulness becomes delay. Even grief must be packaged. Even joy must be explained.

No wonder we feel tired. No wonder so many people have forgotten how to simply be. Because if we cannot sit with ourselves, we cannot sit with each other either. We lose the ability to listen. We lose the ability to imagine alternatives. We lose the ability to build movements that require time and intimacy. And meanwhile the world burns on. Fascism rises in quiet corridors. Children are bombed while politicians debate semantics. Climate disasters suddenly hit towns that have never seen floods. ICE kicks in doors in the middle of the night. People work two and three jobs and still cannot afford a day of rest. Violence becomes background noise.

Presence in a world like this is not a spiritual exercise. It is a political act. It is a refusal to let crisis steal our inner lives.

The speed of our world is its own kind of violence. We are asked to react before we understand. To post before we process. To respond before we feel. We are encouraged to perform urgency instead of practicing care. And this erodes the very things that keep us human. It erodes attention. It erodes the slow unfolding of a life. It erodes the ground that art grows from.

Watching Joel, Robert, and others step away from social media is a reminder that refusing this violence is still possible. Their choice is a form of reclamation. A way of taking back their sense of self from the constant demand to be visible. It made me ask what I want my life to feel like, not what I want it to look like. And that question is changing everything. Because the real danger of performance is not that we confuse others. It is that we lose our ability to tell the truth to ourselves.

I was thinking about what the last day was that felt fully mine. It was a quiet evening sitting on my couch with a copy of The Essential June Jordan in my hands, “Magnolia” by J.J. Cale playing in the background, and the city spread out beneath my windows like a moving mural. The only thing moving in the room was my dog, Stokely. I was turning the pages and letting the sentences rise in me without rushing to share, annotate, or meet a deadline to blurb. I was simply reading a book while the world moved outside my window. It was small, almost embarrassingly simple, yet it was one of the few moments I can recently remember myself as a person rather than a producer or some sort of vessel.

It is obvious I am still learning what presence really is. I would not pretend otherwise. But I know for certain it does not come dressed in glamour. Presence does not ask to be admired. It asks to be lived. It cannot be saved, shared, filtered, or branded. It is necessary for love, trust, imagination, community, and healing. Presence holds contradictions without rushing to resolve them. Presence creates the conditions where justice can begin. Presence allows people to gather in real rooms and plan real change.

Yet so many of us cannot remember the last time we lived something without the instinct to narrate it. We try to archive our lives while forgetting to live them. The result is a spiritual thinning that takes something vital away from us.

A people who cannot be present cannot resist effectively. A people who cannot slow down cannot imagine anything better than what they have. A people who perform more than they connect cannot build the kind of solidarity required to survive these times.

Which brings me back to writing. I believe writing is the act of sitting still long enough to hear the small truth behind the larger truth. Writing asks for patience, discomfort, and quiet. But the way we work now forces many writers to create faster than they can feel or grow. It is not only a creative challenge. It is a spiritual loss.

So I want to return to presence. Not as an escape, but as survival. I want my life to unfold in rooms where people speak without worrying about how they sound in the minds of strangers. I want conversations that wander. I want laughter that arrives without a camera ready to catch it.

And this is not to say that I will delete my social media, because the truth is that I cannot afford to do that as an author who is still carving out space in the publishing world of this moment. But two things can be true at once. I can choose to emphasize the offline parts of my life while still using the online world as a vessel for connection rather than an altar for worship, which is what it has quietly become for so many people.

I want my readers to feel that presence. I want them to feel a kind of permission. Permission to breathe. Permission to slow down. Permission to be fully human in a world that tries to turn people into content and statistic. If the world insists on reducing us, let the page be where we expand.

A sentence without presence is only ink. A sentence with presence is a living thing. And I want to offer that living thing to anyone who finds their way to my work. Because yes, I want people to act on the truths I write, but I also want to remind us that we are allowed to move at a human pace. We are allowed to take our time.

If my pages of poetry, essays, and novels can hold that, then maybe they can hold us. If the writing can be present, then maybe we can remember presence again. And if we can remember presence again, maybe we can survive this moment without losing ourselves.

I believe that is how we keep saying I am here in a world that keeps trying to make us disappear.

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or made you feel seen, please consider ordering my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber. I keep my writing free because I believe in access, but sustaining that vision takes support. Your contribution helps me keep creating with care and honesty.