The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Letter Please:

I love coming back here to this newsletter at the end of every month. It’s like returning to a favourite park bench or beloved booth at a diner; seeing what’s changed and what remains. What song can you hear this time, and what shape does your shadow make? What winnowed revelation appears; what grief, what thrum, what way to see the world anew.

Well I feel none of that incantatory calm right now. None! Gotcha! Right this moment I am crying on a train, with my back to the future, vertigo eyes laptop-looking while the trees wrong me. How dare they disappear rather than approach!

Everything went wrong this morning. It was already getting light at four when I began my quest to get back to London from the north. A grainy Sunday dawn mocked the remaining Saturday nighters and their borrowed-from-tomorrow stumbles. I didn’t exactly feel better than them. But I didn’t not feel better than them. I feel sorry about that now.

Lately I’d been priding myself on not needing to compulsively text my mum my obsessive thought loops. Well I just caved. (I binged? I thought-relapsed?) And then I performed a manic close reading of Aldous Harding’s song, “What Am I Gonna Do,” from her new album Train on the Island, released this month.

The song goes:

What my God is thinking?
I get lost in that place
…
I know things ain't working out
But they may come good later
I hope I'm more than I think about

My mum sent me back an audiofile of her cat purring.

(Damnit the newsletter-as-pilgrimage-to-the-park-bench worked on me again. I do feel a prayerful calm. I do feel my self pop back into its socket, tender but intact.)

Digest Please (three texts I appreciated this month):

• “I knew that I was going to die, but I had to stay alive, even though I had already lost my baby. I woke up in the Indonesian Hospital fifteen days later, to the voice of my uncle, and I couldn’t see anything. My uncles were crying all around me, I could hear voices, then I blacked out again. I didn’t know myself for an instant and I asked someone nearby, Who am I?’”
  
  - Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Palestine, Samar Yazbek Translated by Leri Price, Fitzcarraldo Editions, p. 164.
  

• “Adults use children to manage their own childhood, writes Young-Bruehl in Childism (2012). They do not meet them, emotionally, as they really are but rather through the filter of their own, unresolved disappointments, humiliations, unmet longings and terrors. The child is an unwitting participant in the adult’s struggles to regulate feelings that were never made sense of in their own early life.”
  
  - Being small: Nobody quite recovers from being a child: the asymmetry of power between parents and children always leaves a trace, Tom Wooldridge, Aeon Magazine.
  

• Not at all literary, but a surprisingly refreshing textual experience! I started a new work contract and needed to do the compliance training, including Safeguarding Adults and Safeguarding Children. I actually love these compulsory modules. I read every section in detail. I love the quiz at the end. I think my appreciation comes after starting my adult life in New Zealand, where I witnessed and experienced bullying and sexual harassment, where I spoke up but there was nothing much but a pained shrug or a there there pat on the shoulder or a, “you’ll have to get used to that around here”. I feel good when I read these UK modules. A cynic slash economic materialist would say maybe that’s all they’re really there for — a feel-good sense of trust to manufacture consent. And yes, I know reality is messy compared to policy. But I love that there is something of integrity there in plain language, and someone has put a lot of time and effort into the writing of these units to make them as accessible as possible. It’s an art form, I tell you! One section urges professionals to avoid stereotypes and bias about what abuse can look like. “We need to think the unthinkable”. Okay now that’s a turn of phrase! I love that these modules plainly recognise our psychological foibles; our normalcy bias and bystander tendencies.
  
  Another plain-spoken moment in the training: “Violence is commonplace and frequent in nature”. (Okay module-writers, yes! Give it to me! I am loving this mash of HR and anthropology.) The paragraph went on to say that at the escalatory stage preceding physical violence, “the worst approach is to use an intervention that assumes the person is thinking rationally”. Too true. This gem, too: “non-matching behaviour is when your body language contradicts what you say. People pick up on this, even if we think we are not being obvious. You will find being genuine, open and honest, reduces the probability of conflict.” Thank you!

  And this definition that disarmed me in its directness: “Trauma is an event that combines fear, horror and/or terror with an actual or perceived loss of control. It can often be a life-changing event with negative and sometimes lifelong consequences.” That forward slash did so much for me. Horror and/or terror, hell yeah! Many such cases right here!

Archive Please:

May 2025 - Damnit Hanny, she was pissed: “After 20 months of atrocity it is mind-numbing to see some institutions and leaders now come to find some weaselly kind of voice. None are saying, “gosh I was wrong”. Instead they behave as though something new or different has happened, and that there is a category change in the situation. Polite people who care only about preserving normality, and their place in it.”

May 2024 - Damnit Hanny, maybe poetrylessness is perennial May problem: “It’s one of those rare end-of-month times that holds no impulse to alchemise poetry from existence. Tonight there’s no sudden arrival of the usual proper peace that comes when I sit down here for my appointment with you, to find out together what is real and true.”

May 2023 - Damnit Hanny, she really went there: “You’ve got lovely long hair don’t you, can you tie that up? Sure, of course. Is there any chance that you could be pregnant? No. Can you hold still? Yes. Even more still? Mmm. Can you take only the shallowest of breaths? Actually can you hold it? Can you hold it in?”

May 2022 - Damnit Hanny, maybe May is for poetry after all: “The only place that feels like home here is the island, which can’t stay home forever. On the ferry back to the little house from the city last night I sat alone out on the top deck. White harbour lights began to perforate the night wash of blue-black. A choreography of seagulls wheeled about the berthing boat.”

May 2021 - Damnit Hanny, that dog is dead now: “Joanie was looking out at the garden as she peeled potatoes, Ryan was at the table patting the proudly offered tummy of the floor-rolling dog, and I was tidying away the clean lunch dishes from the drying rack when she said it. “I think what’s hardened me is death, being around so much of it.””

May 2020 - Damnit Hanny, maybe you should put more current affairs in your newsletters again. This one is a real time capsule (feat. the brief cancellation of Alison Roman!): “Such a moment of backlash or cancellation is a relief, of sorts. Catharsis feels good (see - racism does have consequences! We aren’t just getting away with it anymore! Maybe there is a scrap of justice in this world!). But it’s all too neat and ritualistic: we can exteriorise then exorcise the discomfort of knowing that our existence has been made possible on the back of others’ suffering. Cancellation tells us how not to do things, how not to say things. But what to do?”

Okay one more photograph of the early summer genre, why not (is there a rule that rhododendrons must be planted in twos? And in two shades? This duo is everywhere):

Until next month may you receive a cat’s purr in a moment of need. Or, you know, feel free to borrow from tomorrow. I won’t judge you,
H x

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You get a prize if you can speak
- Tusiata Avia

My phone has been broken this month (how very Ben Lerner Transcription of me). Well, broken for the last six months, really. I can’t take photos anymore. No screenshots (this one I surprisingly miss maybe the most). My notes app deletes what I’ve written. WhatsApp crashes. A lot of the time I am living under a thick sludge anyway, so this lack of phone function doesn’t really matter. But I’ve been trying to care more about myself and write down my dreams when I wake up. I dream a lot. They fade so fast and typing is quicker than a notebook.

So I send text messages to myself. I type my message and hit the blue arrow, whereupon the the text is doubled and split into twins. There’s a blue bubble and there’s an identical grey one. I’m used to the blue being me, the words I say, and the grey being someone else, the words I receive. So I expect the blue/sending self to be the originator. But there’s a trick — the moment I press the send arrow the blue bubble appears first, only to be swiftly displaced by the grey bubble in the linear text log, a doppelganger self that gets in ahead of me to send it first. The grey me-that-receives exists before the blue me-that-sends. The person who sent it actually received it, and there is even a read receipt. She read it! She thought she sent it but she received.

I do think that’s what writing is, though. Receiving first. An ancient sandstorm swirls and all we can do is close our hands around a few grains. We shelter ourselves for a second to examine what astonishment lies in our palm before the grains are whisked away again. Right now I feel the sandstorm raging with more fury than ever. Language is revolting. Language is angry at the harm we have done to it; all of our inaccuracies, untruths, cowardices, parrotings. My eyes are stinging in the angry storm, I can’t grasp enough. I swear I once lived in a world of clement trade winds — I could open and close my hand, grasp and be astonished and tell about it. Now I just can’t grasp. Empty-handed I can’t seem to shelter myself either, not even for a second. The sand is flaying my face and filling my mouth. My throat is concrete. I can’t speak.

One time I was part of a study programme where the participants started to take on the language of the course leader. They used whole phrases lifted from the speeches of the leader. The phrases were lovely but incomplete. They were incomplete thoughts, but everyone spoke them as if they were final. Language was dying there. I remember trying to explain it to a peer, why I knew this wasn’t the place for me. Words had been domesticated and tamed. Words were parched and unfree. Words were dying for some refreshment. But I couldn’t make myself clear enough for her to understand me. Or she couldn’t make herself clear enough to me. I backpeddled to save us from this failure. Panic and nicety stacked in a trenchcoat.

Now I think I am the peer that can’t find the right response to make or meet a truth. Someone says something and I am completely blank. Language is so angry at me. I can’t dress nice lies in a trenchcoat. But I don’t know how to say what I can really see, either. I can’t seem to speak accurately. I can’t lie but I can’t tell the truth, either. I don’t mean I am obscuring or rationing the truth, I just can’t find an accurate translation. The language centre doesn’t work.

Can you sustain brain damage from witnessing what we’ve been witnessing? Is that what’s happening? I don’t know. You can definitely sustain language damage. The forced non-performativity of words that mean everything and are made to mean and do nothing still does something to everyone. The energy that would have gone into the proper enactment of speech acts still has to go somewhere. I will speak plainly. “Free Palestine” is meant to perform the action of freeing Palestine. Where does the energy go when those words are deadened rather than enacted? It’s whipped into the fiercest sandstorm. It’s flaying my face and filling my throat. I need to re-learn to speak, so that I can find people and we can shelter each other for even just a second, to inspect what’s in our fists, open-palmed to life. All power and grace to the flotilla.

*
Archive Please (I just noticed the location palindrome!)

April 2025 (London) “Mass was spooky, and I kind of liked it.”
April 2024 (Edinburgh) “The whole of the UK was inside a cloud … baubles of malicious chill. I found myself sobbing for my reunion with this good mean old place.”
April 2023 (Waiheke) “Right up until the morning of the race I’d believed that a marathon was about running. I was wrong.”
April 2022 (Waiheke) “I’ve been able to access the counselling service at the local marae … Each session we meet beneath a tree.”
April 2021 (Edinburgh) “I run my hand along each wall by way of farewell, saying thank you to the house.”
April 2020 (London) “I don’t think in words - do you? I want a more diagrammatic way to say the things that come to mind.”

*

I want to thank you so sincerely for letting me be open-palmed to life here once a month. I can’t always speak but I feel you sheltering me, even for a second. I hope you receive a second of shelter here from time to time, too. I love you.

Until next month,
Hannah x

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One more, why not:

Was writing in that case a form of housekeeping? A way of bringing things into order? When Adam named everything in the Garden of Eden, was he in fact doing the work of a housewife?
- Olga Ravn, My Work

I got too excited, I started thinking about writing this letter early. Why wait till the end of the month, I thought to myself. I was in the departure lounge. I was flying. I was flying in all the ways. I was high from the war*. Mind altered and racing, roaring heat and prickling numbness, voltage hurtling between electrodes, intake-compression-combustion-intake-compression-combustion, sulfur sputter, black tar, no no no, surely life has been cheapened enough, surely this can’t be what life is possible of meaning. I felt clear-skied in my denial. I was flying high on NO, I could say anything to anyone, life itself meant so much to me, my life meant so much to me, your money or your life, my LIFE.

But when I got back to earth all the confidence flaked away. My skin flared up. Psoriasis or eczema or demodex mites or a mould reaction or a vague sort of post-viral immune mis-firing. (All of these ideas floated by the last GP I tried. Were they being clinically humble or were they being a conspiracy theorist? I am not used to GPs sharing when they really don’t know the answer, turning their screen to show me their search results. I was excited and also suspicious. You can’t just give someone a list of half-baked theories and a catch-all prescription for various creams, surely? I went away and looked up demodex mites and found out they’re nearly always already there.)

“I’ve got jetlag-induced psychosis!” I told my sister. “No, scratch that, you know me, I love hyperbole but I hate the diagnostic turn! So I’ll just say I’m feeling horrible! Nothing makes sense. I can’t speak. I cried on a park bench for two hours. I can’t understand anything. Why am I here. I don’t know anyone and I’ve got too much time to think about it now. Before, well, I honestly forgot about everyone and everything that I cared about. I was so employed that I was in a tunnel, not good or bad (well, maybe bad), but it definitely provided an existential winnowing. I couldn’t remember anything or anyone, and it didn’t matter. Now I remember everything and everyone and it matters so much that my heart is—”

*

When my brother got back to London I met him at the Heath (spring haze, the day after the hot day, wearing shorts and trying not to regret it), and he told me about his flight home from Turku being cancelled; his quick pivot to catching the night ferry to Stockholm, where he found a flight to Heathrow in the morning.
“Oh but you’ve always wanted to catch the ferry through the frozen sea from Finland to Sweden, haven’t you! What a happy accident!”
“Well, no, I can’t say I have ever dreamed of such a thing.”
“Oh, that’a right, it’s Ryan. It’s Ryan’s dream.”
How could I get them confused?

Jonty and Ryan are both born in November, a decade apart. My brother and my partner. I don’t often write about my brother because he is probably more of a private person than me. I don’t have automatic rights to his person or stories. He is Scorpionic, if you go in for that. One time I went on a trip with the two of them, my partner and my brother. Ryan was really good at communicating with everyone and leading the charge on trying-anything-once, big smile and open hands like a universal trust-me translator. Some people make things happen; other people make something of the times where nothing seems to be happening.

My brother was really good at making eye contact in a fast-forming moment of mirth, finding the humour latent in every situation then going all-in, potential energy to kinetic energy, his face creasing up so comprehensively. Like when our building’s elevator reminded him of a padded cell and in an instant he became the actor and I became the director, how his eyes turned to those familiar half moons of helpless laughter. Or when my brother and I ganged up on Ryan to convince him to procure and wear a pair of Havaianas. Ryan got a blister between his toes. The flip-flop form was truly that new to him. But he persisted.

A go-on-I-dare-you edge can always go wrong. To find thrill in saying something silly that could be real (or something so real that it sounds silly, you never can tell), I don’t know, the dopamine can make a person mean. But somehow that’s never true with my siblings. Luckily my brother and I keep the stakes low, anyway. More like improv. Yes, and! Yes, and flip-flops! Anyway my partner and my brother have known each other for over 16 years. So they are kind of like brothers now. Neither of them have a brother of their own. They are each the youngest in a world of sisters. But haven’t you heard? My brother just accidentally fulfilled my partner’s dream to cross the frozen sea from Finland to Sweden.

*

Until next month may you feel and fail and feel and fail, again and again,

H x

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*Another way to put it: “I find this to be increasingly kind of the feeling of being alive today: sorrow is the content, ecstasy is the form,” said Jia Tolentino in her short-form discussion of her New Yorker piece on Robyn’s music this month.

the violent inertia of ordinary life
- Anisha Sankar, via Betty Davis

February 28th V.1

This year I’ll live this last day of the month twice, on account of a timezone hurtle. A twenty-nine-day February for me; my own personal leap year. Back at my parents’ place lives an old cardboard box of un-sorted family photographs. We siblings hauled it out of the attic on a visit one year with the idea of making proper memory-respecting albums. We thought we should make linear page-turning sense of the jumble of eras. Instead we greedily looked through them all, ooh-ing and ahh-ing, laughing and crowing, then put them back in the box in an even more jumbled state and left it on the kitchen table. The box of memories has never moved and has now been commandeered by the cats as a raised bed — their plinth or even their throne. Time is a jet-cheatable thing; time is a cat bed.

I’ve been on the go this month, working a lot in a very hands-on/thinking-mind-off capacity, then zooming about to recharge some relationships. Which is another way of saying that I have not been writing this month. I feel good and outwardly employed and useful, but also completely alien to myself. When I don’t write I am something like a squid, without a spine. I don’t know myself. It’s like a long winter where the sun never touches your face. You are okay, but not fully alive or activated, not stretching out to meet the light.

Somewhere in-between February 28th V. 1 & February 28th V. 2

I’m on the plane and I take a sleeping pill while listening to the audiobook of Olga Ravn’s novel, My Work. I’ve never taken a sleeping pill before. I lower my eye mask and wait for a wave to take me under. But nothing happens. As I wait, the character of Anna, the Olga-mother-avatar in the novel, also takes a sleeping pill. And nothing happens for her, either:

‘I can’t sleep.’
The midwife left. After what felt like an eternity she returned with a little white pill.
‘I took these when I was pregnant,’ said Anna, ‘they’re not strong enough, I need two.’
‘Just start with one for now,’ said the midwife. The child was sleeping. Aksel was sleeping.
Anna took the pill. The hospital was quiet. Occasionally, the sound of a buzzer from one of the other rooms where someone was calling for help.
Aksel stirred in his bed, it was early morning. Anna pulled the cord again.
‘Could I get another sedative?’ she asked. ‘One pill isn’t enough.’

February 28th V.2

Should I make a portrait of my second chance at this day? My sleep-deprived second day? Or narrate one of the thoughts that cross my path. Right now I was daydreaming at the not-my-city traffic lights about how I am not a mother. I maybe won’t be, I maybe will be, I don’t know yet. A lot of people, maybe most people my age, already know. For me it’s complicated, I feel like I myself keep suddenly needing to be born. It’s like intensive care. When my friends have their babies the babies seem very much of my friends. Very of their flesh. Very of their consciousness. But as they grow, the babies start to seem only of themselves, and my friends are doing a lot of intensive work with these people. I do a lot of work with people who are only themselves, but I am not their mother. Sheila Heti thinks of mothering backwards as mothering, too. Thinking of her mother and her grandmother. Maybe you can feel them grow in your body too, somehow.

I narrated that traffic-lights thought because there’s been a lot of censorship going on these past years. External censorship but also internal censorship. It’s been creeping up on everyone. (Maybe that’s some of Sankar’s “violent inertia of everyday life”.) There’s nowhere I can resign from in protest. I don’t work at a university or a masthead. But against censorship I can say things that are true and complicated and internally shamed. Like whether I’m going to mother forwards or backwards. Maybe I’m daring myself to break a big taboo within myself and daring you not to have a big problem with it. I’m daring us not to be brittle and cruel. Lately I feel a huge pressure not to write. I feel things that are accurate to me but seem unintelligible to language and shared expression and reception. When I do write the result feels accurate. Maybe I’m afraid of accuracy and how naked it makes me. Can I dare myself to keep going?

Archive Please!

February 2025 (the one that was an ode to my sister, and her funny-mouth city. “With her I was someone that could need help and offer help and magnanimously write off any balance that was beyond help. I had a purpose, an audience, a cadence, a confidant. I was on a level; I had found a peer.”)

February 2024 (the one that formed a collage to big and small things of [anti-]colonialism, “layers of concrete atop reclaimed land, not far from one of the city’s patched sinkholes — the original coastline ever-seeking the sea. I felt my old wrongness about living in this place, and I wondered if this short evening walk after a beautiful show with beautiful people was forming part of a long goodbye.”)

February 2023 (the one about gardening in a borrowed garden, on borrowed time — this one turned out to be a portent. A no-fault eviction came soon after. Three years later I can say all for the best. Or, I have made the best of it, as always.)

February 2022 (the one where I reflected on the world of work, and my new reinstated place in an office. I felt like an untamed animal, captured. The pandemic was the great untaming. We never went ‘back to normal’.)

February 2021 (the one where I grappled with the place of lyricism in the marketplace of writing, written from the socially-isolated heart of locked-down Edinburgh.)

February 2020 (the one before the world changed forever, when I thought I had all the time to work out what I was going to do with myself as a new arrival in London. It turns out I did have all the time, just half a decade later than planned. I am so lucky.)

Photographs Please!

The sisters, together again.

Until next month, may you live each day as good as twice — I dare you,
H x

All I had was a million details. I couldn’t see how it would ever be possible to make a container for the cascade of interesting stuff that poured past and through me each day
- Helen Garner

On the last day of 2025 I woke up early and wrote a December Please letter to you in the morning, then set about packing, showering, and readying for the journey from Aberdeen to London. Our grandmother Joanie’s NHS nurse made a house call and, after checking up on her patient, asked us for our advice on how to responsibly introduce her tween to alcohol on New Year’s Eve.

He doesn’t like a shandy, I’ve tried that one, any other suggestions? I drew a blank. Imbibing my first alcohol as a tween had not been a great move for me. Though of course at the time it felt like a huge, unexpected answer. A cure-all substance, lifting the burden of the sheer volume of THOUGHTS THOUGHTS THOUGHTS rushing through my brain at all hours? Oh hell yeah! (Oh, hell.)

My sister and I were flying together, just us, for the first time as adults. 8D and 8E, not bad. She lost her boarding pass and the gate agent had to manually board her. The agent’s face turned ashen and she called her manager over, confessing to checking in the wrong person — another passenger with the same last name. Don’t worry that will be me! We’re sisters! Everyone melted in gladness. Me in pride. I was traveling with my sister, you see! My sister!

After all that the boarding pass turned out to have been somewhere in my sister’s pants the whole time. We laughed maniacally when it turned up on the seat beneath her. She let me keep her lost-and-found boarding pass for my maybe-one-day scrapbook. I loved seeing our same last name on the passes. (My mother-in-law often calls me by my partner’s last name. But I will never be anything other than Hannah Lees! I will forever be as someone as Hannah Lees! It’s Hannah Lees, please!)

No sooner had we settled into our seats than the captain came over the tannoy. At a cantering clip he shared that Heathrow landing slots would be in short supply, on account of a fog-induced backlog. A one hour twenty wait here on the tarmac, folks. Please accept a bottle of water, with our compliments. I felt rationally accepting but physically hungry and antsy, trapped and roiling with excess energy. My sister offered me a Zyn. I decided to try it.

All hunger and antsiness disappeared. An enormous calm came over me and I locked in on a conversation I’d been meaning to start with her but been slightly too afraid of. I felt anchored. I felt amazing. A cure-all substance, oh hell yeah! Oh wait. Oh, hell. With my first ever Zyn in, I vowed that my new year’s resolution would be to quit Zyn.

Happy New Year, everyone! Lunar New Year incoming.

*
January Reading

The Mushroom Tapes, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

The Season, Helen Garner

Take What You Need, Idra Novey

Jung, Anthony Stevens

January-into-February Reading

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

As Lucia Pietroiusti of Serpentine’s Ecologies department puts it, Hospicing Modernity, “really speaks to the sense that something is ending or collapsing; it speaks to the nested and interdependent collapses occurring at psychic, organisational, societal, and planetary levels, and to how we might live through these collapses without inflicting further violence.”

Until next month,
H x

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Dusk outside Joanie’s house, at the end of 2025

Scores of crows circle the open purple sky. Curlicued oaks host the joke-songs of jackdaws (corvids dressed in vocal drag as squeaky rubber ducks). Nesting swallows gurgle away from me and the dogs1 as we snap through the hollow-hearted barley stubble. Duck wings alight from the old clayworks quarry pond. Add to their wingclap the magpie rattle and partridge scrape — a whole percussion section but no soloist, no lark. But then the visitors arrive: great V’s of geese to roost at the basin. Pink-footed geese in from Greenland and Svalbard, and the odd Alaskan snow goose, too, chronically social, taking whatever company they can get in these parts far from home. The geese each honk their two-note, quaver-crotchet phrase; in an imperfect, perpetual round. For now they are home, and I am too.

Thank you for reading the last letter for 2025! By way of [re-]introduction2, my name is Hannah Lees. I work in education and, for the past six years, have written this letter to you on the last day of each month. What started as a post-English MA thesis outlet for book reviews and cultural studies has turned into something of a mental health lifeline. I write to learn how I think and feel, and hope that it can give you a moment to think and feel, too. I sometimes write in other places — something I want to do more of in 2026.

One night this month I walked from Broadway Market in Hackney to Hornsey Rise in Islington. Crossing borough lines always gets me excited, but this walk hadn’t been my first choice. I needed to get to where I was staying that night, my phone was dead, and there was a bus strike3. On my long walk in the dark of this December afternoon I stopped at every supermarket on my path. I didn’t need anything, I just liked the break from walking to look through each bright shelf. I realised I felt happy. So many losses and shocks this year, but I am facing them with something like (at least a little bit more) spiritual muscularity. In these recent years I have become less ironclad sure of the promised moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. But we can act as if it is so, regardless. All I know is that I refuse to adjust to this world.

The year in letters

January Please - “I will be starting at a new rental home soon,” I said in that letter. Unfortunately it didn’t work out and I was in yet another temporary situation.

February Please - “I’m almost at the stage of life where a decade can be said to pass quickly. But just one week with my sister was a whole lifetime.” Okay, wow, I can be a melodramatic so-and-so, can’t I. But the euphoria of seeing my sister after being so mentally unwell in my meant-to-be-well new life meant everything to me.

March Please - “March was a mostly wordless month anyway, with a missing last day for me, and a monthlong missing net with which to catch much verbal sense-making.” Okay, wow, I was really going through it. The exhaustion is dripping off of me here. I felt gagged, I couldn’t speak, I was in deep despondence for our world, writing was lost.

April Please - The Pope’s death got me reflecting on growing up Catholic. “…The involvement of lay people, shy women turned full-throated by the dignity of the reading roster. A cappella singing from a swishy-robed priest directed at a host that we were promised was now the body of Christ. Not just a symbol, but the real thing! Transubstantiation, baby!”

May Please - This one was my favourite — when I stopped masking. I can remember precisely how I dropped into my body when I wrote it, and that being honest gave me more of an ability to look outside of myself again. It looks simple now, but at the time it took a lot for me to write that, “for the past while I have been really very depressed”.

June Please - Oh I was having fun psychoanalysing everything that month: “an ugliness: if I can’t be loved then at least I can win, and it will be like nothing, it will be no effort for me, but I will win so easily; it will be so easy for me and everything will run off me and my huge great feathers. It will be so easy for me! I will whirligig myself skyward, and no one will ever keep up with me, and I will finally understand why I am so alone..”

July Please - Oh I was angry that month: “Within all the settler-colonies is this posture of hollow largesse that risks (and redistributes) nothing: those who only give a land acknowledgement or an Indigenous greeting when their ill-gotten supremacy or conception of ownership is not really in question — not in their minds, anyway. It seems that western leaders are wanting the Palestinian situation to get to this phase.”

August Please - Oh I read a lot that month! An old-fashioned letter of impressionistic book reviews. On Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno trans. Natasha Lehrer: “Reading this book made me white-knuckle glad to find new forms to say the unsayable.”

September Please - Oh, there was a bit of a manifesto budding: “I don’t want to be fixed. The question is, simply, can I speak? I want to get and give more of that permission to just be present. We’re so programmed to preclude just being present because we can’t bear it, or it’s not allowed.”

October Please - On falling [back] in love: “My skin was electric. Why are you so funny now? Because you are enjoying who I am. How does it feel to be enjoyed? Like home. Today we are away from each other and it is exciting. The absence is not non-presence but rather an active, imaginal thing”

November Please - Tree-comfort, for loss: “On the night my uncle died I went outside and faced a colossal weeping willow. I parted its great dancing curtains and placed my heart against its silver-barked trunk.”

3

The strike was a good thing. There was probably some bus still going that could have got me there but, in the way of all encounterings of major or minor disasters, I was immediately calm and accepting of the task ahead of me. It is only when I still have control in a situation that I feel stressed, nay, plagued by the possibility of still yet optimising the outcome. If I can make the best decision then I must, which ups the ante in situations that others find low stakes. But the objectively higher the stakes, the more calm I feel. I am best in a catastrophe, decent in a pickle, and terrible in day-to-day decision-makings and plannings. I don’t work by task lists, I work by cues. Disasters do not rely on executive functioning and evaluative prioritising but, instead, bypass straight to the control centre. There is no low stakes priority list to organise, there is only the problem right there in sight. My whole being becomes an arrow for this bullseye. I’m loving putting myself in scenarios where this way of being is a strength rather than a liability. May you also find the settings that make the most of your way of being.

Thanks for reading LETTER PLEASE! The end-of-month newsletter from Hannah Lees:

Curlicued winter tree branches silhouetted against a last Scottish sundown of 2025 (photographed at 3:46pm — oh these exquisite short days, drinking up each drop, not a beam of light unadored)

Until next month may you enjoy finding your way into 2026,
H x

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City agleam. Trees November-bare. Spiky branches skying death, heavenward, earthward, surely incapable of ever again sustaining leaf-life. Somehow there will be a spring, just not one that’s easy to believe in.

This month my uncle died after a short period of medically-sustained life. He was 54, with four children and one grandchild, a partner; one surviving parent, my grandmother Joanie; and one surviving brother, my dad. For those short long days he lay connected to a ventilator looking all the part alive. Chest up and down; warm hands. But then the tests: no life in his brain stem. Alive-dead. I don’t understand.

He had suddenly collapsed at work. His workmates administered CPR and bundled him into the work van when told it would take an hour for an ambulance to arrive. Those men were his circulation. Their actions gave his family time to hold his warm hand. The medical workers spoke to my uncle directly as they narrated their ministrations. They found out his favourite songs and played country music for him. They helped my cousins make a tree of his fingerprints.

On the night my uncle died I went outside and faced a colossal weeping willow. I parted its great dancing curtains and placed my heart against its silver-barked trunk. I closed my eyes and saw my uncle’s playful face and body language, like on the October day that he’d dropped me and Tracy at the Catholic church in Montrose. I hadn’t been in years, but felt it was somehow right to go with her. My uncle was bemused but only happy to help. He loped into the car all jaunty limbs and goofy smile. He waited for us on the lane afterwards, and he reached for Tracy’s hand when she returned to him.

Or the September day my dad arrived from New Zealand and fell asleep in Joanie’s easy chair. It was only the afternoon but he was near-drugged with jet-lag. My uncle, standing at the Stanley oven (never sitting, he couldn’t sit still), looked over at his oldest brother with a combination of exaggerated ruefulness and genuine affection, then made eye contact with me and laughed. I laughed, too. He had made a moment of connection from nothing, just because he could. That’s what he did. He then loped off to make tea for his youngest daughter. That’s what he did, too.

I haven’t said these words in years, but it feels right. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

*

Until next month, may a tree give you comfort,
H x

*

Archive Please

November 2020 (Edinburgh)
“I have not known the sparkly flash of a corporate-style achievement in isolation and for that I am glad. I am learning that work is not the way to freedom, unless that work is care, which should be all of our work, together.”

November 2021 (Waiheke Island)
“In November I wasn’t much of a person, I was more of a worker. Not only the work-for-wages type, but also the work-for-deliverance type. A person in need of deliverance is still a person, but the worker monicker suited me fine.”

November 2022 (Waiheke Island)
"The island is a retirement village for those who are deluded enough to think they’ve played their cards right, but who were merely dealt all the cards”

November 2023 (Waiheke Island)
"The end of a hard day leads not to rest but more darkness to fill up the eyes. So in this wash of queasiness I want to remind myself of last month’s permanent marker polemic: a shared humanity is our guide. Sometimes spiky but always shared; humanity as an immensity, a remembrance, a wide attention, a woven existence, beyond domination.”

November 2024 (Edinburgh)
"There’s been a crazed white noise in place of words. “Watching a live-streamed genocide” has become a stock phrase, hasn’t it, but the relentless failure of fairness and justice really does do something to even the witnesses.”

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the plane takes off from the place I keep leaving, which is also the place I keep returning to
- Nina Mingya Powles, In the Hollow of the Wave

One time I accompanied my mum to a veterinary surgery with her bonded pair of Burmese cats. They had dental issues. One actually had two rows of teeth, like a shark. The other one, I don’t know, he must have had his problems, too. On the journey there the two cats coiled together in their one transport box, confused but comforted by the other. The extractions required anaesthetic and then some hours of recovery and observation. Still sleepy and no doubt sore, the two cats were eventually released from their separate spots in the vet’s hall of recovery cages. We imagined there would be some reciprocal licking and consoling, a few days off their food, perhaps, and a great deal of retiring to the shared round bed by the sunniest window.

Instead, upon arrival home, the two cats did not recognise each other. And not mere coolness or distance-keeping. Between them was a vicious heat, complete with foreign sounds of snarls and hisses they had never so far had reason to make in their cosseted indoor lives. The old play-fight of scampering chase and soft-thumping bunny rabbit legs to the head was replaced with full-throated attack. What remaining teeth girlcat still had made for the jugular of boycat. Mum let out a wail. I became authoritative. Right, we’re separating them. Girlcat through to the bedroom, boycat in the living room. One human each. See you when this is over, I guess. But what if they never reconcile? What if we have to give one away? Let’s just see. Unable to wait and see, mum consulted a cat-person at her work, and bought a plug-in calming pheromone device. The device did nothing, but it was a project at least. Maybe it was time that did it, time and the fading proximity of death that they had smelled on each other.

*

My favourite colour at the moment is orange. It was always orange in the past, and then orange moved over for yellow. But orange is back on top. I feel uneasy around yellow now; I can’t listen to it anymore. Has that ever happened to you? A sudden allergy to something that was a moment ago so familiar? When Ryan arrived at Heathrow from Aotearoa he was the colour yellow. He was a de-sharked cat. Theoretically it was brilliant to see him again, after six weeks apart. But for the first few days together again I didn’t recognise him. I’d been so absorbed in care work that I’d let the absence lose some of its aliveness. I know change is hard for you, he said. Hiss hiss snarl, I said. I know this is restraint collapse after what you’ve been managing, or, it’s possible you’re projecting your own self-disappointment on to me, he would have said, if he was into psycho-speak. HISS, I would have replied.

I don’t know what did it. But the other day I realised we were laughing. We were riffing. My skin was electric. Why are you so funny now? Because you are enjoying who I am. How does it feel to be enjoyed? Like home. Today we are away from each other and it is exciting. The absence is not non-presence but rather an active, imaginal thing:

I think what did it was a momentary fading of death’s proximity. I started being around more life. I started falling in love with people on stages and in train carriages and at shared tables. I became more bold and individuated in my speech acts. I spoke to strangers and we were witty and searching together. I spoke with a therapist and he said that, just as there are genders or cultures as identities to play with, there might also be the identity category of migrant vs. stayer-put. Once you have moved you are never the same; the place you leave and the place to which you go are never the same, either. I became excited by his image. We kept going. Maybe we are all somewhere on the periodic table: there are the noble elements that keep their state, but to move is to split in two; unstable kinds of atoms, perilous but capable of producing great energy.

The thing was that I wasn’t paying for the services of this therapist, we simply got talking as strangers at a busy bakery. I only found out he was a psychotherapist at the end, when he’d finished his focaccia and filter coffee. All this to say that this month I became someone I enjoyed, and I enjoyed others. I started walking more, walking fast, becoming sinewed and taut like a bow to stick-slip friction-release across the strings of the lives of others. I fell back in love because I became someone that could love everyone, and everyone was now shining back at me from the eyes of the person I had felt to be a stranger for those first days of re-entry. Ryan was full of shark again, Ryan was orange, Ryan was even yellow in a way that I could listen to again. Vitally, imperfectly, freely.

October Obsessions:

• I became the violin bow, yes, but even more than the violin the piano has been my captivator. Each time I pass the public piano in St. Pancras I think of Deborah Levy’s August Blue. I think of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no.2 op.18, and the ending of Levy’s character’s carefully composed identity as a virtuoso. In August Blue Elsa/Ann is split right from the beginning of her life, as an orphan. She manages to keep her splitness at bay by perfecting the pianist path set out by her guardian. But one night on stage she comes to juddering halt mid-Rachmaninov, fleeing both the venue and life as she knew it. In the aftermath she is inducted into a new way of life by the appearance of a doppelgänger — an external marker of the many selves and forbears, such as her birth mother, within her. Elsa must learn to embrace the immense energy of her shattered self and forgo the noble, unified life of the performer that her teacher/father figure has shaped her for.
  

• Olga Ravn’s narrator in My Work uses a fictional character, Anna, to tell the story of the difficult sides of being a mother. Throughout the book the narrator and Anna’s selves overlap and then pull away from each other. And it becomes clearer that the narrator is using fiction as a vehicle to express the less ‘palatable’ experiences of motherhood, “everything was blood and nothing was happiness.”
  

• Mounting a hilarious (and sneakily/cumulatively liberating) riposte to voyeurism as a pasttime, The C-Word podcast explores what it means when we call a woman “crazy”. Originally published behind a paywall from 2019-2022, in each episode Lena Dunham and Alissa Bennett take us on a deep dive into the life of a woman who, “society dismissed by calling her mad, sad, or just plain bad”. One example of the podcast’s casual liberatory takes, from Lena Dunham:
  We’ve talked about this a lot on the show, but one of our favourite ways to deny our own impulses is, when we see them in other people, to denounce them. So, you think if you denounce someone’s behaviour loudly enough it means you’ve, like, separated yourself from the part of you that would 100% deliver a bloody doll to your ex’s doorstep.
  Amen.
  

• Tell Them I Said No, essays by Martin Herbert, deals with the way that such a large part of the writer/artist’s role in today’s professionalised market is being a commodifiable presence. Herbert, however, provides a counter to the drive of self-marketing, looking at figures who have refused to play ball. One essay features David Hammons, who once commented on what he saw as the over-educated gallery-visiting public: “it’s conservative, it’s out to criticise and not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?” In the C-Word Podcast, Alissa Bennet at one point says that, “professionalisation is a hate crime”. Herbert and his cadre of case studies would have to agree.
  

• Defiant Life, a collaborative album from pianist and electronicist Vijay Iyer and trumpeter and composer Leo Smith. Iyer tells UK Jazz News that, “the stance of an artist is a defiant stance, because on some level, we’re not supposed to be doing it. No one asked us to, and by and large, they seem to not want us to.” The album upholds Refaat Alareer for enacting the pure example of a defiant life. Not merely made out in dedication, the album is itself an act of study of the acts of defiance that make up an entire way of being in the face of domination and genocide.

  ---

Archive Please

October 2019
October 2020
October 2021
October 2022
October 2023 (“After what we have seen this October we will never be the same, we will never be the same, we will never be the same—)
October 2024

Until next month, may you recognise yourself in others, recognise others in your beloveds; be patient as the strange and familiar keep switching places, ad infinitum,
H x

There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand
-Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

The ground rose to meet the plane, that’s what landing felt like. All motion is relative, okay, I swear I was static and the earth was all agency. Fields, trees, roads, reservoirs: all urgent and uprushing grey and gold. My seatmate, an older man in a grey wool suit, made the sign of the cross when the runway reached up and made safe contact with the landing gear. Tears pricked my eyes for his gesture of supplication (I have a note in my phone, Tender Masculinity, where I collect counter-narrative moments such as these). Tiny tears too for the sight of all the British Airways tails tucked into their gates at Terminal 5.

That was the first day of the month. I thought I would be spending this last day of the month in Edinburgh. I imagined writing to you from the window-blur carriage of a train, or the blonde wood interior of the poetry library, or the cosy couch of a friend. Instead I am writing from the carpark of a retail precinct in Montrose. Home Bargains, Farmfoods, Costa Coffee, Lidl. I was shopping for my grandmother in the Lidl (strained Greek yoghurt, still-green bananas, no-pulp orange juice) when Lorde’s Shapeshifter came over the speakers. Who makes the playlist in Lidl Montrose? I don’t sleep, don’t dream at all / Give ‘em nothing personal / So I’m not affected.

So I’m not affected, so I’m not affected, so I’m not affected.

I have been sleeping though, in fits and starts. And it’s the fits and starts that produce memorable dreams. Dreams are the original oracle. This morning in the little slope-roofed room I awoke from a dream that my best friend had left her baby sleeping with me in the backseat of their car. Disorientated, all I knew was that I was now the baby’s keeper. I needed to pick him up to soothe him. But when I held him I found that he had been shot and injured, covered in grey dust. Outside the car all was destroyed. This month the UN for the first time called Israel’s assault on Palestinian lives and means of life a genocide. Hind Rajab was killed in her family’s car, amid their murdered bodies, 20 months ago. And nurse Marwan Abdeen was shot in the head by Israeli forces whilst at work in Nasser Hospital yesterday.

*

I miss my sister, I miss my sister, I miss my sister. Martha, if you’re reading this, know that everything for me is about you; the whole world rhymes with you.

*

I’m sure I’m about to start my period. I’ve been crying a lot. Maybe for too long these monthly letters have been synced with the luteal phase, written under the influence of a great PMDD fugue (if you know, sadly, you know). None of the midmonth euphoria on hand, just words sent from the heavy progesterone pit. I’m not upset by the consequences of this newsletter’s strict timing experiment. Sober sorts of memories and impressions come out that would otherwise never surface from the sludge. I don’t really go in for biological determinism, anyway. On this last day of September all the world feels dysphoric, not just me.

*

This month I went to the start of a fantastic discussion series with psychotherapist Martha Crawford of What a Shrink Thinks and psychologist Deserie Charles. Community Work: Why Bother & What Stops Us? On the first call we discussed, “what stops us, where we get fussed and stuck, the fears we have about moving into collective spaces that our institutions have failed or overlooked, and challenging faulty cultural and personal beliefs that can stop us in our tracks before we even begin.” The next discussion will look at how to care and preserve ourselves as peers who are also seeking to be facilitators.

It made me feel excited. I am loving the chance to air out the usually unspeakable dross of fears and anxieties when it comes to facilitating groups. One of my fears is seeing the unmet needs of others, and being unable to meet those needs. But I know for myself that most often my needs don’t need to be met, they just need resonance. I need to be witnessed. I don’t want to be fixed. The question is, simply, can I speak? I want to get and give more of that permission to just be present. We’re so programmed to preclude just being present because we can’t bear it, or it’s not allowed. But as Hanif Abdurraqib says, there is nothing worse than going with the things that push us further away from who we are.

I don’t know where exactly I’ll be this time next month. My brain is not divided into countries. I have no fixed place, and this makes me a bird on a wire, alighting and landing with the wind. It's not me doing the landing, anyway. The earth is all agency.

Until next month,
H x

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A poem is not just words placed on a line. It’s a cloth.
- Mosab Abu Toha

A lot happened this month. In the family: a PhD graduation, a death, a big new role, a surgery (all happening to different people, in different parts of the world; extremely torn). How splintered off we all became, my sister said, how sad and wrong we feel. With me: voice notes with a new friend, tea and sandwiches on the beach with an old friend, a long long-distance call with an older (but younger) friend, play kitchens in the garden with my three year-old friend, peer support meetings with little online heads that I will hopefully soon meet in full-bodied person. Hospital days. Shock. Intrusive thoughts. Shock. Intrusive thoughts. The day before I found out the news I had a peculiar episode of death-reckoning. I hadn’t had a personal one in a while. A vibrating fear that someone I knew was going to die and then they’d be gone. They’d have ceased to be. I cried and cried for this fictional but ultimately non-fictional end. I asked my dad if he ever became seized by these death-grips and he said no, no point, because when you die you won’t even know it. No, okay I get your cosmology dad, but what about other people dying, does that fear ever grip you? No answer. No answer, which was an answer. The next day came a non-fictional non-fictional death. It was believable but unbelievable. Maybe in time it will be believable believable, but I don’t want it to be.

August 10th 2025

Anas Sharif, renowned Al Jazeera journalist and father of two, was bombed to death near Al Shifa hospital, alongside his peers Mahommad Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Alaywa, and Mohammad Nofal. Israel assassinated these fine people. Non-fictional, believable, unbelievable.

August Reading

Ridiculously good books:

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno trans. Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories Press, 2025)
Reading this book made me white-knuckle glad to find new forms to say the unsayable. Sinno writes down all her reasons why she shouldn’t write this book about and about-more-than her childhood of rape. And still she writes. She writes all the reasons not to write, and those become the writing. And she keeps track of voice-that-writes, too, never able to come to a place of rest. “Here it is again, that little tone of bravado that emerges every so often. As if all this, the fact that I’m writing this book, is the reader’s fault. As if the reader is another juror, different, but not dissimilar to the ones I’ve already had to deal with.” The book performs a hyper-active self-reflection - a critical-creative way of being that is so at odds with the closed psyches of perpetrators, whose very absence of reflection enables them to survive.

In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles (Nine Arches Press, 2025)
A poetry collection in four parts, this new book from Nina Mingya Powles explores orientalism and exile, via thread and landscapes and institutions. The collection makes a quilt of collage. A repeated epistolary address in dear blue makes skin-tinglingly intimate the distance between our diasporic recollections, “Dear subterannean fernery of dreams ~ Dear language of cloud fragments I used to know”. The repeated dear acts like a stitch, over and under, making a line connecting here and there. The epistolary dear later returns in a disturbing context in the Spell of the Red Flowers sequence, “dear HR, I am obliged to report to you that[…]”. Tender direct address turns to surreal mismatch between experience and institutional process. Yet the stitch has been sewn; this too counts, this too is real.

A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland (Granta, 2025)
If Orbital was not about the international space station but about the tiny living quarters of two closeted men in 1980’s South Wales - a world away but the same extremes of claustrophobia and full-tilt love and awe. There are three characters, really. B, M, and the natural world. “He thinks of birds above, feathers puffed, of voles and mice in earthly hollows and the seeds waiting to throw out radicals in the spring. He thinks of B in the nest of their bed.” And love for this small town despite it all, “M stands in the doorway of the shop and watches the parade roll past. B is across the street, waving and smiling and sunglassed”. A love perhaps born of the extreme keenness of observation required of the vigilant. “Boys bring a dead adder down from the village, a trophy on a charred stick.”

August Craft Interview

I enjoyed this LitHub interview with poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney. I have a ticket to one of the launch events for her debut collection, Joy is My Middle Name and I hope I’ll be able to go. I really appreciated this extremely specific experience of the difference between the ages 27 and 33:

Sasha Debevec-McKenney: I wrote the “Elegy” when I was 33, better equipped to handle my feelings, much less hectic, much more stable. Not stable compared to other people, of course, but compared to me when I was 27. I see a more refined, contained poem, but…at what cost?

Peter Mishler: Could you say more about the “cost?” Are you concerned with preserving a kind of authenticity?

Sasha Debevec-McKenney: Oh, I meant the cost of loneliness! Academia is so lonely—you go wherever will have you, no matter what. You leave people behind. I took the fellowship at Emory because it was prestigious and I wanted to live in the South for the first time and visit Civil Rights and Civil War sites, but I never really considered the fact that I would be so far from basically everyone I knew. Writing a good poem about something painful can make the pain feel worth it—if you’re a sicko like me, at least. But as far as authenticity—I think it’s quite nice that my voice has changed because it means I have changed. You couldn’t pay me to relive my twenties or to be that person again.

Augusts Past

August 2024 [Glasgow]
August 2023 [Montrose]
August 2022 [Waiheke]
August 2021 [London]
August 2020 [Montrose]

August Listen:

For Those I Love, 2025

There's no peace across the sea for me, no world where I feel free
I'll stay trapped beneath the weight of a future ripped by thieves
The only place that I can breathe is with the Bonnie Rowan trees
I'll never leave, I'll never leave, I'll never leave
I have to leave, I have to leave
I'll never leave, I'll never leave, I'll never leave

Until next month,
H x

It’s like your work is trying to break through shame into shamelessness
- as told to Leslie Jamison by an unnamed critic (Splinters, 188)

July was a full quiver of questions rattling around and uttered aloud in the dark hours. Nock, draw, loose. Why does “never again” not apply to Palestinians? How do we make sense of the catastrophic moral failure? Is there any explanation for western acceptance and enabling of the genocide other than racism and imperialism?

Why wait until famine Phase 5 to acknowledge what Israel has been doing? Is there any explanation for western words of recognition at this grave point other than the teleology of death above freedom? Easier to give a eulogy than sovereignty: going through the funerary motions, using all the right weighty words, in the hope that we will all pay our respects then move on.

The UK: we will recognise Palestinian statehood unless Israel goes for a ceasefire.
In other words: we will recognise Palestine if they are already dead.

Within all the settler-colonies is this posture of hollow largesse that risks (and redistributes) nothing: those who only give a land acknowledgement or an Indigenous greeting when their ill-gotten supremacy or conception of ownership is not really in question — not in their minds, anyway. It seems that western leaders are wanting the Palestinian situation to get to this phase.

But Palestinians are the undying and we are the unconsoled. No one is moving on. Hind, Reem, Ahmed, Shaaban. And we haven’t moved on in these sibling lands around the earth, either. Not in Ireland or Aotearoa or anywhere. No one is a frozen epitaph. We see the fake largesse and real supremacism. There are enough keepers and carers to make deadening impossible. (“Just be Māori. All day. Every day.”)

One of the central characters in Damien Wilkins’ novel Delirious, Mary, is living with the death of her child. She finds herself in a room filled with people and she realises that, “they didn’t know or care about her son. Alice had forgotten about him already. It was astonishing how this happened. She, Mary, would have to care about him. She saw it for the first time: she would have to find ways of caring which didn’t eject her from society. How?”

Have a lot of people these past years have turned off their care for fear of being ejected from society? (The quiver of arrows is filling up again.) Is it shameful to care? To care enough that the dead become undying in us, alive through how much they matter — is this too intense? Only if this care is so unusual in our surroundings. Who wants a place in a society needing so much repression to keep functioning (and functioning for whom)? The old world is dying and now really is the time of monsters. But it is also the time to live with intensity. This month meditation teacher Anaïs Duplan reminded me that, “emotionally accessing the truths of the world enables us to recommit to working against atrocity”.

This month I tore through The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke. After watching The Pitt HBO Max series earlier this year I developed a renewed obsession with healthcare, or more specifically healthcare workers — the burned out doctors and nurses doing their exquisite best in broken systems that neglect them and their patients. Clarke is herself a palliative care doctor in the UK. She tells the single story of Keira and Max, the children and their families involved in the donation and reception of a heart, alongside the wider story of the history of the medical feat of transplantation.

At one point Clarke describes the ICU staff looking after Max as he waits in urgent hope of a heart transplant. They “were loving, and silly, and kind” (fuck me up, god bless them). Even so, the months and months of hanging on in hospital with end-stage heart failure were “so traumatic [that] he was not merely experiencing suicidal thoughts, he had decided to enact them” (173). Max ultimately survived, but the months of mortal suspension before receiving the heart transplant have stayed with him as PTSD. Abject erosion of both a liveable present and a clear bridge to a future can be enough to make a child suicidal. Of course you know where my mind went. Yours went there too. Everything turns out to be about Palestine. And Palestine turns out to be about everything. Shamelessly.

July Brain Affirmation

This month someone sent me a podcast about foods to eat to help improve my brain. I didn’t listen to it. I was sceptical about the claims. I was even more sceptical about the aim. What if I don’t want to change my brain? Later in the month I read Leslie Jamison’s 2024 memoir Splinters. I loved her thoughts on distraction as a positive heuristic: “where had I absorbed the notion that distraction only compromises attention — rather than, say, pivoting or deepening it? Sometimes your mind leaps away and when it comes back, it notices more keenly. Sometimes distraction sparks observation like a rough surface striking a match into flame” (48-49). Let’s go, Leslie!

July Poem

This month I had a poem shared as part of Vol. 2 of Mote Journal. I loved the company of all the great little squares of Aotearoa-connected writers!

July Letters Past

July 2024 [Edinburgh]
July 2023 [London]
July 2022 [Waiheke]
July 2021 [London]
July 2020 [London]

(The years!)

July Listen

Let God Sort Em Out, the first Clipse album in nearly 16 years. Slippery eel villainy (“bring it, the only thing you killing is precious time”); raspy recollections (“drugs killed my teen spirit, welcome to nirvana”); white-knuckle depth-plumbing:

“The things I've seen under my eyelids
Kaleidoscope dreams, murder, and sirens”—

Until next month, may you live with intensity,
H x

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you sounded like you wouldve as a little girl
maybe thats who you are deep down
- schaeffer lemalu

The monthend sails in at a clip, all stormworn sails of June now billowing gliding triumphing out on a song. Verb verb verb. Doing being going. Today I am in the afterglow of joy, glad anachronism in the day of the bomb the drone the missile the press conference the flour laced with oxycodone. Out damned noun. Let there be verb.

Last night Ryan and I argued in a mall. We were on the top floor, precipitous. I felt unheard and he felt mischaracterised. I felt alone and he felt smothered. I felt ignored and he felt watched. And the same demented insight, forgotten and remembered: that this is going to be the same fight for the rest of our lives. People other than us planted these pains in us and we— blah blah/predictable therapy script. But the same old pain point? You know what, sometimes I like it.

Something in me draws energy from a fight, old adversarial training flaring up in a snarl of supremacy. An ugliness: if I can’t be loved then at least I can win, and it will be like nothing, it will be no effort for me, but I will win so easily; it will be so easy for me and everything will run off me and my huge great feathers. It will be so easy for me! I will whirligig myself skyward, and no one will ever keep up with me, and I will finally understand why I am so alone: because I am just too much for this earth.

But somehow he didn’t buy it and he suggested we go to eat pasta, and we did, choosing to sit next to each other rather than across from each other. And there was peace and a kind of peace-plus named astonishment. It felt like the first conversation I’d ever had down on earth. I was new here: so this is what it means to talk? You listen for the meaning that the person is aiming for with their words, and then you ask a deepening question and/or offer a new riff on what they said with your own words, and then they feel so alive and special to know that you are lending your mind to their experience?

*

And I love you so much more, I love you so much more, I never knew it before:

ANOHNI shared her inspiration for the song:

A friend of mine expressed to me in the final months of his life that the simplest sensations had begun to feel almost rapturous; a carer had placed a shard of ice on his tongue one day and it was such a sweet and unbelievable feeling that it caused him to weep with gratitude. He was a hardcore kind of guy and these moments were transforming the way he was seeing things. I wrote “Sliver of Ice,” remembering those words of his.

*

I’ve been thinking a lot about form this month. I seek document-containers that can make things happen. Some of my modes are expiring and I see that, while critique is necessary, it is form-making that can create new worlds. The unknown and the as-yet unmade — that’s what we’re meant to be working with, not spinning out received forms and gestures. What do poets do? They make forms. Poiesis leads into being what didn’t exist before. But I also wonder about the conditions for form-making. What when the as-yet uncontained (griefs ruptures corruptions illnesses) would so debilitate the experiencer that any account is kneecapped before even attempted?

Courage, heart, community. Pig-headedness. Audacity. Ecstatic love. Or maybe routine: making is what we do, so we keep doing it no matter what, for better or worse. Agony might be for nothing, no meaning in suffering, but a form can make it feel alive and special — leading into being a new way for pain to matter. A form can make us all feel new here. Or, as Hanif Abdurraqib writes in his essay In Defence of Despair, “[a poem ignites] a unique ache, or a unique memory, or a unique desire. And I would like to know about it. I would like to know what few inches of the wretched world can be made into an adequate space for you to mourn, or make a plate of food, or to dance in your living room, or to bury something you’ve finally decided to put down”.

Until next month,
H x

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They were both in a strange holding pattern. He needed to reconnect with his old life. It was never the plan to cut himself off*
- Damien Wilkins, Delirious

There’s a scene towards the end of Jessica Stanley’s second novel Consider Yourself Kissed that details a haircut. This particular haircut is not just a haircut, but a violation. The haircut is a gender enforcement performed by a character with unearned power, and an unexamined need to dominate others. The dark, controlling moment of the haircut is almost swept away in the tumbling light and warmth of the novel’s central blended family, but a sense of body horror and betrayal sticks around. It’s just hair, but it’s also never just hair.

Hair can be powerful, but therefore also vulnerable. Women accused of witchcraft would have their hair shaved off in a humiliating move to coax confessions. Old Testament Samson, having made a vow not to cut his hair, was rewarded with great strength. But he was betrayed by his lover Delilah when she cut off his hair for the profit of his enemies. His hair had seemed to connect him to his God, and its removal left him a prisoner. Without the strength of his hair Samson was captured, blinded, and enslaved.

And the opposite can happen to us mortals, where an inciting trauma can then cause rapid hair loss. A treatment that carries a burden — chemotherapy. A hormonal shock — birth, miscarriage, medication. Even a pathogenic shock can do it — Covid-19, a major source of telogen effluvium, can cause a disproportionate number of hairs to enter the resting and shedding phases after the spikes of a fever. In a position of vulnerability, the loss of hair on top of emotional or physical duress is an extra-othering stress. A person experiencing hair loss can feel marked and haunted, a lesser ghost of themselves.

“Each time I use the comb, more of my hair falls out,” Middle East Eye reports from 12-year old Rahaf Ayyad in Gaza City, “I don’t like seeing myself. This isn’t me.” And a similar ordeal for Sama Tubail, an eight-year-old from Beit Lahia: "I was sleeping when the army attacked the house ... I was afraid so much and I did not know what to do. I cried without making any voice and my heart was racing so quickly," she told The New Arab. "I was so happy when we weren’t killed," she said. "But I was shocked when I saw my hair falling out a lot later…I cry a lot, so I have stopped playing with girls outside". Her mother explained to CNN that Sama feels ashamed of having lost her hair, and feels she can’t restart her life until it regrows.

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted.

Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965

After 20 months of atrocity it is mind-numbing to see some institutions and leaders now come to find some weaselly kind of voice. None are saying, “gosh I was wrong”. Instead they behave as though something new or different has happened, and that there is a category change in the situation. Polite people who care only about preserving normality, and their place in it. Well normality is changing, and they are scared of being left behind. As Omar El Akkad says in the title of his book, one day, everyone will have always been against this. Israel is burning children alive, starving children to death, and creating so much trauma that so many living children wish to die. Eight year-old Sama again: “Will I stay like this, bald, for the rest of my life? No, I want to die and have my hair grow in Paradise, God willing”.

There are so many things to grieve every day, but the thing that has surprised me in my own grief is that I’ve found myself grieving the loss of what I thought the world maybe still had in it and grieving the realization of just how much barbarity and Evil underpins our society in the most banal of ways. 

I have always believed in the good of people, I have always believed that our world, in spite of the structures of violence and repression that exist, could fight back when pushed into a corner. 

I no longer believe that.

There is good in this world, there are so many good people — people who lay their lives and livelihoods on the line everyday for a better world for people they’ve never met. But this world we live in is manufactured to kill them, to render them criminal, to present them as radical and disposable. 

How do we grieve that?

Sana Saeed, X Thread, May 2025 

*Editor’s note: They were both in a strange holding pattern. He needed to reconnect with his old life. It was never the plan to cut himself off - I read this line in Wilkins’ novel last night, and it said so much for me. For the past while I have been really very depressed, and [hopefully just temporarily] isolated from people outside my immediate proximity. Depression is not really the right word, maybe it’s more like suspension. Maybe it’s the afterlife of last year’s illness. Maybe it started with the genocide. And all my moving around. Or— I can’t keep making a litany, this is what stops me from talking at all right now. Every time I try to make sense of the soupiness of this life it all sounds self-pitying. But that’s not how I feel at all. I don’t feel self-pity, I feel merely that I am not really a person, but more a holding pattern. Safe to say that a lot of emails and texts and social media are currently languishing. It was never the plan to cut myself off. And so I offer this song, a “short sweet ballad about relationships and the difficulties of preserving them when they’re stretched on the rack of space and time”:

Kāhore te taumaha e pēhanga nō runga rā
Oma ake tonu ai, ka pekea ngā matata
E kore e kite ana au, e te hoa hōtoke
He pohewa tonu ai i te makaro e

Not this burden that presses down from above
And I, forever running, leaping over the cracks
You have disappeared, my winter friend
A vision lost in the dimness

Until next month, until—
H x

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Who is the nervous spirit of this world / that must go over and over / what it already knows
- Jorie Graham

When the Pope died tears started leaking from my eyes. It wasn’t exactly crying, it was something else, like the water of fellow feeling that fell from my eyes at the marathon, at the end of a previous April. Thanks to an Irish grandfather I grew up Catholic in Protestant Scotland. There was no such thing as a secular education back in the late 90s. During the week my public primary school assemblies were punctuated by sermons from the Church of Scotland minister, and after-school care came with compulsory Calvinist sing-a-longs (Amazing Grace, you know the rest). On the weekend I traded in the plain-speaking predestination of protestantism for a high-camp Catholicism that promised forgiveness on tap, only say the word.

Mass was spooky, and I kind of liked it. The smell of incence; a choreography of lit and extinguished candles; all the daily ungainly transformed into Sunday supplicants, with all the right moves. Latin chants. Ornate painted stations of the cross (all-too-human torture and gore). Prayers of the faithful with room for every socially forsaken group. The involvement of lay people, shy women turned full-throated by the dignity of the reading roster. A cappella singing from a swishy-robed priest directed at a host that we were promised was now the body of Christ. Not just a symbol, but the real thing! Transubstantiation, baby!

And then the welcome come-down of the cup of tea afterwards, where the hard-pewed formalities turned to limber chatter, children’s freshly freed laughs peeling louder than the bells. The priests I encountered seemed so fulfilled, spry and alive with a kinetic kind of joy. One Father Jim was over-flowing with such energy, and poured it into fundraising for parishes near and far. One time he did a sponsored parachute jump (“High Hopes” read his flyer). Another time he lay for an extended period on a bed of nails. Said bed of nails was displayed next to the tea station in the run-up to his fundraiser. Cool. An early adopter of transition lenses, he turned into an off-duty rock star on the steps of the church as he stepped out into the sunlight to farewell the flock. This was a positive adult in my life, a model for how to blend charisma with sincerity, how to pay genuine attention to people, and how to be more than okay being a bit of a freak.

I was a teenager before I learned about the widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic church. I was almost too enveloped in my adolescent cape of false confidence to feel the heartbreak of this betrayal. Abuse of power comes as no surprise. To be able to categorise something was to feel impervious to loss of trust. Couldn’t be disappointed if we could name the phenomenon so clearly. Abuse of power comes as no surprise. I also couldn’t be disappointed if I rejected it all - who had ever asked me if I wanted to be a Catholic, anyway? I hadn’t come at it from first principles but from a childhood inheritance and an environment of vestigial sectarianism. Well I could put away my childish things, couldn’t I? Besides, my peers and I were getting tired of the doctrinal contortions. We didn’t understand the hang-ups on sexuality.

At Catholic high school in New Zealand the progressive teachers tried to win us back from our anger by saying that God loved every human, and that being queer was a way of being human, so God loves queer people too, phew. I liked their interpretation of Catholicism, but during Pope John Paul II’s reign the Church deemed homosexuality to be a “tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil”. Then Pope Benedict XVI doubled down and lobbied against gay marriage. The teachers seemed to be bending over backwards for something that didn’t love them back. Some days their interpretations were consoling and even thrilling (faith is what you make it! Question everything! Queer the catechism!), but on other days, to our teenage ears, it was plain sad: their loyalty secured with a compulsory dose of cognitive dissonance. Was all their hermeneutic labour worth it?

By the time Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected and took up the name Pope Francis in 2013, my Catholic upbringing and secondary schooling were over. I was far away from the religion and barely noticed the new pope at first. I still visited chapels and cathedrals for the wonder of it all. But for the religion I held a weariness. Both the outright moral bankruptcy and the well-meaning back-bending had left me tired. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it wasn’t tiredness but a shift in curiosity, away from the rituals that I had found so strange and interesting in childhood, and toward the spry aliveness of the positive role models — aliveness that could live in anyone. How living and alive could a person be? I started to encounter Pope Francis by osmosis — he was a great one for working the media (all those pressers on the papal plane!), cracking his impish smile, and spreading the word. No-nonsense soundbites made it out of encyclical letters: “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”.

He rode the subway. He took a vow of poverty. He emphasised mercy. He believed all faiths to be valid paths. He wished for Hell to be empty. He sounded a lot like my high school teachers (“if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”). He called Gaza every day. He spoke to the whole world on his last full day of life. Someone so very alive, and alive to everyone’s aliveness, is no longer living. 40,000 people journeyed to his funeral and that’s where the tears came from — he did something for the aliveness of all those people. James Butler wrote on Pope Francis for the London Review of Books, and quoted from his his last meditations on Good Friday: “today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell.” Here’s to keeping on falling and being fully alive to ourselves and others.

Things I want to remember reading and watching this April:

• Bisan changed her greeting for the first time: “This is Bisan from Gaza, and unfortunately I am still alive”.
  

• “Gaza is now home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, the largest orphan crisis in modern history, and a whole generation in danger of suffering from stunting, causing irreparable physical and cognitive impairments; over 15,600 children have been killed violently. Tens of thousands more of Gaza’s children are injured or missing, and many of those surviving are so traumatised that they openly express the wish to die.”
  - Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, counsel for Palestine at the Hague this week, in the shared claim that Israel’s ban on all cooperation with the UN’s Palestinian rights agency UNRWA is a breach of the UN charter, as reported in The Guardian.
  

• Louis Theroux, The Settlers (BBC). Louis lets his documentary subjects tell on themselves, as always. But this is the first time that he has been driven/moved to call someone — in this case one of the leaders of Israel's settlement movement — a sociopath.
  

• “Because our [autistic] children deserve a world that sees them, values them, and includes them. And until that world exists, we’ll build it — one day, one talanoa, one sensory-friendly trip to Pak’nSave at a time.”
  - Destiny Momoisea for The Coconet
  

• I just got hold of Jessica Stanley’s Consider Yourself Kissed, and am so enjoying the funny-tender style:
  ‘…Planning any children?' Coralie gasped.

  ‘I ask', Anne said, 'because if so, it's time to start on the folic acid. And Adam, forty isn't young, you know. Everyone knows about tick-tock, tick-tock for women. Sperm degrades too.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ Adam said. ‘I'm not quite forty yet. And recovering quite well from my Ebola.’

  Who was Anne to snap on her latex gloves, slice and dig into Coralie's chest, yank out her most cherished private dreams, and examine them like an excised tumour? She wished she'd phoned her own mother when she'd had the chance. But that would have left her empty in a different way.
  

• Season 2 of The Rehearsal, by Nathan Fielder. A sincere guy, armed only with a latptop harness, is back to facilitate elaborate pre-enactments of tricky scenarios. This season’s aviation safety concept nicely Trojan-horses central themes around issues in communication and difficulties people have in expressing themselves. But coming from an aviation-obsessed family also makes this concept compelling at face value for me, lol.
  

• Peace is Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh. I was sceptical at first, but reading a little section every night is helpful. Purely obtained thanks to chance-reading a tweet about the impact of this book on Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
  
  This is deeply personal. I share it - while fighting to stop the GENOCIDE of the Palestinians - only because I trust it may help others.
  I came back from Germany hurt, traumatised. I realised it because an uncharacteristic "anger" suddenly transpired all over, from interviews to engagement with family and friends. So not me, I felt unwell.
  At the pick of it, this book literally fell over my head (a lady gifted it to me before my last SOAS lecture last November). Not the book I would normally read.
  I read it.
  It has been pure enlightenment. Calm is back. Anger has disappeared. I forgave the German authorities for bullying me. But I cannot forget how they - and other political systems - are bullying others. That is impossible.
  The struggle for human rights (against dominance and bullying in all their forms, from patriarchy, to settler-colonialism old and new, and imperialism old and new) will continue, in Palestine and beyond.
  And it will be as easy as BREATHING, cultivating peace at every step. If we understand it, we will make it.

Until next month, know that we will make it,
H x

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Women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives - Yasmin Zaher

Well there’s a first time for everything. In a great hurry I learned I’d be in transit for the whole of thr last day of March. So, breaking with routine, I decided to write to you on the 30th instead. An early date just couldn’t abide, so I saved your letter in the substack drafts, ready for the month’s true end. But when she got there the cupboard was bare.

The draft is not here. And I think its disappearance is telling me that in-the-moment is a true enough methodology after all. The stuff of life is happening to us all the time. A net of words descends and catches no big bounty, but at least something small and recognisable, with glitter-scales or defiant flaps enough to wonder at for a moment before releasing back into the wordless manifold.

And maybe the missing draft is telling me that March was a mostly wordless month anyway, with a missing last day for me, and a monthlong missing net with which to catch much verbal sense-making. Speech slowed down (and would that be faltering or resisting, maybe both). I became unavailable to most communication, except for practical things like pick-ups and pot-lucks, and impractical but essential things like hugs and singing.

Buying and loaning were forms of communication too:

Until next month, may the word-net catch and release what it needs to make defiant flaps and glitters; or may you allow just the practical or essential things to happen,

H x

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It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist
- Omar El Akkad

Head left up Hyperion Avenue, cross over from the Gelson’s Market to the Crossroads consignment store, turn down Griffith Park Boulevard then up Angus Street and on to Panorama Terrace. Enjoy the panorama of the aptly named terrace, feel fear and awe at the leaning-tower palm trees now one-century wise; make believe about the lives lived in the houses perched on this hill above a dream; let your bare arms swing as you drink in the dry, dry, dry martini air of Los Angeles in late winter.

I was there to see my sister, and it was my first time in LA in ten years. I’m almost at the stage of life where a decade can be said to pass quickly. But just one week with my sister was a whole lifetime. We made an ecosystem of a shared existence, with ambidextrous roles and language and rituals. Hard-to-launch mornings and super-ceremony evenings. The ability and necessity to push each other beyond our usual limits, and to cocoon each other in the most unusual of safeties. As much reverence for the things the other couldn’t do as the things that they could - never a deficit, just a difference.

With her I was someone that could need help and offer help and magnanimously write off any balance that was beyond help. I had a purpose, an audience, a cadence, a confidant. I was on a level; I had found a peer. We accurately liked what was true in the other. We talked for the hell of it and found it heaven. Together was a lifetime because every topic could be cut clean down the middle to examine the innards, only to cut the components down clean again, halving and twinning and halving and twinning, infinity made with words, no moral resting place of sureness, only pure potential.

And all the while a city in trouble. Charred Santa Monica Mountains, laurel sumac and chaparral under siege. Burned buildings and the tease of that cloying cloud - old faithful marine layer, or could it be smoke? Seeing is not believing, anyway. Strange invisibles have been birthed on the air, midcentury modern asbestos freed for all. Globally-shipped spectacles roll on down in the bowl of the city: the best Grammy’s ceremony in years, bars full for the Super Bowl, startin’ to see spaceships on Rosecrans, they wanna see me do my dance, I let ‘em watch me do my dance.

My first day was an adjustment. A striving-hunger on the air, everyone compulsorily on their way to being someone. Eastside HARRIS-WALZ bumper stickers and yard signs still a queasily fresh, un-sun-bleached blue. The airtight performativity of the law: words that make things happen, words that make you unequivocally on or off the hook. The sense of being held in matrices of amendments and waivers; signs that would elsewhere be read as kindly guides, but here must be read as contracts, ever-implicated force ever-available to back it all up.

Some people are busy manifesting a destiny here. But first you have to manifest yourself a parking space - time on the meter a cosmic bonus, thank you very much! A high curb rises up like steep bank from the road-river that makes all passages possible. Make a wobbly clamber out of the car-gondola and up onto a sidewalk busted up by tree roots, rebellious junipers and gums making tectonic shifts and mitred rifts in the hot concrete slabs. And lo, a pair of grinning runners crests the ridges and leaps from the peaks, the city a goofy-glad obstacle course for people living loud and unembarrassed.

And now my heart is softer, I can feel it. My first day was edge-of-seat unease. First day bemusement at big cars and big-baby comfort beverages of peanut butter lattes and plastic beakers more ice than coffee. But even the next day a different charge. Hungry people, life-hungry people. At the coffee shop a realtor named Adam with a tiny dog named Gracie atop his shoulders strikes up a conversation with me about the sadness of the fires. He talks about a home being a character in your life - ideally your own house to call a home, but even a city to call a home and a city as an important character in your life. The loss of a home is the loss of a relationship in your life.

And you know what, hell yeah, maybe he’s all talk but it’s talk with real feeling. Out and about there are lots of these conversations. Genuine exchanges, or exchanges that bring out something genuine in me, at the very least. So much weird that there’s no such thing as too weird. Sure, there’s a chance that any conversation could be activated for a sales conversion at any moment, but every conversation is also a real stage for being a person and enjoying the personhood of others. Freely-shared charm as a totally renewable currency. Maybe I was wrong in my projections. Maybe making it is not a desperate compulsion but just another goofy-glad obstacle course for people living loud and unembarrassed. (Yes, okay, I tried a peanut butter latte and it was kind of great. Ask me for a reappraisal when the sugar high wears off.)

*

On the plane I did not sleep. Instead I watched:

Anora (the performance of the year from Mikey Madison! Ani lost the jackpot with Vanya, but I trust that Anora is going to be just fine)

A Real Pain (Not as funny as I thought it was going to be, what a welcome wallop of bittersweetness to be reminded that pain so often lives alongside charm, maybe even makes charm possible)

Conclave (The Mean Girls of it all! Much funnier than I thought it was going to be. Talk about the performativity of words that make things happen: say the right thing at the right time and you might find yourself the anointed voice)

Small Things Like These (this adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novel gladly sobered me up again, a film very much about the ethical vacancy at the heart of making it: “if you want to get on in this life there are some things you have to ignore”)

The Outrun (A few darlings could have been killed, but I will stand by any honestly-etched recovery story. Cried and cried for the life of it all, what a bloody blessing this film was)

I’m almost ready for the next globally-shipped spectacle of the Oscars. Best you bet I will watch and live text-react with my sister. Alas, back to long-distance. Not just a house, not just a city, a sister is a home, too.

Until next month,
H x

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You note the bleakness of your own heart
that wants to live in spite of this
- Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Sticky last day of January, ultraviolet dialled high. One hundred shades of green and one thousand cicadas crawling out of their skins. Pollens all fluffed and primed (a sneeze for sweet vernal). Water vapour maxed out, sweat unevaporated and the state of her too floppy for words. The state of her. Two passports / no nation state on a map that can house our hopes for humanity.

This month I spent nearly every day with my sister. She left yesterday. The month together brought laughter as punctuation, a programme of talk-talk-talk and a default screensaver of singing, cascading copies of choruses. My body-doubling friend Anna called last night after the airport drop-off. Usually flush with episodic regalements, this time I struggled to string any stories together for her. I’ll have to tell you later. A rare state: utterly spent, no more words.

Here, too, at this month’s end letter, I’ll have to tell you later. I will be starting at a new rental home soon (and I am proudly a renter, not a temporarily embarrassed home-owner-in-waiting as Tracy Rosenthal puts it). I want to talk all about rent as a social relation, but I’ll have to tell you later. February is a new day. After missing her messages all month, my body-doubler and I vowed to write off fever-dream January and mark this as the new year. I love the fantasy of starting anew. For now I’ll share some favourites:

• Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (University of Akron Press, 2024)
  Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry (US), this poetry collection sends body-waves of grief and potential: “we bury the dead at the fence, let their roots reach the other side of home” (from Variations on a Last Chance, a poem dedicated to the Palestinians who participated in the Great March of Return in Gaza in 2018). The rhythm of the poem enacts the repetition of the marchers that went out every Friday in the face of Israeli snipers, “locked in a series of repetitions not of our own making.”
  

• Recognising the Stranger by Isabella Hammad (Vintage Publishing, 2024)
  A text on the ancient pulls and contemporary limits of recognition - recognition that flares in the heart but fails to launch material change and redistribution of power; the limits of a recognition that can be granted and then taken away (after all, who is doing the recognising? Someone with an unfair dose of power, whose mercy is limited and humiliating). Instead of recognition, the condition of exile opens up to Hammad not only as a pain but an ethic: “to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.”
  

• Read + Listen: Neil Gaiman and the political economy of rape by Emmy Rakete (Overland Journal) and Abolish Rent, an interview with Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal (The Dig Podcast):
  
  “SP was in a desperate situation. The couple represented employment, housing, and security. SP had spent weeks early in the lockdown period sleeping on the beach, and didn’t want to have to go back to sleeping rough. She accepted their offer. Were it not for the housing crisis, she might not have […] Auckland is a city where people sleep in doorways and alleys on Queen Street every night and undeveloped public housing projects rot away, while the palaces of the rich stack up higher in Remuera, Epsom, and Waiheke Island. Every concession that New Zealand has made to the profits of private landlords pushed SP into Gaiman’s arms. She had nowhere else to go. None of the women like her do” - Emmy Rakete

  
  “The truth of our housing system is that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine. The capitalist housing system isn’t designed to provide the best quality housing to the most people, but to generate the most profit and extract the most rent. To win a world where shelter is a fundamental right will mean the interests of landlords and real estate speculators no longer trump our basic human need for a home. It will take a liberatory struggle—a struggle led by tenants themselves” - Tracy Rosenthal & Leonardo Vilchis

• Malm and Mangione by Amna A. Akbar (N+1 Magazine)
  
  "Unlike the cost of health care, the climate crisis is coming for us all, regardless of our class fraction or social location. But both are born of the predictable and calculated production of slow-motion death. The crushing realities of inflation, debt, a burning planet, stagnating wages, and a carceral state within a military–industrial complex are social. So too, it turns out, is the terrifying and dislocating confusion about the path ahead. In the aftermath of the early Covid-era interregnum—an aberration that the ruling class would like us to forget—it’s unclear what we can do, individually or together, to take on the corporations that are destroying the planet and our lives. Or to bend the sedimented wills of their political representatives, who seem all too cozy in this inferno. If we know what to do, we cannot seem to muster the effort, at least not yet.”
  

• Shop: Al-Nabulsi Textile Factory kufiyya, from Nablus via new Aotearoa-Palestinian business Bayyāra
  

• Clip (TikTok): “We will camp over the rubble and live in our city” - Bisan Owda returning home to the north of Gaza after 15 months
  

• Online public conference (Therapy and Social Change): Mental Health in Schools: A Young Person’s Right (Feb 1st 10am UK time). So tired of seeing distress, shame and humiliation as normal in schools, I am looking forward to this one (with Diane Abbott as keynote, let’s go!).

Until next month, may we acknowledge the bleakness in our own hearts then feel our way toward a politics of life,
H x

We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe
- Frantz Fanon

Well, we made it folks. It’s the last day of 2024 and the portal to the new is open and streaked with light. I confess to this newsletter being the first in a fair few months that I have found the time to type at my laptop, at a table. The last three have been written on my phone, in various states of transit (October on the train was the best). Something about the return of health after July and August’s frightening incapacity put me into a frenzy of movement and novelty. As much as I had found to love in the view of the red-berried tree outside the window, I could no longer stand the place of my illness. I wanted to be anywhere else that the new vitality could take me. I said yes to pet-sitting requests and went often to the coast and jumped into a long journey to meet a newborn baby named for a flowering star. Meeting the baby was a shock of beauty, holding a whole world in my hands for a brief moment and finding only trust and need, need and trust; helpless trust and a helpless love. Then a blink of the eyes and his precious limbs could have been those of the precious babies seen in photographs and videos these past 14 months, life robbed of them when all they could do was helplessly trust in the holding hands of the world. A ghoulish overlay, certainly, but one borne of the ghoulish actions of real people that still cling to a constructed unreality of their victims.

On my last-minute journeys I would see people I hadn’t been organised enough to plan to see. Perfect encounters of chance: I bumped into my cousin on a street that I wasn’t meant to be on in a city that I wasn’t meant to be in, and saw a friend from New Zealand on a busy Thameslink platform. You, here? You! Elations wrought of randomness are a joy to someone plagued by decision optimisation overload — see, perfect things can happen even when you haven’t made perfect plans. When I had to be at home I was out of the flat as much as possible, starting the day at Hobz Bakery on the Leith Walk before working in the library. Hobz are a Living Wage business with only local ingredients (no Big Chocolate in sight). They have just three indoor chairs at the shared window bench, but arrive early enough and you can get the corner spot and watch everything happen. Piles of perfect pastries but all I ever ordered was toast. Three thick slices of sourdough tin loaf. Roof-of-mouth-rippingly good. Yes you can toast your own bread but, damn, some dark early mornings I just didn’t want to be in that flat. Huge drive for movement is animating me again.

This time exactly five years ago I wrote this letter from the departures gate at Auckland International Airport, on my way to move to the UK. And today I am writing to you again from the airport, this time at Heathrow to make a journey back to Aotearoa. A sucker for symmetry, this New Year’s Eve home-going feels so special. In that newsletter (half a decade ago!) I wrote about my relationship to working in the education system. I’m not sure what my absolute life’s work is yet, but my life is unashamedly a work of art, as is the case for all who love life and humanity. I love rituals and objects and routines and places and people so fiercely. Burnout has taken away the drills of what I used to think of as discipline, but I am ever-devotional. So I want to tell you about some of the textures of my year - in a horrible year, a confusing and deracinating year, there were so many devotional things.

Best dish - a whole artichoke with molten saffron butter in Glasgow at Big Counter. A flower food! What an ceremony, to eat each petal! All complete with the most charismatic chef and his warm patter for each table. This was during a stint looking after my childhood best friend Heather’s dog while she was away on tour with her bagpipe pop band.

Best Booker winner in a while - Samantha Harvey, Orbital. A book where earth is the obvious character, but where language is also a main character. All the while the human characters themselves become non-characters in space; ego dissolution outside of earthly relations and encounters. The novel’s language is declaratory, exclamatory; all in the foreground. To read the book is to sense an imagining author using ecstasy to fill in for direct experience. And aren’t we all glad that Harvey did just that.

Best day - a whole afternoon sitting on the fishing wall at South Queensferry with my brother Jonty, when he was up visiting from London (2024: most definitely The Year of the Brother, blessed be). Brilliant sun, sandwiches from Dune Bakery, and all the time in the world for train, plane, and seal-spotting — a trifecta for ritual-lovers who find even inanimate objects to possess an eye-crinkling soul.

Best book talk - Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, Goldsmiths University Stuart Hall Building: “I envy everyone that is able to speak. It’s not that I don’t want to speak. But failure of language not abandonment. It is stopping to think. Literature is not a tool but a space of intimacy. Linguistic erasure, failure, betrayal allows for something else. You listen while you cannot speak; distance as link to the other. Silence is born from the love of language. To be articulate is to be in a position of power. Therefore a failure of language is a refusal to be in the position of power.”

Best lecture - Amy Tobin, Varieties of Togetherness: Some approaches to feminist art histories, Edinburgh College of Art: “a network of exchange is about being impervious to assimilation — how do we each exist? How will we realise ourselves? Via a personal will to continue being other. As the Combahee River Collective reminds us, we cannot live without our lives”.

Best workshop - What Does Palestine Reveal about the Psy-Disciplines, Healing Justice London, hosted by Tarek Younis and Lara Sheehi (author of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine): “beware concepts that are co-opted and defanged. All these practitioners who wrote about decolonisation are no where to be seen in a genocide. It’s because these concepts are not meant to just be cognitive concepts. They’re meant to be in action and relational and ever-turned toward the land. To decolonise is to give land back. People must be allowed to return to Palestine. Beware the temptation to position oneself as the ‘respectable’ pro-Palestinian with professional credentials as a therapist. All that does is creates a non-respectable alternative. You are doing nothing to disrupt the cycle of violence that creates the conditions of suffering that you’re trying to ameliorate to begin with.”

Best Edinburgh Book Festival event - Gerald Murnane in conversation with Merve Emre: “Why do I write these books? I want to know the shape of my own mind. What are these connections? What energy do they give rise to? This energy is good for the soul; the excitement of the inner life. I also have the urge to annoy, to be willfully cranky and obstinate.”

Best overheard conversation - Two men, at the British Library atrium café:
Man 1: I’ve lost social confidence, I’ve really lost confidence.
Man 2: Well I think we’re all still traumatised. It really was traumatic. And people experienced it in different ways. Some people launched themselves back out there and then there was also the feeling of woah woah woah.
Man 1: Running into you like this was really good timing.
Man 2: Well let’s do it more often. I’ve really enjoyed this.
Man 1: Let’s do it. See you next month?

Best shop interaction - buying a falafel plate at Palestinian restaurant Shakeshuka in Marylebone. At the end of my delicious meal I thanked the proprietor and he said,
“You have a beautiful spirit.”
I thought he was going to say day! You have a beautiful day! But he said spirit! I had said you too before I knew! But I stand by it.
“You have a beautiful spirit.”
“You too!”

Until next time, may you listen in periods of silence and find the gentlest of devotions. Everything against genocide; everything for liberation.
Let’s do it. See you next month?
H x

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P.s. any ephemeral best things from your 2024? I want to know what made your eyes crinkle with pleasure.

LETTER PLEASE

For what has felt, by turns, a long time and a short time, I’ve been living in a top-floor tenement flat near Leith Links in Edinburgh, watched over by Arthur’s Seat. The mountain is a constant companion. His rumpled silhouette is spiked by a day-crown of human climbers, and at night (so much of the day, by this time of year) the silhouette is swapped for survivalist flashes of torchlight. All year we’ve been here, and all the while I’ve wondered about the mountain’s view of us — how humble our street-looming facade must look from on high! All but a red-bricked dot! And yet. I have never felt called to join the corona of climbers myself. Climbing would be a conquest. I want to let the mountain be, only to be seen from my puny ground-bound position.

Up there the mountain is bare of all but gorse. Down here the death of the deciduous leaves is more comprehensive now, at November’s end. The trees look more like they did when I arrived, long-fingered and lonely. Though to which moment of arrival am I referring? 2020 or 2024? Only now, toward the end of this strange year, do I see that coming back here to the UK was safety-seeking behaviour. I was bereft and seeking familiarity after unexpected trauma in New Zealand. (Though that’s a tautology, isn’t it, traumas being definitionally unexpected. Despite all evidence of life and people being unpredictable, the individual assumption of uninterrupted sovereignty of body and spirit suffers with any new violation.)

Seeking safety in the place where you were born, where you were moved from as a child, makes some sense. But that’s not the place I was seeking. Where I was seeking was the intense here-ness of the locked-down era. The strange suffering that transmuted into an ecstatic smallness; absolute devotion generated by the blandest of objects and rituals (the fish finger sandwiches on a Friday, the twice daily walk to the canal pontoon, the same salad again and again, the same photograph every day, the same whorls of wood on the plywood wall). Home went from something I was sick for, to something so conceptually wobbly that I did not even know to miss.

This year my own emotional life became that conceptually wobbly thing that I have not known to miss. Where the first months of the genocide found easy expression (nothing was easy, but the truth was clear), more recently there’s been a crazed white noise in place of words. “Watching a live-streamed genocide” has become a stock phrase, hasn’t it, but the relentless failure of fairness and justice really does do something to even the witnesses. So very many people killed by the actions and inactions of cowards, the deaths themselves and the death of morality all whirlpooled together. But this month the ICC issued their arrest warrants for Netanyahu. At the Oxford Union debate on November 28 the motion, "This House believes Israel is an Apartheid state responsible for genocide,” passed overwhelmingly.

This month I walked a lot around Edinburgh, up and down the Water of Leith, Easter Road, the Leith Walk, and in and around Nicholson Street and the Grassmarket to attend the Radical Book Fair and Edinburgh’s International Poetry Festival. On all my walks I let myself listen to the audiobook of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. I found myself smiling stupidly during Ivan and Margaret’s scenes (she does falling in love so well!) and crying during Peter and Ivan’s culminating moments after the chess tournament. Walking around the freezing city, by myself, laughing and crying, grateful for the chance to feel something again (I can cry! I wrote stupidly, at the end of one of my walks). Knowing what to miss.

It was on a tram ride to the airport to greet my brother when the tears started falling for Professor Adnan Al Bursh. I’d read Francesca Albanese’s shocked statement on the news of the manner of the Palestinian surgeon’s death a few days before. Cognitively appalled but emotionally numb I’d been to read the words: “Likely raped to death. A doctor. A stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics. Likely raped to death.” But on the tram, days later, and after hours of walking around listening to Sally Rooney, I started to cry.

ARCHIVE PLEASE

November 2023: “The settler-colony of New Zealand has sworn in a new government beneath its union-jacked flag, a triumvirate coalition of the tax-cutting right, landlord-loving libertarians, and minority-blaming populists. As Mihingarangi Forbes said, the new government “have burnt the house down … It’s the right of Indigenous people being decided on by the majority”

November 2022: “the very context collapse that makes [Twitter] horrible is probably also the thing that makes it great: so many worlds and perspectives and tones and communities openly kaleidoscoping and allowing for the knowledge that different ways of being exist, even if you don’t want to know about them”

November 2021: “All month long I wanted to hear my own whispers on the wind and know what I was thinking of myself. Too bad that was physically impossible, but I did have books”

November 2020: “I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself: launching changes when I know that any change, at least at first, so unmoors me. Maybe it is a need to live inside a Shakespearean drama, in miniature - all recognitions and reversals“

November 2019: “I’m over it [my thesis]. I feel like I’ve sucked the lemon of the subject dry and want to move on to something new. There’s no sour tang of discovery here, just some fibrous pith to chew through. Nine days until submission. Wish me luck”

*

Until next month, may you climb the mountain or watch it from a puny position, either way end the genocide,

H x

LETTER PLEASE

Autumn in Edinburgh means trees aflame in orange, leaves still mostly fastened to their branches but bough-bonds soon to break. O orange, colour of death. Chlorophyl green has gone and, for this window before winter, the carotenoids sing a palliative swan song. Now is the orange pigment’s one and final starring performance. Summer’s supple wind-dancers hospice themselves into dry orange paper then wet brown mulch. The boundary between the living and the dead is porous. No wonder Halloween makes more sense in the north.

One night this month Ryan and I were struggling to get to sleep. (This happens a lot: one of the dyad is often plenty sleepy, but the other will need to talk to find out how they think or feel (a day of work has a way of alienating you from your mind), and we never leave a processing need unanswered, but it does mean that the sleepy one in turn becomes the wakeful one and ends up needing their own processing time). It’s funny the things that break through the numb morass of horror. And by funny I mean not funny at all, but my use of the word funny certainly performs the abjection I describe.

On the night in question Ryan was riven by grief for a storyboard artist killed by Israel in Gaza’s Jabalia regfugee camp. Mahasen Al-Khatib. In one of her last work-in-progress videos it was possible to hear, amidst background bombs, the familiar gentle sound of a stylus making contact with the digital page of a tablet. I hear this sound every day from Ryan’s own work. Instead of asking why she had to die, Ryan got stuck repeating the question, why am I allowed to live? I couldn’t understand his inversion of the right order of things, death as the default and living as the aberration. That’s when my own sleepy processing need woke up.

They’ve inverted the right order of things haven’t they, I said to him in the dark. They’ve destroyed what it means to be human because, while there are good human acts each day, there also exist their annihilatory acts each day. Because the génocidaires are human and they are doing this, it means that what it means to be human includes what they are doing. (But what did I feel before? That cruelty was simply produced by an absence of knowledge? That knowledge-work could bring us freedom from cruelty and domination?) Don’t they get it, the capital-captured leaders? Their blank-cheque bombs and surveillance are making for a butchery that is destroying what it means to be human.

A dead body used to be a sacred thing. I don’t know if I’d even seen a photograph of a desecrated dead body before. The physical integrity and spiritual privacy of a corpse used to mean something. Grief used to mean something. Don’t they get it? Their destruction is destroying grief. How can any of us honour a single grief when they keep piling unmournable griefs higher and higher. Everyone needs a candle to light their way. Whether they believe in an afterlife, or even just the physical afterlife of atomic de- and re-composition, they need a candle. A being used to reside in those atoms! And now it does not! What a strange miracle of non-existence where once there existed a being! Ceasing-to-be used to mean something!

[All these thought-processings in the dark night of deferred sleep. Ryan held a candle for me, as I tried to imagine all the people that have violently ceased to be, and whose ceasing is also violently unmarked and un-miracled (atoms plastic-bagged or even vaporised, a toddler vaporised for God’s sake). Everyone needs a candle.]

*

This time a year ago I insisted that these violences are not part of our nature: “Domination is not our nature. Occupation is not our nature. Walls and borders are not our nature. Apartheid is not our nature. Raining down destruction upon dehumanised others is not our nature. Raining down destruction upon other-than-human beings and places and archives is not our nature, either”. But now I see that they are. That they can be. That nature is malleable. Of course my words last year came from a place of still-welcome steadfastness.

Writing allows for an ethic of attending to the world as we want it to be. But this year has changed me and changed my mind about what the aim looks like. An end to genocide, always, an aim for freedom, always. But the how has changed. Insisting on what isn’t our nature risks reifying violence (it’s always someone else, over there, committing inhuman violence. Couldn’t be me!). Instead the how is to embrace the porous border between victimhood and perpetration - dropping any fossilising of either of these terms in the way that we view ourselves, understanding our capacity to cause pain to others, and staying alive to that porousness. The aim is to know that causing pain to another is so terribly possible, normal even; resisting feeling damned by that reality but instead giving a damn enough to attend and mend to the pain we cause.

One piece that made such an impact on my understanding of this aim was Brandon Taylor’s essay on child abuse, written within the context of posthumous revelations of author Alice Munro’s enablement of abuse toward her daughter. Taylor eschews the impulse to give Munro a reaction worthy of a newly-minted monster. Instead, Taylor unfolds just how casual and easy monstrosity can be:

"What kind of mother? What kind of person?

What kind of woman? etc. Well, any kind of mother. Any kind of person. Any kind of woman.

She made a choice and justified it to herself through any number of inversions or self-delusions, who can say. But is this really so shocking? People do this every day. My own family did this. I saw it play out first hand.

Rather than a rare bolt of pathological evil that we can consign to devilish people, the pain we cause others is simply devilishly common. So many children were raised by emotionally immature people, but were for so long not allowed to think of what they experienced as child abuse, because abuse is evil and our parents aren’t evil. But abuse is just so easy and humdrum, that’s the thing. The effects are huge, but the doing is so common. It’s awful to realise that our pain is caused not by evil but by something human. It’s almost insulting that huge moral injuries could be born of moral carelessness.

Our nature could be anything. It’s malleable. We can hurt and we can be hurt. There is nothing to vanquish, just porousness to feel and truly mutual freedom to seek - which includes attending to the capacity we have to create unfreedom. Today I don’t have all the words for what I want life to mean, but know I want the sacredness of death to mean something. Addiction to narrative strength and sole stories of victimhood make for a death spiral. Not only the death of life but the death of death. I refuse the unmournability created by violent arrogance.

People who think they are right can be very wrong, casually wrong, too-alienated-by-work-to-think-straight wrong. That’s okay, just don’t stay on the sinking ship of your rigid narrative and insist on taking the rest of us down with you. (Deleuze talked of fascism liberating a popular desire for suicide, as Richard Seymour invokes in his new book, Disaster Nationalism). Be open to changing your mind - that’s what being free allows. Feel the freaky fizzle of realising how much more we have to do together than your ideas had allowed. Turn toward the sharedness of this pain we all feel under the supreme casual moral carelessness of extractive systems. Don’t rip away others’ lives and freedoms because you don’t want to use your own freedom to change your mind.

DIGEST PLEASE

• “You’ve got to be part of something big, then you are a human. If you’re not part of something big then you’re that anxious thing under the covers, ordering a box of cookies and watching Netflix. We’re all here for Palestine, we’re here to never let the Israelis forget, nor the Americans - the Americans who are even worse, having destroyed so many”

  - Vijay Prashad (paraphrased), in conversaton with Emmy Rākete (link is to the off-putting format of an Instagram video, but it’s such a worthwhile conversation: courage, confidence, clarity, and humour! I loved hearing the laughter of the live audience, and laughed with them).

• “[T]he instability of grief leaves you always changing your mind and having to reckon with iterations of yourself that feel disparate”

  - Raven Leilani, “Death of the Party” N+1 (I kept having to put it down and stare into space for a while before I could carry on: such pinpoint accuracy on the self-alienating and art-alienating debasements of grief)

• “People have to learn through experience just how difficult it is to win change through the proper channels, and that can be very radicalising. There’s no better teacher than just having the powerful be unmoved by your pain and your suffering.”

  - Solidarity episode of The Dig, with Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix

• “After his murder, his name came alive, his vital face and beautiful black hair, the stories about his genius at school, his ambition to become a physician—and he might have become a gifted trauma surgeon serving in a state-of-the-art burn unit somewhere civilized … A charred soul, like invisible ink, once burned, becomes visible in lieu of the body it once illuminated. Also, the charred soul soots the killer’s soul.”

  - A Glass of Water, a Burning Boy: Fady Joudah on Images From Gaza, Literary Hub

ARCHIVE PLEASE

October 2023 "[Colonising means] becoming brittle, losing the elastic of that expansive humanity when we ratchet up what we are willing to do to others to maintain our idea of safety and normality”

October 2022 "I must have taken some comfort in telling myself that I would later be reviewing these entries from an entirely different vantage point; that I would be grateful for the immediacy of the daily recordings, otherwise lost to time. But today I can’t bring myself to go back to read the entries and find all that curiosity and melodrama - how short I thought the pandemic would be, how eager I was to capture the ephemeralities that would in fact become years-long realities. I don’t want to go back and find all the affectations of reverence for the state of exception - my naive sense of occasion.”

October 2021 "In brick-stacked London I experienced a claustrophobic sea-longing. Now all around me is sea and I feel an agoraphobic brick-longing. The reversal is an ancient myth hatching once more, all of our longings meeting the same meted out plots, again and again. It’s not a tragedy, though. It is not all too-late reversals and recognitions. I am young, not young young, but not old. This must simply be the first time accepting the arc of these human plots - no exemptions or special passes”

October 2020 "My worst fear is turning out to be one of those people that, in a plane crash, reaches into the overhead compartment for their luggage before evacuating the plane - not because they love their stuff so much as it’s just what you do when you get off a plane; a normalcy bias. Sometimes I think my whole life is an exercise in de-programming”

October 2019 "What does it mean to write lyrically about genocide? I felt queasy, at points, to read [Anne] Michaels' beautiful lines about the ugliest events of the Holocaust. For instance, "a camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they’d once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude." I don't know if I can stomach putting words of gratitude in the mouth of a Holocaust victim, however much grace each person may have brought to bear during their dehumanising [death] sentences. But maybe it is worth risking romanticism to try to represent the unrepresentable, for the sake of the ongoing memory of those that perished.”

October 31st 2024

R: I loved it when we caught eyes through the café window. I thought to myself, if I didn’t know her already I’d think, wow, what a cute and fascinating person.

H: I’d think that too! I’d think, who is this person with these crinkly eyes, this lilting gait, this fistful of light.

*

Everyone was someone’s someone, weren’t they. Someone’s someone to be discovered through a window and spend many future nights resisting sleepiness in order to stand sentinel over their heart. Everyone was someone, a someone belonging to themselves and to everyone.

Until next month, may death be made visible and life be seen for the many-headed humdrum hydra that it is, freedom of mind free for the taking, never a case for taking from others’ lands and lives,

H x

P.s. Where are you when you’re reading this? I’m in the dark, on a train, whooshing closer to a dear old friend. Maybe by the time I press send I’ll be in the pink room that she’s reserved for me.

LETTER PLEASE: one newsletter, written and sent on the last day of each calendar month (for the past five years and counting! Thank you for reading!)

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