Tag: nonlinear narrative

Ceaseless Watcher, turn your gaze upon this wretched thing
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CONTENT WARNINGS: vague references to sexual violence, sardonic references to Ancient Greek pederasty, omnipresent sense of dread/surveillance and being misgendered

Also my recording sounds all shaky and unpracticed and then I get into a flow just trust me xoxo gossip girl
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On visibility post-panopticon

Writer’s note: I understand many of you to assume “post-” means a concept or social construct is “over,” hence your difficulty interfacing with “postcolonial” theory or “post-covid,” but for our purposes, “post-” means “after the advent of the thing” or “in the thing’s world now.”

#ootd

Out on Aliceanna Street, I swung my left leg back and forth off the curb like a child, tilting my head to make sure my pants reached all the way down. My father’s voice calling a boy’s too-short jeans “highwaters” derisively in the eighth grade lives in my head whenever I dress myself. If I’m trying on a coat, I do “the Waawaakeyaash Test,” something Ojibwe language teacher Waawaakeyaash Keller Paap taught us when we were really little, where you put on your jacket. “At ease,” meaning arms resting at your sides. “Reach for the sausages,” as in, reach to the top shelf. “Do the circle dance,” which means putting your hands in fists in front of you and circling them around. Well, yeah, dancing.

A lot of the cardigans I wear these days don’t really pass the test, but my new pants seem to fit okay, so I stepped out on Easter in my favorite “worst outfit ever,” which consists of the pants in question–faux-patchwork white and blue wide-leg jeans from Chickie & Co. on Howard, just past all the pitted empty storefronts in Antique Row, a white and grey baby tee with boxing gloves embroidered across the chest and KNOCKOUT embroidered underneath, with a matching patchwork jacket I’ve been meaning to add embroidery to that Della gave me from our basement. I think it’s from the 90s, but I can’t be sure.

I’ve been listening to a lot of cassettes lately. Unlike CDs, vinyl, or streaming, I can actually hold the music in my hands, examine it. I love the click of the hard plastic or the soft matte slide of the paper cases against my palm. When I first got really into cassettes, however, one thought pushed itself to the forefront of my mind. Disturbed the shit out of me.

Well, I thought, there goes my end-of-the-year music recap.

You know it. You love it. Spotify Wrapped. Apple Music Replay. The annual roundup of everyone’s most-listened to artists and songs we all share with each other in December like the business card scene in American Psycho.

You’re always gonna use it. Sure, some jumped ship from Spotify when the Rogan scandal caused a bunch of classic rock stars to pull their catalogs from the streaming platform, openly deriding the website for how they severely underpay their artists. And yeah, Spotify’s known for its “CIA-level surveillance software,” which a noble few try to push against as best they can. But you love it, don’t you? You love being watched.

Apple Music and Youtube both jacked Spotify’s swag the moment they noticed the gorilla grip Wrapped has on consumers, which is a fun little dirty euphemism for “people” I like to toss out every now and again. Less and less now that I’ve met more people who actively identify with the epithet. I’m what my friends call an “Apple music understander,” a label just a few notches above “Riverdale Apologist” and below “such a hater.” Thus, my “Wrapped” is Apple’s “Replay,” which tries with clumsy glossiness to copy what Spotify corners the market on. Before your hackles raise at my irony-poisoned tone, I need you to know I love my little Replay. Last year, I drew immense pleasure from posting Deafheaven as my top artist, because one of my best friends had literally no idea I loved Deafheaven that much. The conversation that ensued gave me enough serotonin to last me through the rest of that brutal winter.

There’s something so comforting in being surveilled, isn’t there? In proving you have nothing to hide. You’ve done nothing wrong. You’re a Good Person. You believe in The Acceptable Things. You listen to the Sanctioned Music and you support the Proper Celebrities. You say the right thing, always, and if you don’t, well, you’d better dust off that Notes app, because accountability and catharsis are your only saving grace right now.

I get watched a lot. My landlord’s set up all these cameras, see, three at the door before you unlock the building, three more in the landing. Maybe more upstairs, I haven’t checked. These walls are thin. The floors are thinner. Today I crossed my apartment and realized my upstairs neighbor was crossing his at the same time, our footfalls an eerie harmony. Creak, thump, creak. We’re doing our laundry at the same time, too, right now, both of our machines lurching and rattling the whole old building.

It doesn’t stop when I leave my house, either. It might even get worse. Once, a few months back, I stepped out in my favorite pink and gossamer outfit, the one I’ve pretty much dry-docked since upping my T-dose. It’s a long, flowing pink skirt with a mesh gold petticoat that gives the illusion I’m floating. Then there’s usually a pink shirt on top, only I believe that day, I was wearing a red waistcoat that definitely didn’t pass the Keller Paap test and therefore required the posture of an Irish River-dancer. A carful of older women, Millennials or maybe even Gen X, started to scream at my approach, with two of them raising their phones to film and photograph me. One woman panicked when she realized she had her flash on—it was nighttime. Some phones turn the flash on automatically. I did not turn around. I was used to people having bizarre reactions to my presence at this point, but the two friends trailing behind me stammered, “Did… were they… did they just take a video of you?”

I shrugged and kept walking. These things happen.

Out on Aliceanna, I swung my leg off the curb like a small child. I wondered if I was going to post on Instagram for Trans Day of Visibility. I’ve been oscillating between trans pride and trans prejudice, you see, joy at my own body and anger at its implicit betrayal, at how many times I’ve entered a space with other trans mascs just to have them slant their eyes at me because I’m not like them. Whether that’s because I’ve been on T for longer, or my height, voice, whatever, is anyone’s guess.

It was a beautiful, sunny Easter Sunday, and a lot of people—men, mostly—were out with DSLR cameras. Phil and I had just gone to the Sound Garden, where I bought about ten new cassettes and one vinyl copy of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing, an apt record to name-drop in a written piece dedicated to watching and being watched. I FaceTimed my grandparents from the curb, furrowing my brow at my unkempt face, my loose, dry surfer waves that looked crunchy. Across the street, I registered the vague presence of a man with a camera and a beautifully dressed middle-aged woman. She’d walk a few paces, strike a pose, and he’d capture her. I watched her for a moment in admiration until my grandparents picked up and I got ready to tell them about my plans to pursue a prelaw degree.

Just as my grandfather said to me, “We should FaceTime more often. You know, I won’t be around for very much longer,” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up just in time to catch the man with the camera as he casually hooked his arm up and around, winked, and took my picture.

I faltered in my response to my grandfather’s alarming and true statement here. For one long, agonizing moment, the world moved in slow motion. My leg swung back and forth off the curbside, one long, infected pendulum. The warm spring breeze ruffled my hair as dogwood petals swirled around me, white as an angel’s feathers but reeking of cum. My eye zeroed in on the bulbous black eye of the camera, where all light seemed to disappear. My grandfather smiled at his mortal assertion and I glanced down at where I held his face in my hands, frightened by how it took me twenty-four years to realize his eyes are green. The man across the street saw me see him and smirked a little, lowering his camera. His lady friend spun on her heel and looked expectantly at him. I opened my mouth and as I was saying, “Yes, yes, that’s true, you’re right,” two young men walking into the alley tripped over each other and began to point at me. They both stared, walking backwards into the dark.

passing time

Transness is a funny thing. There’s all these layers to how it’s perceived. Monstrous, threatening, laughable, embarrassing, liberatory, beautiful, bold, annoying, or, in my case, just plain boring. Being trans might be the most boring thing about me, and I have a lot of boring things.

Because my phone thinks I’m a cis gay guy who struggles with erectile dysfunction and keeping my asshole clean, my explore page is filled with weird, quasi-right wing memes. That is, of course, until I spend time training my algorithm to show me calls for submission, grant opportunities, and job postings. Instagram recently removed the timestamps, at least on my version of the app, which has made this difficult and made my explore page backslide into the mean spirited, weird shit I don’t actually like to see, peppered with femcel rhetoric I super don’t like to see. What I end up finding is a lot of biological essentialism, insecurity, and comment sections filled with “bro got mental illness” and “bro switched sides” and “no way bro” with the crying laughing emojis in response to trans people acknowledging our own existence.

Sometimes I see homoerotic videos, mostly of the gym bro variety, talking about touching tips with the boys, going on camping trips with the boys, jacking the boys off, or how the boys seem to understand better how to love each other than their girlfriends do. The latter is mostly in the form of “when my girlfriend says she loves me but bro just said if he were going blind in an hour he’d want my face to be the last face he sees” or some such poetic shit. These boy-centric homosocial posts tend to posit homosexual relationships as being simultaneously inevitable and unattainable, a fantasy bubble existing only in the gym or video games a la Black Mirror’s infamous “Striking Vipers” episode. There’s an undercurrent of “no homo” to all of it, centering the perceived misery of a heterosexual romantic contract as the end-all be-all of male existence. Tellingly, bro never wants to lock bro down, even when the feelings are mutual and the joy seems abundant. This is because, of course, straightness is sacred, unimpeachable. The natural order of things.

Enter they/them pussy.

Your “fruity boyfriend” cannot see you

I’d like to preface this by saying everything I’m about to discuss here suffers from my own prejudices. I’m writing from the perspective of someone who, as I’ve said before, was a no-boys-allowed lesbian until I wasn’t, at which point I began my social transition, still pursuing anyone who wasn’t a man (except for one gay man ten years my senior, but that’s… that’s classified), then entered my “volcel era” so I could be “more finished” before I actually kept having sex, then I detransitioned, then I shacked up with a girl, then we broke up, then I re-transitioned.

I’m not really the person you could easily bond with if you’re attracted to men from the get-go, is what I’m trying to say. I’ve never tried to justify the sexualities of the men I sleep with, because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how we’re perceived. It’s why I don’t really hold their hands or their gazes out in public. It’s why I’m kind of a homophobic douchebag. I know, I know, I’m working on it.

With trans people becoming more “visible,” so too have our presences in the memetic world increased exponentially. One such meme is the coveted “they/them pussy,” which I’m certain began in T4T spaces as a sort of ostentatious flouting of gendered expectations for who can have what genitals before it became a chaser’s calling card. The amount of men I’ve come across who have their Tinder preferences set to “women only” but prefer “nonbinary chicks” with their boyish aesthetics, blunted emotional needs, and perpetual youth is staggering. As for the “chicks” in question, my absolute favorite thing is hearing an AFAB enby go off about how their new boy toy’s only ever been with cis girlies, but he must be a little fruity if he’s going out with them.

Of course, because he thinks I’m one of him, he drops his guard, starts talking about his “girlfriend” and “her” genderweird shit, calls “her” “a they/them” as if “a they/them” is a noun and not, like, a weirdly immature, slightly dehumanizing misuse of someone’s potential pronouns. These relationships never last, but I always wonder what would happen if they did. Would my friend, my beautiful, insane, nonbinary, disgusting little freak of a friend be tamed by this? Their boring, unimaginative, ludicrously uncurious boyfriend, the fucker they keep bringing around because he’s “basically queer” only for him to barge into everyone’s personal space with his entitlement and his black-hole lack of personality? Is he gonna win, is what I’m wondering, and are they going to relent, become a “she” to his “him,” a “wife” to his “husband?”

Furthermore, is he? Queer, I mean?

I think he might be. Queer, though, not in a life-giving, revolutionary kind of way, but in a repressed, emasculated, Hays code way. I’m thinking of this one absolutely batshit screenshot drag artist Penis Envy (Radcliffe) posted on his Instagram:

More on the “real women” idea later, but to wrap this portion up, I’m so against this type of guy being in me and my friends’ personal space because I’ve been chased by that exact guy. You know the kind. Straight guy, identifies as pansexual because he’s sucked a woman off and thinks pre-everything tboys are fuckable as long as they look twenty years old at most. I won’t name him. His life seems kind of bad. I don’t like kicking people while they’re down. But he was in his forties while I was barely nineteen, and he’d try to hold me down, make me spoon him. There was something empty and shattered in his eyes I couldn’t quite place. Now, having fucked a few guys as a guy and felt them melt within my hands, I wonder if it’s that. The simultaneous aversion and obsession with homosexuality. Some great, unmet need within himself. A lot of my friends think the boyfriends who fuck up their lives are looking for mommies. I almost disagree.

I think a lot of men wish they had a daddy.

The responsibility of desire

I’d gone on a rant recently about how so many Native men are just gay. There was a point to it. I was all beat up and upset over a particular Richard Van Camp short story, the one where it’s these two childhood best friends and one of them is getting married (to a woman), and his friend asks him if he remembers their deal. The deal had been that, so they would never go a day apart, they’d both get married to women but they’d live in a great big house, or rather, two houses, attached in the middle, and they could all sleep together in one bed. And maybe they’d share their wives, if the wives were okay with it, but the point was, these two boys would grow old together, too. And the man, the husband, he goes to his new bride and asks her if she’d be alright with that. She says, “Can I think on it?”

The story passes in typical Van Camp fashion. Loopy time. Vivid and dreamlike at once. Gets inside you, in your head and in your heart, I mean, there’s a reason I have “Godless but loyal to heaven” tattooed down my hip. And then the bride summons her man back and says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

Her man says that’s alright, returns to his best friend. His best friend kisses him and says, “Okay. Maybe in our next life.”

I was mad as hell about that story for a couple reasons. Mostly my own sense of impending doom. Marriage seems like a death sentence to me. It’s probably the “child of divorce” talking, but I’m terrified of it. Whenever a high school buddy of mine posts their marriage photos, I have to fight the urge to pour one out. Especially if it’s someone I knew for a fact was having gay sex when we were in school and is now a good ole boy, going to church with his pretty blonde wife.

I was going off about this, how so many Native men would be better off, maybe even nicer to women, if they just admitted their own queerness. I was going off about it to Carmen, who I love so much, and she interrupted me.

“Listen. I think… look, I get where you’re coming from, but I feel like… I feel like alleged gayness absolves these men of the responsibility of desire. And… and I was. I was desired. I was desired, one hundred percent.”

In the final episode of Fellow Travelers, the main character’s wife says, “I’ve gone my whole life without knowing what it’s like to be desired. Do you have any idea how lonely that is?”

I stopped mid-rant, tension leaving my shoulders. I nodded, but Carmen couldn’t see me. We were, as usual, talking on the phone. There was context for her comments that cannot be shared here, and context for my relenting that can. She was right. I knew she was right, because I had desired women, too, and broken their hearts just the same, hiding in my own homosexuality as if that made my behavior any better.

Under one of the innumerable memes I mentioned before, which was a picture of some tomboyish teenage white girl with perfect skin, freckles, and buoyant hair, captioned, “This is my girlfriend but she goes to a different school,” someone commented, “Any idea what the deal is with right wing incels’ obsession with her?”

The top comment in response: “It feeds their Ancient Greek desire to have a teenage boy-wife.”

When I’m out with my friends, particularly my early or mid-transition trans masc and nonbinary friends, I am always chilled by how obsessed older men are with them. I know they’re beautiful, I fucking, like, have eyes, but seeing thirty-somethings and forty-somethings, unmarried and incapable of keeping a woman around long enough to have a wife, decide their next best option might just be the under-twenty-fives I love more than I can reasonably say, I start to wonder if aggravated assault should be legalized. You know. Just for me.

Not that I hang out with many straight women. Whenever I do, I’m always floored by their dysfunctional behaviors. Going through their man’s phone. Making him unfollow “all his hoes,” including his female cousins because… scarcity? I guess? But what I see in them is a desire, too, a desire for permanence. For a guaranteed future, free of the imperiled liminality of The Apps and texting their exes. They create their own intricate rituals to “trick” their men, find their own ways to blunt their emotions so they’re easier to consume. Being watched, being surveilled, being policed. What was it that Sylvia Plath once said? Every woman craves a fascist? A boot to the neck of a brute like you? When I was more girlish, more female, I’d urge these women to read up on compulsory heterosexuality. Especially if they were the types of girls who said they wished they were attracted to women.

Now, though, I find myself sort of seething in silence. I’m being tamed, too. Quelled. If not by a man, as a woman, which never would have happened to me to begin with, then by the cameras in the stairwell, the cameras in the hands of the people outside.

I’ve clocked that a lot of these men go after “they/them pussy” because women have expectations and nonbinary people have to expend most of that “expectant” energy on simply not being misgendered. You, as a two-bit no-good boyfriend, can get away with a lot of shit if your partner is so busy trying to be received as the person they truly are, they don’t notice your lack of personhood, your meat with its dumb, unformed mouth attached, spouting bare minimum pittances like you’re putting the blood of the lamb on your body. And I know chasers chase the moment they know what they’re chasing. The moment the prey can be shaped, named, observed.

The moment we’re made visible.
April 1, 2024

baltimore, nonlinear narrative, stream of consciousness, trans things
Standing on all of your shoulders

Certain places we cannot return to. The coordinates remain, the address is the same, but the context has changed. Whoever we occupied these spaces with, whatever we were going through at the time, the moon’s apogee, the temperature, whether or not the ground was wet or dry, all of this decides and defines the place. You know what I’m talking about. You can’t go back to high school, for example, even in dreams. You’ve hardened and cracked and hatched. You’ve grown and changed.

One such absent place, for me, is the porch where Lily Gladstone first told us she was going to quit acting.

Hot summer’s day bled into brittle night. The sun lowered behind the Rocky Mountains like a wounded animal. A bruise spread across the sky. I can’t recall if this was the old house or if our elder had moved already. The old house and the new house have similar porches in the dark. Besides, if you’ve been keeping up with the press, they all say it’s hard to look away from Lily when they’re talking. That TikTok of Martin and Francesca Scorsese, “she consumed,” comes to mind. So we sat on the porch, I at her feet like an overgrown child. A cherry burned in her mouth and then between her fingers as she jut her chin out at some dying future. Waved it off.

“This isn’t working,” said Lily. “So why force it?”

What struck me in that moment was their tone. Their head’s always been screwed on real tight, as they say, plus a total lack of desperation. There was no self-pity or wallowing when she spoke. Lily was like a mechanic under a carriage of dwindling opportunities, sliding out from beneath the machine and shaking her head. Not worth the effort or the cost of materials to fix. Sorry. Better get you a new car.

Lily took another languid drag of her cigarette and chuckled. I looked at her carefully. There are people on this planet who electrify and magnetize. There are birth lotteries and hard-won victories and debates about who deserves what. My favorite thing to hear is, “You’re not special.” I was raised in houses of fast-paced discussions and constant commentary. Our late mom Carol, who was alive on that porch with us, would get into it with our dad, Shaawano, about the concept of “deserving.” I don’t remember who took what stance. I just remember drawing my own conclusions. Nobody deserves anything. That’s not nihilism. What I mean is if you get in a terrible accident, if you get an STI or your dog dies, you didn’t deserve it. God’s not punishing you. And if you get ten thousand dollars in a tragic windfall, you didn’t deserve that, either. Someone made the decision to write you into their will. Someone loved you. Does that make sense?

We watched Lily decide her life wasn’t going how she wanted or planned it. We listened to their low, earthen drawl. We were on their land. You could see Chief Mountain if you slanted your eyes toward Lily’s shoulder and darted them out to your right very quickly. There are the places and then there’s the imagined future where we tell someone about the places. In that moment I was in love with some girl back in Wisconsin, I think, and half my time was spent fantasizing about how best to describe the big sky to her. I wanted this girl back home to fall in love with me because of how much I loved the big sky, how the big sky seemed to love me. That future died, too, or never happened. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to anyone about these summers. I still can’t, not really. That’s okay. But that’s how I’m able to remember all of this so clearly.

Lily planned a graceful pivot and allowed herself a few minutes of mirthful bitterness. A working actor is like a desert island. Every audition a message in a bottle. Sometimes the rescue doesn’t come. She finished her cigarette. We all saw the metaphorical door close.

Years passed between the first resignation and the famous one. Mere months after the porch, Lily was cast in a highly-anticipated Kelly Reichardt project, Certain Women. We were so proud of them. I told and retold that story, the story of how Lily quit acting and then got a big, important role. When Certain Women went to streaming, it was a goddamn event. All of us stood in one of our siblings’ living rooms—whoever had the biggest screen and the best sound system at the time—and sat through two hours of grim, contemplative Montanan drama. Lily garnered some accolades for her performance, well-earned, and then the No DAPL protests pushed Indians into the mainstream. It seemed every chimookomaanag who’d ever called themselves a producer wanted to sink their talons into Lily. Projects were thrown her way like a cat offers carcasses to its owner. Will you eat this? Is this good for you?

I moved from New Mexico to Seattle. Roomed with my sister Lacey and her kids. This was 2016. I’d recently shot a sizzle reel for a project—Six and Bisti—which has transformed from a Spaghetti Western into something deeper, what I’ve been describing for about five years now as “a love letter to our ancestors.” This is my shameless plug for Tse’Nato’, by the way. Make of that what you will. Anyways, I was eighteen going on nineteen. Lily Gladstone was sometimes in our house. My nieces were five years old and three years old. One shared a name with Lily, so we differentiated with a nickname I won’t tell you because it’s ours. Lily chased the girls—shrieking with laughter—around the tungsten suburban purgatory we occupied (yet another place none of us can return to) and when it was the girls’ bedtime, Lily sat on the back porch with us. We told each other stories. About half of my adulthood memories of Lily are either on the porch or in a park. It’s almost always nightfall.

“Because Native people are trendy now,” Lily had said during one of these late-night talks. “I’m busy.”

I wonder what happens to all the aborted films. I’d auditioned for a few, back when I was pre-transition. Always the same role: over-sexualized Native girl gets brutalized on camera and dies. Murder or exposure. One role went to another friend of ours, someone more successfully female, but besides her frigid midwinter selfie, I never heard any more about it. Thank God, though, because she’s had a much better career since.

I had a dream last night someone asked me where my film went. I said “it’s in development hell” and they laughed. Then they asked if I believed it could be raised from the inferno. On the far wall, Lily’s Golden Globes acceptance speech played on loop. I nodded.

“A lot of things are possible now,” I said.

Because of Lily Gladstone, I tend to call everyone by their full names. Part of the reason is because I think it’s funny. Ellie Hyojung Lee was in my house the other day and said, “You name drop all these people in a way that makes me think you’re referencing like, a famous person, but it’s always just some guy.” That’s the other half of it. When you’re on a porch late at night with Lily Gladstone and they’re telling you something important, you realize all at once that you are privy to some machinations of human history. You can reach your hand out and feel the fabric of spacetime warp. There is a man behind the curtain, kind of, and it’s you and your kin. The sacred task is to remember that this person, this brilliant, furious, hyperactive, bizarre and beautiful person, is also just some guy.

I’d be remiss not to tell you, then, about Erica Tremblay.

We were deep in the pandemic. What we didn’t know was that there’d be a moment, three years from now, on live television, where our loved one would look across a glittering sea of drunken stars and stare right into the eyes of the greatest living director and, voice thick with affection, call him “Marty.” No. At that time, we were all, including Lily, just doing our best. I had long since quit the film industry. Instead I built robots for a living on the edge of Ithaca, New York. Carol had died almost three years prior, in July of 2018. A month after her, our friend Leilani, who Lily also once taught, passed on. Then our grandfather. A new trio of deaths had just begun in 2021, but I didn’t know that yet. Erica—who is Seneca-Cayuga—lived on her people’s own land due to a series of strange coincidences. That’s her story to tell. Lily knew Ithaca well—she had apparently stayed with my parents for a brief period of time, but that’s their story—and decided to put Erica and I in contact.

Erica and I went for a long walk through Cascadilla Gorge. I loved her right away. Her eyes are difficult to describe. Sometimes they’re ice. Sometimes they’re the waterfalls of her homeland. Usually they’re sharp and conspiratorial. She and Lily have the same wry undercurrent when they talk about the lives they lead. A very low bullshit tolerance and a very high regard for what’s real, what my Tuscarora friend Meredith’s child calls “for real for real.” At the time, Erica and Lily were writing their feature length collaboration, Fancy Dance. Erica asked if I could play Lily in the Sundance screen test. My dad would play Lily’s character’s adoptive father. We agreed to it.

Life happened. Dad moved out of Ithaca in 2021, back to our homelands. I stayed. Got black mold poisoning. Followed him. Moved to Baltimore in October of 2023. Gave away my laptop. Watched Killers of the Flower Moon twice, both times at the Charles Theatre. Got a free laptop from Erica that I used as the centerpiece for my home desktop setup. Started to write again. Remembered to breathe.

When I was little, I learned about “all my relations.” I tried to imagine what that could mean. Before I’d been given that teaching, my dad told me that if I ever had trouble falling asleep, I should start listing off everyone who loves me. I stopped doing that pretty much as soon as I started because I’d get overwhelmed and begin to cry. But here both lessons come to mind. There are all these filaments coming out of my heart right now. I asked Lily—didn’t even congratulate her, by the way, which was literally so crazy of me (but I guess this is kind of a congratulations)—for their consent to write about them on this website. I asked Erica, too, and then I texted Grant Conversano, a filmmaker I met out in Camden, Maine, at a CIFF screening pre-pandemic. This next part of my ramble has a lot to do with them.

One of the big things I was most excited about when I moved to Baltimore in 2023 was my proximity to the train station. I can go to New York City basically whenever now, though I’m such a homebody, you have to dangle a carrot in front of my face to get me to leave my intensely curated apartment. Around the time Killers of the Flower Moon came out, my carrot was a meeting with Nara Milanich. We were gonna talk about her followup to 2019’s Paternity: the Elusive Quest for the Father, and on a whim, I texted Lily Gladstone: are you in nyc rn?

Their quick reply: Are YOU in NYC right now?!?!

After a nourishing meeting with Nara, I found Lily and her college bestie Gillian in Central Park, right next to the carousel. There’s something here about cycles and horses. A sharper eye than mine might be able to hone in on it. We walked and talked and sat in the dark and talked. We joked, all three of us, about “the new normal” bearing down on Lily. We laughed. Lily showered me in little trinkets because I was having a flareup and their immediate response was to scurry to and fro until they assembled a care package. I love the articles I find that mention this quirk of theirs, the way they’ll sometimes move from room to room like a little kid showing you their toys for the first time. Then they’ll soften and grow serious, their luminous face changing planes. Shifting gears.

We entered the subway together and they handed me a KN95 mask, marbled in the same colors as my apartment. Of course, I didn’t tell them this. I just let my jaw drop a little. They put on a matching mask and said, “So people see we’re friends.” I had run out of words at this point. I just kept saying I missed you. I missed you so much.

My friend Charles, who performs harsh, experimental noise under the name FLOSE, had a show in Brooklyn the next night. A friend of mine from Ithaca, Han, was going to meet me for tacos beforehand, Charles being their roommate and all. I told Grant Conversano where I was and they found me after the FLOSE set. I’d tried to stay as long as possible, but the subwoofers turned my stomach. I’m stone cold sober and here I was, staggering out of a bar in Brooklyn on a Tuesday night. Conversano followed me out and I collapsed into the heavily graffitied outdoor seating area. Their hair was long, flowed over their shoulders. They watched me with an unreadable expression.

“Hold my hand,” I said.

They held my hand.

“It’s not just the harsh noise,” I said. “At least, I don’t think.”

“I know,” said Conversano.

They’d gone through something similar. When they were around nineteen, twenty years old, one of their close friends had also been swept into the tide of fame and prestige. One minute you’re in an empty field with someone you love and the next minute, they’re nominated for a Golden Globe or an Academy Award. Nausea had overtaken Conversano, too, a placeless, sourceless nausea. Their friend was an actor. Conversano is a director. There was no jealousy, no obvious reason for this sudden, full body illness. Not jealousy but magnetism. The tremendous, crushing weight of a vibrational shift, of contexts changing and histories being written and rewritten. Doors closing. Doors opening. I imagined a gigantic alien ship with a tractor beam. How it comes into our field and chooses who it chooses. Takes who it takes. And there you stand in the crop circles, staring up at the sky as your friend is carried off. The big sky.

My father had me read Foucault’s Panopticism when I was like, twelve. I met Lily Gladstone shortly afterwards. Red Eagle Soaring has a summer program called SIYAP. They hire working artists to come wrangle all us shitass kids. Lily was one such unfortunate soul. I’m kidding. She held her own. We loved her. Obviously we still love her. We were also shitasses.

One summer, there were all these child psychologists around. They kept taking notes. They were white. I have always had a terrible ability to pressurize a room when I’m angry or upset. I suck the life out of everything and drag everyone else down with me. I do this less and less the older I get, but I still have my moments. That summer was no exception. I hated being surveilled and I hated being annotated. I ruined the vibe as thoroughly as I could. The sky above Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center opened up and a torrential downpour began. All day just grey and rhythmic. A thousand tiny water drums. I scrambled up the round staircase and into one of the empty rooms we had smaller workshops in. There was a faux polar bear rug in the bay window and not much else. I sat down and ugly cried. Ashamed of my behavior. Ashamed of this terrible, awful thing inside me, this monster I swore lived just beneath my skin and pushed at my ribcage.

About five minutes into my meltdown, I heard the heavy pneumatic hiss of the door as it opened and shut. Lily crossed the big room in a few firm steps. They sat next to me, on my right. We were silent but for my occasional sniffle.

I won’t tell you everything they said. I was sixteen years old. I was the worst person I knew. I dreamt of blood, fire, men with masks and guns. I dreamt of war and famine and plague. I dreamt of things bigger than I could comprehend, things so bright, they burned through your eyelids. Lily had bangs back then. Her hair was in a ponytail. She wore a black tank top, black pants, and black shoes.

“There’s a paradigm shift coming,” Lily said. “Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. Kicked my feet against the wood slats.

“It’s gonna hurt,” said Lily. “It’s gonna hurt because healing always comes with hurt. Growing pains. It’s just growing pains.”

Ten years later, I lay on my back outside a bar in Brooklyn and held Grant Conversano’s hand.

“I had a hard time,” Conversano began, “growing up in the South and hearing everything was part of God’s plan. It felt unfair. Why would God listen to some of us, but not others? And you know, they say God’s plan about everything. The best and the worst.”

I hummed. “Your hands are soft.”

“I get that a lot. Apparently it’s a sign I’m untrustworthy.”

I laughed. Brushed my fingertips across their palm. Some of their memories flashed across my eyes. I knew they were theirs because I’d never seen trees that particular shade of green before.

“It’s not God’s plan. It can’t be. It’s all… chaos. Some of us are born, you know, into the worst conditions. We live for a short, hellish time and we die horribly and we never find out why. And then some of us are told from birth that we’re special. That we’re different.”

“The accident of your birth,” I said.

“Exactly. So we can’t dwell on these things. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I find myself sitting somewhere just asking something dumb like, ‘why do I get to have so much fun all the time?’ But we can’t lose ourselves to this idea that there’s some inherent specialness. These things just… happen how they happen.”

“And you have to deal with it.”

“And we have to deal with it.”

I sat up. The nausea subsided. On the table between us, someone had written in sun-yellow marker: “Condemned 2 Win.” I stared at it a long time. Hammered my knuckles against the wood. Huffed, an ironic grin across my face.

“You are all so lucky I’m not insane,” I said. “All these patterns.”

My heart hurt from only seeing Lily for what felt like a split second. I filled the absent places with more questions. I wanted to hear more about Conversano’s life. Where are you going? What are you doing now? Who are you on your way to become?

I walked them home. I lingered. Not God’s plan but whatever it was Lily saw on that porch. A future like a broken machine or a boat dead in the water. Closing the door. Saying no. Saying not right now. Knowing when to quit and when to get back up again. When to hope. When to keep the faith.

There are things I haven’t told you. Things I will never tell you. One thing, though. A couple years ago, we were all in an auntie’s house. Me, my siblings, the kids, Lily, and Lily’s mom, Betty. I had no idea Betty wasn’t Native. That’s kind of a compliment, I guess. Most white moms are like, incurably white. Betty existed in the patchwork foreground, a gentle smile on her face as Lily and my sisters played with the kids and talked serious talk in equal measure. One of the little ones was going through a phase, something she picked up in daycare. You play a hand game with someone. One hand goes here, the other goes there. Three claps. Maybe four. I can’t recall all the details. But if you end the game with your hands crossed over each other, it means you’re “related.” Betty and Lily were there as our precious one, four years old at the time, crossed her hands over mine and cried out, ecstatic, “We’re related!” before tackling me.

“My mom’s name is Peace,” said Lily. “So my full name is Lily Peace Gladstone.”

Betty Peace smiled big and shook her head. There are places we cannot return to and I mourn it. Let the grief melt each moment into the patchwork memory. Let me live through this again and again but more importantly, let us live.

The Golden Globes videographer zooms in on a beautiful older woman. A big smile, long white hair, rosy cheeks. Tears in her eyes. High definition in the foreground while in the background, on her left and right, respectively, sit Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese. Not God’s plan at all, but Lily’s. The indomitable drive of “just some guy” to accomplish what is otherwise considered impossible. The growing pains clarified in this one vibrant moment. I sat on Phil’s couch and cried happily while everyone in that vast, violent room stood up and applauded. I took pictures of Betty. Phil took pictures of me.

They used to run our dialogue backwards. Time runs backwards for me, too, sometimes, slipshod and adrift in the loom of the universe. The rain goes up, up, up and away into the grey clouds. The sun comes back from behind the Rocky Mountains and swallows all the purple. Smoke disappears into Lily’s hands and the porch gets brighter, brighter still.

“This isn’t mine,” Lily says, lifting a solid gold model of Planet Earth. “I’m holding it right now.”

They took the Indians in elder housing to see Killers of the Flower Moon the week it opened. My grandma called me up afterwards.

“Hey. Your lil friend did pretty good.”

I laughed. Grandma Rose has always had the uncanny ability to humanize the historical, to boil and reduce all we can’t hold into a few simple words.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, so she did.”

January 9, 2024

behind the scenes, family, memoir, native history, nonlinear narrative, stream of consciousness
I am (not) your father

A slow-burn retrospective on genocide

Summer is irreducible. This doesn’t stop us from trying. I could write about the moments that define summers past. I could play the magician and make you know without knowing the before-and-after of each solstice. I could, but I won’t.

There was no transition period for us here. One week, we were being pan-seared on the pavement, the next, I had to put on “the uniform,” the standard Pretty Girl outfit I’ve poured my body into every September since seventh grade: oversized sweater, short-shorts, red Converse. The parts of the sum matured, I guess. The sweater isn’t a joke anymore, but a carefully knitted warm beige number with a full-color embroidered buck standing on the edge of a river across the chest. The shorts are embroidered, too, by me, “ur gay” written in fuzzy pink lettering. An accusation, a challenge, exposure therapy for the guys who flinch every time I look at one of my friends with love in my eyes. The Converse are no longer canvas, but suede and leather with red piping. This morning, in the Blue Moon Too, a beautiful girl with ash blonde hair down past her waist and pecan brown skin smiled up at me shyly. She looked younger than me by a lot, or maybe she was just holding herself like that.

“I love your outfit,” she said. Her voice was clipped and restrained, like she was trying to swallow the words before they could be properly heard. She held her mouth in such a frightened way. I smiled warmly at her and said something stupid and honest back, “I love your hair,” or something along those lines. She didn’t hear me. She took a breath and said, resolute and somber, “I love people who just be who they are and show the world. Don’t care what nobody says.”

I glanced over her symmetrical piercings, one on each nostril, one in each dimple. I hoped she could hear what I meant when I said “me, too.”

A chill ran through me. In the seventh grade, a different girl, also with ash blonde hair and brown skin, had come to me with a similar declaration about my own perceived independence. I had bristled at that girl back then, because I had attitude problems and everyone knew it.

“People say shit about me?” I had demanded. My hair was long, so black it looked blue, and fell in my face like the Grudge.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” my classmate had said. Later, she apologized, and what was worse, she meant it.

I wore Converse for my whole life because my dad wears Converse. For the past couple years, I haven’t, choosing instead to lace into my grandfathers’ respective combat boots or the tattered pair of original rubber Doc Martens my dad and I scored at Trader K’s in Ithaca, years before it closed. Thirty bucks and they’d been made in England for real! Otherwise I have these Nike N7s, the Fly chunky boots I stole from Ava, and the black and white checkered platform shoes my mother wore every day while she was pregnant with me. If you were the psychoanalyzing type, you’d have a field day with my closet.

This summer, I primarily wore the Doc Martens and the N7s. The N7s are sort of honey-beige and spattered with bleach and paint stains. Unsure why. The model prior to these ones was made to look and feel like cartoon moccasins. Mine look like regular shoes, just… earthier? They give me another inch or so of height I don’t need and make me feel like I’m exercising when I’m not. The Doc Martens always blister me and I keep thinking I need to buy gel inserts, but I never remember this when I’m in a place that sells them. Anyways.

Near the end of June and my residency at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, I was in Terrance’s cabin with a bunch of professors plus my dad. We were all visiting and laughing and I was starting to have an allergic reaction to Terrance’s cat, so I stood up just as we got on the subject of my shoelaces. My Docs had already chewed up one pair of shoelaces, so I walked around with replacements. Then one of the replacements got fucked while I was on my way back from the hospital, so I needed new ones. I informed the group of this because I love small talk and complaining about useless things.

“Wait,” my dad said, “you already have mismatched shoelaces, the hell is the matter with you?”

One of my shoelaces says YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND over and over and over again, it’s true. I think my little sibling has the other one.

“Yes, and I’ll keep it as long as we’re on Native land,” I said, voice dripping with irony the white people definitely didn’t pick up on. “Enough scrutiny. Goodnight.”

I walked back to my cabin, pressing my “native land” foot into the spongy earth as hard as I could, as if empty words by a goth-ish vaporwave brand making bank on stating the obvious could wake up the sleeping giants beneath. As if my sole and my soul were one. As if putting one foot in front of the other could fix any of this.

For a split second, this summer threatened to define itself as the one where I almost went blind. Then it was the summer of ill-advised hookups. Then it was the summer of taking the train. The summer I made my baby nephew really mad because I wouldn’t let him electrocute himself. The summer Taylor and I took the girls up into the big ferris wheel above Seattle. The summer I became beautiful. The summer I turned mean.

I was on the phone with my mother today after pulling into my aunt’s driveway. I had a laundry list of things that needed done and choices I had to make and I was still rotating the weekend in my head, trying to examine it from all angles. I’d gone to see Godflesh with Phil at the Baltimore Soundstage before performing with Andie, Kamya, LouLou and Genocide at the Daughters of Lilith’s inaugural art show opening, Venusian: an Exploration of Femininity Through the Planetary Lens of Venus.

When I’d shown up, everything was chaos, but the show went off beautifully and I rode the high of my new life all the way up to Ithaca, where I was the maid of honor at one of my best friends’ big gay trans wedding. Around 9pm that same night (this was Saturday) I pulled up at the Sacred Root Kava Bar to perform as Bogo La$ik on a bill with STCLVR, Prayer Rope, Phantom Project, Magnetic Coroner, and Compactor. Sunday, I finished a tattoo design commission in the Watershed while a group of elderly white Ithacans played Irish jigs loud as hell, Taylor squinting across the table at me in sensory overload and mounting irritation. Monday I was back in Baltimore for the Igorrr show, which might have just ruined all live music for me, because I can’t imagine anything being better than that.

I am telling you all of this because I’m going to tell you something else, but the thing I want to tell you is awful. Tom King writes about that in his book, the Truth About Stories. He tells this heartbreaking story about a friend of his who was made to recount all the traumas he’d endured, part and parcel with colonialism, and the more he rehashed this narrative, the sicker he got. Like the spirits that feed off our pain wanted more pain to feed off of. Like they were cultivating him.

So when I talk about anything extra fucked up, I cloak it in the banal and the funny and the stupid. All the things we forget about when we have those big, defining moments. There’s always a wedding. We don’t see the settled disputes, the nights the couple has sex in such a way, they feel like they’re going to dissolve into each other, the nights they don’t but they know they’re one beast anyways. The fridge magnets, the cold shoulders, the financial stress, the inside jokes, the periods and the hospital visits and the traffic jams. We just see the wedding.

Same goes for a funeral. We go for the dead. We pin them to the ground. We decide they’re in heaven or privately acknowledge they’re probably just nowhere. We do the protocols for our lodges and we cover the mirrors and photographs and we do not speak their names. We weren’t them, so we’re not there for all the days they spent feeling lonely, or angry, or stitching moment to moment with taste and touch and hunger and want and fear.

After Grandma Deanna died, I got mean. I got mean in a foreign way. The meanness did not come from me. It hunted me. It scoped me out. It did its research. Then, when it realized I was safe, it entered my mouth and now it inhabits my head, my throat, my bones.

In the car, on the phone, I wondered aloud to my mother if it had come from her. Our grandma.

“Like she couldn’t bring it with her to heaven,” I said, “so she shed it like a snake sheds its skin.”

“Holy fuck,” my mother said, in the tone she uses whenever an idea resonates. Then she gathered herself. “I mean, yeah. Heaven doesn’t need that shit.”

“I feel like someone handed me a gun,” I said. “I don’t know how to use it and I’m scared it’ll go off when it’s not supposed to.”

“Just sit with it,” my mother said. “It’s a useful tool. It’s a good thing. It can be a good thing.”

I told her at the Igorrr concert a guy tried to come onto me, but he looked too young for me, so I waved him off and it was like I’d used the Force on him. He was there and then he wasn’t, jettisoned away by the wave of my hand, out of my purview, out of the venue. I felt terrible. I felt powerful. Suddenly, everything I said or did had an extra bite to it, an extra weight. The pressure made me desperate. I looked at Phil often and tried to anchor myself on his familiarity, but my eyes swam with a cloying darkness I’ve observed in other people who are needy and cruel and don’t know how to control it.

This morning I borrowed Phil’s copy of This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno. I read most of the first bit at the bar in Blue Moon Too. When it got to Thiago tracing his own lineage, marked and marred by hurt, abuse, and murder, I shivered, because this summer hadn’t only been the summer of embodiment, death, sex, meanness and beauty. It had been the summer when a handful of people had, unprompted, told me their version of my father’s conception.

I’m careful talking about my family because you don’t deserve it. You don’t. I don’t know you like that and you don’t know me like that. In a world full of Indians trying to make it on TV, Indians watching Indians on TV, Indians who aren’t even Indian at all and we find out in the worst, ugliest ways, after those of us who fell out of community bared our very darkest selves to them, thinking they understood, I drag the dead weight of my unknown grandfather forward like a leash on a sick dog. There’d been a time when I was hungry, mad with obsession over this man who never claimed his children. I needed to know what he was so I could know what I was. Then I realized I never crossed his mind, would never cross his mind. I was a non-entity to him. He had impregnated a beautiful woman and left her like he probably had done a zillion times before and that was that was that. One night with the wrong man makes a girl a martyr, and the American Indian Movement was full of martyrs.

Besides, it wasn’t like this guy was my only tie to my… what? Ethnicity? Political affiliation? Full time god damned job? I knew who my biological grandma was. I knew she was gorgeous and sad. I knew she was strong. She used to be a bartender and ran with my other grandma’s siblings’ friend group. They said she was funny and hot and charming. They said she knew how to beat the shit out of someone in a way that changed the course of their life. They said a lot of the men followed her around like puppy dogs. I knew she died the same day I left Ithaca in a hurry. I knew I didn’t matter to her at all, but that didn’t stop her blood from being inside me any more than it stopped me crying over her for days. I know my real grandparents, the ones who raised my dad and worry about me all the time and give me presents and get on my nerves. I know my Papa Vince and my Grandma Gail and my Grandma Rose. I know if you’re not Native or of some adjacent cultural background, you’ve been counting up my Grandmas and trying to figure out how I got so many.

So you can imagine why, after my biological grandmother’s death, it’s been surreal to have so many people coming out of the woodwork at me to tell me who they think her babydaddy was.

It had been a little over a week since Deanna’s funeral. I was going to be crammed in a car with my mother, my little brother, and my little brother’s fiancee. We were going to Meskwaki Powwow. The Meskwaki Nation and I are on weird terms. I bear their name but not their status. I’ve written about this before. I’m more than happy to be a member of the White Earth Band of Minnesota Ojibwe, but the rules by which the Meskwaki Nation permits or denies their children continue to be a hot-button topic for the Fox people. Still, the Meskwaki Powwow is legendary for its rich history as an act of resistance and joy in the face of annihilation.

Dr. Charles Eastman, Dakota missionary for the YMCA recalled back in the late 19th/early 20th century, that, “One of the strongest rebukes I ever received from an Indian for my acceptance of [Christian] ideals and philosophy was administered by an old chief of the Sac and Fox [Meskwaki] tribe in Iowa.”

The elder had patiently sat through Eastman’s 1895 plea for Indian reformation and conversion before replying, “The white man shows neither respect for nature nor reverence toward God. You try to buy God with the by-products of nature. You try to buy your way into heaven, but you do not even know where heaven is. As for us, we shall follow the old trail. If you should live long, and some day the Great Spirit shall permit you to visit us again, you will find us still Indians, eating with wooden spoons out of bowls of wood.”

comic & commentary by Ba Ka ta bi a, from his book The Larry Andy People Fun Book

Eastman’s personalized call for reformation was partially due to the fact that the Meskwaki Nation’s response to the Religious Crimes Code had been to throw the biggest, most Meskwaki party ever. They held sporting events, group harvests, dances and art fairs open to the public until Smallpox decimated their village, prompting the U.S. government to burn said village to the ground and replace it with isolated houses, far away from one another. In 1913, the newly spaced out Meskwaki Nation renamed their harvest the Meskwaki Powwow, and invited outsiders to come celebrate. Performance has been a vibrant tradition with my mother’s tribe, and one of our ancestors even rode with Buffalo Bill back in the day as a career Indian. The Meskwaki mastered the art of double-speak—giving the white man one story while giving themselves another in the same exact breath.

Still Indians. We rolled into Meskwaki Nation and I melted into the familiar heat of it. I’d lived here as a small child and could always bear with the summers in a way I couldn’t elsewhere. I was happy to note this hadn’t changed, even with the world on fire. The trees and their knotted red trunks twisted up into the vast blue sky, their tiny green leaves shimmering gossamer in the soft breeze. Bitterness spiked, unexpected, at the back of my ribcage when I realized I’d need to reintroduce myself to people. When it hit me that this wasn’t mine to keep. I shook it off, that horrible, colonial sense of scarcity, and did my best to keep it at bay, even when my family spent my patience. Even when the third or so person asked “Where’s Chloe?” and I had to clench my jaw because that wasn’t even my deadname. Even when one of my mother’s family friends asked me both times when I showed up at his stand, “Where are you from?”

the writer next to his great-grandfather, floyd keahna

After we got some good Young Bear frybread, I realized I’d had it. I stood up and informed my family I’d be going on a walk to decompress.

I walked, aimless, for awhile. One of my friends was there because she was Miss International Two Spirit and was on the powwow trail as part of her regal duties. I wanted to see her but I also didn’t want to bother her. My extended family was everywhere, looking like me but brown, bearing our name. I didn’t want to bother them either. My mind was a ticker-tape of insecurity and I was so totally sick of it. I can’t deal with insecure people. It’s like, my biggest turn-off. So to be in the body of an insecure person gave me the ick, big time, but for the one person I couldn’t reject: myself. Eventually I wandered back to my mother’s friend’s stand. For the sake of the story, lets just call him the Artist.

The Artist’s partner is a gorgeous Native woman, we’ll call her Jay. She smirked up at me and then at her man. Behind them sat a third Indian I did not recognize.

“You gonna ask him where he’s from?” Jay sniped. “Again?”

The Artist shook his round head. He had pleasant features, curved and sloped all over, kind of like a turtle. His smile reached his eyes but only crossed half his face, like you’d caught him mid-thought and he didn’t want to tell you about it.

“Where you from?” asked the guy in the back. He was wearing sunglasses and grinned at me, pretending he was in on the joke when he wasn’t.

“My father’s from White Earth,” I said. “My mother’s from here. You know her.”

“I do,” said the Artist, laughing in the way everyone down there does when they think about my mother. “As a matter of fact, I know your father, too.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Your ma hauled him over round my place, oh, about twenty years ago now. Wanted to know if I was his dad.”

I stared at him, this small, round-faced man with no discernible features in common with me or anyone related to me, least of all my dad.

Jay raised her eyebrows at her man. The guy in the back had checked out the moment his joke didn’t land.

“I’m not, by the way. In case you were wondering.”

“But you could have been,” said Jay. She didn’t say it accusingly. If you’re dating in Indian country it’s like that. I already told one of my friends back home they can have me after my first divorce. Maybe my second. Even with so many of us being Christian, we just sort of have to be cool with people, well. Hitting it raw before they got with us, you know?

The Artist nodded, then shook his head emphatically. “Okay, well, I did, you know… I…”

“You got around,” said Jay.

“I got around! Didn’t we all? But I’m not his dad… or, his dad’s dad. I can’t be, I…”

The guy in the back, smelling blood, put down his phone and tuned in. “Huh? Who’s this kid again? He lookin’ for his dad? Are you his dad?”

“No!” the Artist yelped. “I’m not his…” he looked at me then, “I’m not your dad! And I’m not your dad’s dad, either.” He took a short, jittery sip of his pop and let his eyes unfocus. He jabbed one callused finger out, partly at me, partly at someone only he could see. “You know, I’d bet you I seen your grandfather, though. Or who he could be. A potential. See, I was at that protest. Summer of 1970. July. I was supposed to, you know. With this girl. But I was at a protest instead. And then you know who I come upon is this Oneida girl. I think she was Oneida, at least, I can’t really recall. Couldn’t have been taller than five two, five three at best. Backseat of a station wagon with this big guy from way over in Pine Ridge. Giant man. Two of them goin’ at it at that protest. And I’ll bet you anything that’s your grandfather.”

I blinked at the Artist. The meanness in me was new yet, but I could feel her curling around my tongue, ready to snark, “But I don’t wanna be from Pine Ridge,” knowing damn well I’ll be canceled for saying that, knowing every Indian I’ve shared this unsaid whiny rebuke with found it funny as hell anyways. Instead I said nothing.

The Artist nodded at me again, his brown eyes firm and intense with the “how-it-is” of it all, the surety that he’d solved some decades-old mystery, right here, never mind that he just told some kid he barely knew the story of the kid’s father’s conception. Like, ew.

“Look into that,” said the Artist. “Big guy from Pine Ridge. He mighta been six foot seven.”

“You, uh, you got a name?” Off of him shaking his head, “or, uh, literally anything?”

“Nah,” said the Artist.

Awkward silence. Then the guy in the back gestured to where there were two bowler hats with beaded hat bands on display on the table.

“You should buy one of these,” he said. “You have the head shape for it.”

“That’s okay,” I said, already drifting away. Then I walked backwards into a world where I hadn’t heard that story, a world where I was just some guy in a long line of “just some guys,” all the way back to the lucky bastards who got to live in a world where our people weren’t batshit crazy all the time, in a world where we could eat our ash bread and our tuber and berry soup with wooden spoons and wooden bowls.

Part of my obsession with the unknown grandfather has to do with my own mortality. My mother’s side, both sides, all sides, tend to live well into their eighties and nineties. People were shocked when my father’s mother made it as far as she did. Apparently she was the last one of her siblings, a fact tragic both in its finality and my cold tone relaying it. I should care more. I do, it’s just that she and her siblings exist to me the same way parallel universes do, or Imagine Dragons. Like, I could tell you all the words to Radioactive, but I don’t really feel it the way the average American Eagle centrist Protestant feels it. Fuck. I don’t think I’m putting that sentiment in the final post. Or maybe I will, just because I need you to know that I kind of suck. I’m bitter and lonely and part of me will always be that little girl, staring at a picture of an old, hard, martyred woman on her father’s phone, knowing with a deep, irreversible sense of betrayal that that was his mother and that she would not be in our lives.

Therein lies the other part of the obsession. That little girl realized it takes two people to make a baby. Therefore the other half of the equation was still out there, somewhere, maybe capable of loving his child. Maybe he could be convinced, once he saw how cute and sweet and special his three little grandchildren were. The girl I was prayed for that, even though she knew by then and I know by now that men are fickle and infuriating, and Native men doubly so.

I have, however, inherited my father’s handwriting. That thing everyone calls chicken scratch because it is. I used to have “pretty girl handwriting,” the bubbly, big-looped lettering you see in the notebook of a girl who tries hard and gets results, even though I did neither, but now that I’m a Native man in a big city, I’ve become his echo. It makes me wonder how much of his personality, how many of his traits, came from these two strangers. There is the daisy-chain we’re tied to by what the anthropologists call “fictive kinship,” and then there’s all that blood.

The funny thing about genocide is that you can’t remember anything before it. Everybody who could have told you what was what is dead now. Been dead. Murdered or disappeared or incarcerated or maybe they just never returned your dad’s calls. The funnier thing is that the people who killed your grandparents are still alive. They have houses and incomes and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some of their grands are your friends. They share Mary Oliver posts about letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves and brand themselves with Tove Jansson, mushroom philosophies, esoteric ramblings, God. The by-products of nature, buying their way into heaven. Perhaps the funniest thing of all is that you have to be civil about this. You can’t just remember everything and take it out on them. Sins of the father or whatever. You have to look them in their wide, blue or green or grey eyes, and you have to hum in soft acknowledgement when they tell you about how they’re on some great and beautiful journey, how they’re really trying to find what works.

Back at the Watershed, I sat across from Taylor and sketched a tattoo commission for Mashkode-Sage in silence. She had asked for golden eagle feathers and a buffalo. “You know the kind.” Back when I’d crashed with her on one of my uncountable trips across the country, she’d said she was pretty sure she was done with tats. I nodded at that; she had a healthy assortment. Me, I want more. I keep telling people I look like a child scribbled on me with a Sharpie and ran away. Smokii said, “Yeah, that’s what it looks like when you don’t have money for tats.” He snorted and I mentally filed the exchange away for when I wanted to hurt myself later for doing everything wrong and out-of-order.

That’s one of the things I like most about Mashkode-Sage, actually. She will make these hardline declarations and go back on them when more of the narrative unfolds. It makes me feel dynamic by association. Like her ability to grow and change is somehow talismanic with mine.

She is also the child of an adoptee. She writes about it in her own words on her Instagram. Like this, we understand each other.

I do commissions infrequently. I think part of me still feels guilty for every time I dropped the ball, going all the way back to the fifth grade, so I punish myself by keeping my talents close to my chest. If I don’t set up any expectations, there’s no way I’ll let people down. But there, in the Watershed, the goddamned folk band wailing away, I felt like this could be something I could do. This could be income.

I finished the two feathers with a flourish. Pride warmed me and I showed Taylor, practically vibrating with it. Then I started in on the buffalo.

still from buffalo bone china, taken from dana claxton’s website

A long time ago, we went to the Hearts of Our People exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Few pieces resonated with me as deeply as Dana Claxton’s Buffalo Bone China, released the year I was born, which consists of a short experimental film projected above a pile of shattered bone china, reminiscent of that one photograph I refuse to share because it makes me sick. You know the one. Throughout the video installation, there’s a repeating clip of a herd of buffalo running. The rhythm of the soundscape and the repetition grinds it into you: these are People. Their enormous heads mopped with thick bangs over high, severe cheekbones and deep, wet eyes. Their arms and their legs and their broad shoulders. They dance like we dance. Their rage and love are ours. I don’t know how long I sat in the blue dark, watching them. Trying not to cry because I didn’t want one of the many, many white women who’d been filming my journey through the gallery to find me and capture my noble savage grief on camera.

As if I’d thrown it in the freezer that day and only now rediscovered it, the feelings came back full force. This time there would be no context for the outsiders to latch onto. I would be just another white boy in a bar, upset and lonesome, blinking at the wall. I traced my sketch of Mashkode-Sage’s buffalo until I felt something spring to life in the cold, digital slab. Then I did the line-work and, with a shit-eating, manipulative grin, added a penis so the buffalo could reproduce.

I stole my insistent terminology, “martyr,” from Carmen. We’d been up late in her apartment again, talking for hours, and somehow got on the subject of the American Indian Movement. All the unclaimed babies it made. Most of the secret-not-secret stories about AIM are shared like this. Two women talking after midnight, their legs almost touching, their eyes on the wall or the floor.

Both of the horror novels I’ve read this year, John Darnielle’s Devil House and Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us, blend genres and interrogate ethics. What are our responsibilities as writers, as storytellers? What comes through when we violate these unspoken contracts? Sitting down to write this, I was faced with the problem countless Native writers before me have dealt with since the moment you demanded an explanation. When does this stop being my story to tell?

Maybe it stops here. Maybe I’ll leave you with the image of me and Carmen, mere feet apart, talking about the men who, by their own narcissism, caused our respective dynasties to exist. Rootless or headless, but extant nonetheless. Sure, most tribes, like the Meskwaki Nation, require proof of paternity to enroll a child, so if your dad bounced, or better still, never knew you even happened, you’re fucked on the federal recognition front. And sure, a lot of AIMsters justified their anti-birth control stance as being part of some great repopulation initiative. Never mind that all they needed to make a person was a station wagon and a protest, while their women had to give up the rest of their natural lives, had to face the government’s insistence upon stealing and trafficking their babies to Christian homes who did everything you could imagine and more to the poor bastards.

But someone clawed their way out of there. A couple someones. Scarred and burnt and ugly and alive, these kids grew up and struck out and had kids they claimed, kids they kept, kids they raised in whatever approximation of “our ways” they could manage.

Or they didn’t.

Sometimes I dream about the ones who didn’t. I have an aunt I visit with in dreams, you know. She’s got ash blonde hair and pecan brown skin she tries to bleach. She wears a little gold crucifix around her neck that she clutches whenever she sees me. She says I must be the Devil. That I’m here to do the devil’s work. We walk through a forest that will never see the light of day. Thick, ropy vines hang from the dark green canopy, exposed blood vessels threading the telltale heart of her pain. I don’t confirm or deny her accusation. I just walk with her, my bare feet in the spongy earth.

One foot in front of the other.

I am the father and the Mother’s brother’s distant cousin / the children and the wives / a multitude of thousands live inside my head, manufacturing weapons, demanding to be fed.
David Keenan, “Me, Myself, and Lunacy”

September 19, 2023

adoption, family, ICWA, intergenerational trauma, memoir, native history, nonlinear narrative
About Time
bicoastal collaborative narrative featuring danny crook, ava aodha, taylor rae, dani rivero, & sunmi

1) unnamed spirit + 2) singularity / the world / everything | by ava aodha

The Birth of Helen

by Danny Crook
```
1. Misconception 
Leda is tired of picking 
tics off strays. 

She tramps through mulch, quivering 
reflections of the alabaster moon. 
Traces of the lifting swan 
inspire no melody she can repeat. 

Refusal totals Leda. 
Desire no longer compels her 

to pursue what she had 
believed are life’s proper themes. 
This includes putting up with the bodily 
artifact—that scavenger 
bloated from road salt. 

A low-flying goose settles on a bench, 
feathering to rearrange discomfort. 
From her new egg, Leda projects, 

shooing the strays 
across spiked concrete 
as she splats the mud, running so 
that it won’t calcify her footprints. 

***

2. Parallel Mothers
The world groans after the creation 
of a new myth as its stories 
crowd, gel in new ways. 

Leda and Nemesis walk out of a clinic 
after sitting through paperwork post embryo transfer. 

Nemesis gave hers freely for comfort 
that will subside when she learns 
from the oracle how the procedure 
did not empty her womb. 

She was a nice girl, Leda’s teachers said of her, 
though some would change their minds 
knowing what she rigged against God. 
How, unable to weld their souls, 
she arranged to mother His child’s other half, its body. 
But oh the miracles of science! 
Many would do the same. 

At the end of the block Leda parts from Nemesis—
always Her responsibility, 
the reworking of toxin into balm, 
the recognition of beauty 
and its leveling. 

To phantom kicks, her body 
responds, however crudely, 
with a phantom’s pregnancy. 

This is how it is done, Nemesis: 
drive 3000 miles 
away from the equator. 
If you’re asking why 
3000, drive 4000. 

You will know 
you’ve gone far enough 
when earth is not 
muddled green, 
not even a patch for a day. 
Remission is unacceptable, 
relapse impossible. 

Only in His absence 
can one do without the God 
in whose image they were made. 
Substitute alternate form, 
chase it, then console 
with return when certain it’ll work. 

If you can wait 
until May wait until August. 
If you can travel 4000 miles go 5000. 

***

3. 
Roads end, and the quality of silence increases. 

The only way through 
space was time, and 
the only way through 
time was memory, which I did 
until plucked raw, drawing 
shadows’ paths 
during the sun’s brief sally. 

The winter inhabitants labor 
to retain their strength—axe 
striking ice, then water. 

Water. 
Surface refractions fade uniform. Tessellate. 
Then, like a child peeing in a pool, 
I realize my own warmth 
and how in stillness it surrounds me. 
The water’s movement anyway. 
Earth is asking your name—
how should I answer? 

One leg curled to grace the other, 
and from between them, smoke that hides 
a face turned into the crevice of 

both arms, heaving gently in the warm 
mud of an ancient shore, just meters 
from sun-crusted soil. 
```
untitled #1, dani rivero

There is actually so little time. No, that’s not really right, is it? Time is a muscle. It flexes. Through pain and pleasure, it strengthens. Through disuse it atrophies. Shortens. Grows fallow and incapable of holding us.

I’m writing you from Ceremony Coffee Roasters in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. I first grew to know and love Ceremony at its previous location downtown back in November. I wrote there, too. About time, or maybe distance. The word is the same in Ojibwemowin, kind of.

11/7/22 — Ceremony Coffee Roasters — Downtown Baltimore

While I don’t believe in astrology, there does seem to be a cyclical element to this thing I’m beholden to, this narrative of frustration as it drives me to abandon everyone and everything I am—every few years. Sometimes—often—people need me, and the need pushes me out. There’s something perverse about being needed, being bound to one place, one person, at one time. Sun Yung Shin as Satan writes “Everything I make is unmade, a bed in the morning, your memory of me—” in Rough, and Savage, her immigrant retelling of Dante’s Inferno. I do not give myself over to the moment. I am stingy with myself, with Time itself, even as it slips over me in great translucent whorls of candy-scented lube, fucks the world with my hollow body and empty words.

Right, the cycle. I breach like a choked whale in November, even-yeared, although there are echoes of breathlessness in the odd numbers as well. The energetic buildup to these biannual climaxes remains the same, even as the context changes. This time it was the Place killing me. The Place and its People. I have lived in this place since the end of my last breach, early spring of 2017. I began my transition then in a kind of religious fervor, frenetic, holy energy vibrating from the cradle of my throat to the tips of my fingers. Even then, I was beautiful, but my voice betrayed my sex to the uninitiated, and I wanted to clarify myself, to be seen and desired not as a strange, angular girl, but as whatever I am now, all the way out here in Hell.

That’s part of the reason I’m writing this, I think. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon tells her students, “Write to think. Don’t think to write.” These days, writing inhabits a barren, alien realm within me. Miles of cracked earth and craggy mountains without a plant in sight. Imagine hues of indigo-grey, navy blue, perpetual twilight. I stand in this desert clothed in robes of burlap, armed, bloody, and try to conjure narrative from memory. There was a time when I would invent, but my inventions came true, always, and I was afraid. I felt surveilled. Well, I’ve always felt surveilled, especially when I go to church. Whenever I go to church I can feel one big eye on me, peering into my petri dish through its heavenly microscope. I hear a big, booming, genderless voice proclaim

THERE YOU ARE.

Truth it is, then, even as I work to warp the personal and political into the fantastical. I feel very lucky to have lived such a short and horrific life. Again, summoning Sun Yung Shin:
```
I wanted everything about me to outlive me
I want to leave threads on the ground so I might return
         without the pinch and itch of memory
```
untitled #3, dani rivero

9/3/23 — Ceremony Coffee Roasters — Baltimore’s Inner Harbor

We’re coming up on a year. I still want everything about me to outlive me. I love the way Sun Yung Shin writes the grotesque nature of being alive before, during, and after colonialism. The world burns and someone says “God cleans with fire” but I don’t see God when I look at those fires. If there was such a God I think I would kill Him or try to and I wouldn’t care how bad it hurt me.

My God is other people just like my hell. Everything is here, right now, stacked or intertwined or otherwise enmeshed. Would it kill you to acknowledge just how powerful and insignificant you are? Or is it more comforting to relinquish everything to an invisible force? Nothing can hold you. Nothing can hold everything. Nothing can hold all the sin in the world and nothing can even hold the mallet that hammers us into the ground or drives the nails into our hands, into our feet, cuts us open and invites the vultures to feast.

Sorry. I’m not making much sense, am I? Let’s go somewhere else.

山なし、落ちなし、意味なし etc etc … by Sunmi Flowers

9/5/23 — Aunt Mary’s Kitchen — somewhere outside D.C.

September is here and everyone is talking about time. People forget September is summer, too, but this bitter heat wave forces us to remember. Yesterday I left Baltimore in a hurry. I woke up sick from my friend’s cat and needed to get away as soon as possible. Before I got in my sauna of a car, I turned to look at my friend.

“I live here now,” I said. My own voice surprised me. It was oddly flat, with a little bit of wonder and some dark undercurrent. A threat, maybe, or a challenge. Like this whole summer’s promise had been one long game of chicken.

“You do,” he said. “Come over anytime.”

I prickled and smiled in a way I despise. There were reasons for the smile and reasons I shouldn’t have smiled at all, but what was done was done and I needed sleep and food and, most importantly, my own space. Somewhere to put all my books so I wouldn’t have to put on the fake smile and play like I’m a person. Sorry, that was melodramatic. September does that to me.

I used to think I caught an attitude every September because of all the unmet summer fantasies. Here’s where I excavate and resuscitate all of my most embarrassing wants because I’ll bet you anything you wanted some of these things, too. I was a kid and summer was a punctuation to the school year, a pregnant pause within which gestated such terrible possibilities, imagined first-kisses last-kisses and bruised bodies and going to the fair.

Summer embittered me because I was a child of divorce and spent its every occurrence in Seattle, an insurmountable distance from Wisconsin. I knew full well everyone else in Hayward would spend summer clarifying their friendships and relationships with each other, strengthening their bonds until they were nigh unbreakable, whereas I became something of a ghost. Nobody got back to me on Skype in a timely manner and nothing outside was mine to keep except maybe the sun damage. Still I wanted to be loved by anything outside of our core family group. Still I wanted to be wanted instead of this thing I was being spoken into, this unattractive beast child who, in the words of my high school best friend, felt “like you belong to someone else already.”

September rolled around and if the most thrilling thing that had happened to me was sort-of touching hands with my crush because an all-black ladybug with two little red hearts on its wings landed on us, I would go into the school year upset and convinced I’d never be held.

I’ve made some grave mistakes in summer’s receding shadow. I remember I moved in with someone, years ago now, and the night I left, my father looked at me and said, “Everything about this feels wrong, but okay.” He was right, of course. Everything about it was wrong, went wrong, let me drop like an apple falling off of a cart, let the worms fill me.

I’m not moving in with anyone now. For anyone. Anyone but me, I guess, but I’m such a shotgun shell of a person. One big circle and a bunch of little holes around me in a speckled halo of absence.

Anyways. Despite my illness, this summer had no unmet fantasies. I loved and was loved in turn. I did what I wanted to do with the people I wanted to do it all with. So now I begin to wonder if there’s something about September that just pisses me off.

The Nature of Things

words and sculpture by Taylor Rae

the nature of things by taylor rae, clay sculpture (unfired/unfinished)
```
The crisp air of Fall’s promised arrival reminds me of death					The decomposing of leaves and berries and the leftover remains of small game.
					It reminds me of the hooves
												I held in my hands as I saw
					your sinew glisten									in the light
It reminds me of my fall from grace				into the pits						of my own mortality

With the return									of the season					I begin to break
				The hard shell fortified										by the applause of others
And the solemn smile							upon my lover’s face,			crumbles away
To nothing										I drown							in my visions
		of the past,								transformed						into shackles
			for my future.
							Fluorescent lights and the sterile smell of my corner room
							The drain placed precarious in the side of my abdomen
							next to the hollow from which my sanity was stolen
							Their words weighed on me heavy, barely held
							by the body that smelled of death and was
							reduced to bone. She is so lucky.

So now I ponder.													What shall be done?
							I find my way back,
							slow and circuitous,
							on a path forged for			me
							Grounded in the clay
							the plants and the							water
														Held by the ones
														who cradle
							my powdered remains
														like sand
														cupped gently 
														in their hands
							I craft the vessels
														of my homelands
							and whisper my story
														to the wind
My torso and the medicines
							growing where I used to be
Not because beauty has come from the pain, but because
														Where there is death
														life always follows
Such is the nature of things.
```
untitled #2, dani rivero

9/26/21 – Pike Place Market, 2016 – in the pinch and itch of memory

Gargantuan yellow cranes hang their hooks low. Hazard-bright vultures on concrete, brick, and iron carrion, they crisscross the city, block out the sun or cut clouds open with their spines. You remember Kay saying something vague a couple months back, something about two millionaires playing tug-of-war with Seattle. Whoever breaks the city first wins.

You’re sprawled on the stained grass of a green hill on the edge of Pike Place. There’s a woman a stone’s throw from you. Growing up, you’d see her around town, always the same, always pulling a cart of copper earrings behind her tiny, stooped body. Just like you, she’s Native, with deep set brown eyes under furrowed brows and a wide mouth turned down in a sweet frown. Unlike you, her clothes are ornate, velvet regalia beaded with the colors of her aura. Her pepper hair stays braided thick and clean under a black velvet cap. You reach up under your beanie and scratch at your scalp, trying to remember if you even have hair.

The woman is asleep under a sun untampered by cranes. Her mahogany skin glows almost crimson in the golden light. Your lonely eyes trace the innumerable lines of her face. They run dark. They run deep. You are a scrawny teenager, sharp, genderless, a thing so thin and slight you might as well be a line yourself, a line on the skin of the earth. You can’t remember how long you’ve been on the grass. The crane casts a shroud around you. Your calloused hands caress and mutilate the ground in equal measure. Torn blades of grass lay around you in the war zone of your fingers.

You are a ghost. Nobody notices you. Those who do look away quickly, troubled, ashamed. Of you or for you, it doesn’t matter. You were never meant to be here.

Seattle is paradise, though. Last week, you fell asleep on the express from Ballard to Edmonton and woke up just outside Tulalip. The sun was so bright, the whole station shone white, almost blinding. You were exhausted and the light entered you slow. You thought about angels taking human hosts. In your half-awake mind, you floated up in broad daylight toward the sun, which was a god, an eye, a portal. You came down to earth and no one hurt you. You belonged to the sun, your skin kissed brown and freckled as your ancestors. You remembered your name in this moment of warmth.

Now you’re on the edge of the harbor. Puget Sound glitters in the sunlight, every crest of wave a different color. Sometimes the killer whales break surface. Sometimes they jump and curve across the sky, an upside-down smile sent direct from the vast, dark deep. You don’t look for these blessings, but you pray for days after they happen, just “thank you, thank you, thank you” until you run out of breath.

“No visitors today,” someone says.

You barely flinch. It’s the old woman. Her leathery hands gently hold the guardrail as her dark eyes flit across the horizon.

“How do you know?” you ask. Your voice whistles a little in your throat from disuse.

She shrugs. “Just do, I suppose.”

There’s a long pause as you both watch the unbroken sound. Small waves splash against the blunt edge of the harbor. There’s an unusual dearth of boats on the water in this moment. All you see are whitecaps and rainbows interrupted by empty docks and eroded posts. You take a deep, sea-salted breath, and let yourself imagine a world before or after. No millionaires fighting over who gets to pierce the ocean first. Just a stretch of open sound and the possibility of visitors.

Late Poems

by Danny Crook
```
A child hands me a drawing of a figure standing 
on an insect, the two roughly the same size. 

She was very delighted when I told her that 
a human with the strength of an ant 
would never fall from the monkey bars. 

She then asked if the bug-sized human 
would still have to watch their little brother, 
and I told her of course not as she ran off. 

More and more, I think I am simply too far from 
her grandfather’s account of the burning barn—

listening hard to the old poet wanting to start 
from the beginning about growing up in Brooklyn 
as he held a framed portrait of Tsar Nicholas II 

with his finger pinned on the village 
in the background and staring above my head. 

Meanwhile my thermometer and 
compass are telling me yes, yes, there is 
a match and it is being held very close. 
```
September 4, 2023

collaboration, collaborative bestieposting, my friends, nonlinear narrative, poetry, time, visual art
IN DEFENSE OF UNHAPPINESS
```
TRIGGER WARNING: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS MENTIONS OF DOMESTIC AND SEXUAL ABUSE, ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY, SELF-HARM AND DISORDERED EATING
```
❤

When I’m about twenty years old, I take a subway train with an artist who’s had more of an impact on me than he probably is aware of. I befriend him after he and his brother/co-collaborator resolutely do not cast me in their short tragicomedy, Do More of What Makes You Happy, which is about a chronically ill person and their friends struggling to make ends meet in a hostile world. Three or four days from this moment, I will have overstayed my welcome in their apartment, because my then-boyfriend will have done something violent to me that will leave me unmoored for the next several months. Neither me nor the artist know this now. We are taking the train to Manhattan, if I recall correctly. Somehow we get to talking about something that leads the artist to say this to me:

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Whenever I think about you, I think, yeah. Cleo’s okay. Cleo’s got their shit together.”
```
IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT I NO LONGER GO BY “CLEO” AND PREFER TO BE CALLED FRANKIE, FRANCIS, VARIOUS NICKNAMES THAT COME FROM THAT, AND/OR SHAAWAN.
```
It is an assertion so far and away from what my family (at this time I have only one friend, who is in agreement with my family) thinks of me, that I’m lost for words. The sound of the subway becomes the sound of my thoughts, kh-shunk, kh-shunk, kh-shunk, the high keen as it hits the brakes, the whistle of the gas-electric engine, the hiss and the bustle and the worrying of it all. I stare at him. He is not much older than me, but he seems more… established. More here. Here, as in here, as in on this earth and of this world.

From the ages of seventeen to twenty-four, my body does not feel like my own. I take selfies with an obsessive feverishness. Like I need proof-of-life. Like I’m holding myself hostage and threatening my own future. I post all of the selfies and I scroll through the comments about how handsome I am with the dead-eyed, thin-lipped expression of Patrick Bateman. No pleasure to be gleaned from anything. When my then-boyfriend says what he says to me and does what he does, I’m not so self-hating as to think I deserve it—I am just so numb to everything that my sort of doomed, dead-man-walking energy affirms that the violence I face is just a statistical inevitability. Part of the narrative, as it were, or, in more recent memetic terms, a “canon event.”

What I tell people when I explain the arc of my transition is that I cloistered myself. I think I’ve said the sentence “I hermetically sealed myself” more times than I can count. This is both true and reductive. I tried as hard as I could to be like every other trans person I came across on Tumblr—to be “Discord-enough” as one of my friends ungenerously says—and keep my body in a house, keep my mind online. Life found a way, though. Against my will, life happens.

I’ll pause here. I am twenty-five again, going on twenty-six. This might be the ugliest thing I’ve written to date. I still feel like writing it. I still feel like sharing it with you.

So I seal myself away. This is how my first few “relationships” occur. I meet them online and they are terrible people. I still love them worse than I’ve ever loved anyone. I still let them hurt me. At one point, one of my online friends, who is doing the exact same thing I am, says they can’t believe they let a guy in cat ears who never leaves his bedroom destroy their capacity for intimacy. This is a bizarrely common tale, as it happens. Many people who grow up on Tumblr find ourselves utterly obliterated by total losers. When we come of age, much later than our cisgender and heterosexual peers, mind, we tend to avoid looking back at the exploded shells of our past lives. I tried. I tried a couple times. One of my therapists looked at my intake form, which outlined for several paragraphs the part of my love life that coincided with my detransition—when I was catfished or maybe just hallucinated the whole ordeal—and said “I can’t help you with any of this. I’m sorry. I’ll take you on and we can talk about whatever led up to all of that, but this… this is totally outside my wheelhouse.”

Even sealed, I shuttled my vessel around. I was “always on that damn phone” and beholden to people miles or eons away from me who craved the kind of life I led, who wanted to be my partner because I was maybe their ticket out of whatever personal hell their families had built for them. I avoided eye contact with anyone in real life who might have wanted to touch me. I curled up on leather couches and my fingers went fast, fast, fast, against that pane of glass and all the desperate, lonely people who lived inside of it. When I had no choice but to put that phone down, I opened my eyes to art galleries, film festivals, people and places who, against all odds and again, against my will, loved me. Wanted to be a home for me in a similar way the chronically online wanted me to be a home for them.

And I masculinized. My body grew and shifted and changed. Early in my transition, when I was nineteen years old and maybe four or five months on T, I found myself at Toronto International Film Festival. I had been promised small changes over a long period of time, but I was already read as a cis man always, even if I didn’t bind. At one of the mixers, a butch/femme lesbian couple from Israel crossed the sea of pale faces and stood right in front of me. The butch was six inches shorter than I was, and her femme was six inches taller. The femme did not speak, but the butch smirked up at me, eyes cloying and hungry.

“Excuse me,” they said, “are you gay?”

I blinked at them. I was wearing makeup and a button-down shirt with the collar open to my cleavage. I’d been a lesbian for my whole young adulthood, but I had just begun my horrid dalliance with my then-boyfriend, who, only two weeks of DMing in, told me never to leave him.

“I… I guess,” I said.

“I knew it,” said the butch. “I see you and I think, that is far too beautiful to be a straight man.”

Satisfied, the butch and femme left me to my beautiful isolation, and I scanned the faces for someone, anyone, who could keep me here.

An Argentinian woman approached me. She was flanked by two sharply-dressed cis men, who were almost too handsome. I looked down at her and tried not to notice how uncomfortable the men were with my proximity.

“You are the only real person here,” said the Argentinian woman, by way of greeting.

I could say nothing. I glanced up at her men, then back at her. They seemed real enough.

She grabbed one of her men and snapped at him in Spanish. He looked like she’d just slapped him, and scowled down at me.

“You two,” she said, “take care of this boy. Promise me you won’t let anything happen to him.”

The men looked at me. Now that I was a boy and not a gay man, I was less of a threat. The blond one actually smiled. The Argentinian woman squeezed my hands. Her hands were small and hot and soft, like she had never worked a day in her life. She leaned in and smelled me and then walked away. Her men left shortly afterwards, but everywhere I went, I felt their line of sight pierce me. True to her word, nothing happened to me. Well, almost nothing.

from Surviving Romance on Webtoon

I am telling you all of this for one specific reason.

When people push against trans healthcare—indeed, when they push against “the whole transgender thing,” which is to say, our lives, our very existence—many say “it’s not going to make you happy.” “It” could be anything from a change of pronouns to a wardrobe shift, but more often than not, “it” is hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgeries, the whole medical backbone to the transsexual experience. This justification has always baffled me. If something I want won’t make me happy, isn’t that my business? And furthermore, why deny me the freedom of unhappiness? Never mind that the people who say “it’s not going to make you happy” are often, themselves, miserable and proud of it. Never mind that their needless suffering allegedly brings them closer to their God. What about my needless suffering? Isn’t that, by their illogic, also holy?

I have drunk whiskey until I vomited into a sewer grate while a man ten years my senior rubbed my back and cooed “I like you because you’re not like other girls” in my ear. I have filled a bathtub with apple cider vinegar because I heard it rebalances your pussy and I needed that control back. I have broken a boy’s ankles and told him he needs to crawl back because he threatened someone I love. I have run away from beasts in forests I should not have been in with a person I should not have gotten in the car with. I have starved myself. I have cut myself. I have ignored all of my body’s warning signs and let people inside me who have called me a monster and told me they will write my callout post themselves if I abandon them. I am an amnesiac and a survivor and I have hurt people. I’ve dropped out of college and I’ve spread nasty rumors and I’ve apologized profusely for both.

I have been ludicrously unhappy.

You cannot take my transsexuality away for it.

Let me tell you something. Hormones and surgery aren’t going to make you happy, it’s true. Not on their own, they won’t. You’re still entitled to them. That’s right, I said “entitled.” You are entitled to transsexuality. You are entitled to the processes by which your body might look and feel a little bit more manageable. A little less torturous to be in. I don’t care if you’re one of those annoying, self-hating people who like to direct message me from time to time saying I make you feel insecure, because I “pass” and you feel like you never will. You’re still entitled to this shit. You still need to try. You’re going to die. You’re going to grow up and die and rot or burn. This is your only chance to be you. I say this because you might believe in reincarnation, so “YOLO” is out of the question, but the next time around, you’re not you anymore. You’re something else. Be you, now.

Here’s the story of my life and also yours. We are born into a sick world. We do our best. We are often unhappy. Sometimes we have trouble getting out of bed. We laugh a lot. We are loved even when we don’t feel like it. Sometimes we realize years after the fact that we have been loved, that we wasted it, and it stings. It aches. We look in the mirror and we don’t understand how perfect we are because the world we live in has a vested interest in making us aware of our lack. We want. We crave. We need. We get and we give. We make mistakes. We are forgiven. Sometimes we forgive. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we avenge. We don’t ask enough questions. We aren’t asked enough questions. We try to forge connections. Some stick. The ones that stick make us who we are. We lose the people we love. It hurts. We grieve. We die. We leave.

from Stagtown on Webtoon

There are brief and salient moments where everything clarifies. If we’re lucky or we work at it, we get to feel deeply. But even if we never “aspire” to profundity, even if we want the most ordinary, mundane life imaginable, we are suffused with some kind of life-spark. Call it whatever you want. Call it God or your higher self or the unbearable triteness of being. But I’m calling it now—you want to do something to make your life more yours. Your pitiful, beautiful, imperfect, disgusting, wild and heartbreaking life. Your body. Your body. Your body. You’re going to live. We both are. So if you’re looking for a sign, this is it. Take HRT with me. Fuck everyone who says this isn’t going to make you happy. It probably won’t. But it might make it easier to do more of what makes you happy, in the words of that estranged artist and his brother. It might make these old bones of yours feel like good bones. Feel like a house. Maybe even a home.

Coz, see, I’m not looking for people who are far away from me now. When someone looks at me who wants to touch me and I want to touch them, too, I look back. My whole Instagram isn’t selfies anymore, or “lonelys,” as the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco once called them. There’s someone else on the other end of the camera now, and I don’t search comments for affirmation. And it’s not a hundred percent fixed, of course it isn’t. For example, lately my hands haven’t felt like my own. Even now, even as I write this. There’s this weird senseless sensation in them. I see them moving across the keyboard in my peripheral vision. I hear the clack of the scissor-switch keys. I glance down and think these are ostensibly mine, but even my arms are foreign. Long twigs with little mittens attached, like a snowman someone forgot to kick down that is now possessed and coming for the village. And I don’t like growing facial hair, at least not right now. I shave my face every three days and I bought Paco Rabanne’s INVICTUS aftershave a couple weeks ago because I was shaving so much, and it all sort of feels like I’m buying accessories for a character or a doll or something, not myself. Also, I have insomnia.

But I’m here.

I know I’m here in a way I didn’t know it before. I know I’m here for sure. I’m here and so are you.

I do my T shots every Tuesday and my estradiol suppositories Tuesdays and Fridays. Come on in. The water’s fine.
August 26, 2023

blog, memoir, nonlinear narrative, personal, trans healthcare, trans things, transsexual feminism
Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in

we’re so back

Up in that choked-out periwinkle haze the moon is a rose gold fingernail. All the cell towers flicker their tuneless percussion, just behind the graying tree-line. Did you do it right? Did you do the right thing? You promised yourself right at the beginning of summer that you’d savor it. The longer days. The slower sunsets. What do you do when you find yourself somewhere unexpected—turning into someone unrecognizable—doing what you can—and then you’re on the same road you’ve driven for months now (when did it become months now) with someone you hardly thought of until—

If the light turns yellow when you’ve finally caught a stride, will you slow down or speed up? You missed the meteor shower even though it rescheduled. Even the stars procrastinate now.

At some point, you realize you’re in it. The end of everything. It clicks for you at the weirdest time. You’ve known since birth, of course. You were told. Day in, day out. “This shit won’t last. Don’t get attached.” But being told something is different than actually living it. Sure, it made you weird. Your first couple of heartbreaks felt worse than anything in the world and you screamed bloody murder because you knew deep down you needed people. Every lost friendship reverberated throughout your lifeline until you smushed your palm against the wallpaper of your playroom and growled “enough. Enough.”

And the irony there is that you roll your eyes at other adults who scream and cry and claim they’re “grieving” a breakup (three month poly non-attached situationship) because now you’ve got all these dead people in your head and you’re never gonna hear their voices in real time again, or taste their food, or talk shit about them in a way that matters. But you’re scrupulous with that, too. You know to be wary of any attrition to your ethical and compassionate faculties. Just because you’ve got a broken leg and someone else has a cold doesn’t mean you’re not both hurting.

So you force yourself out of bed on a Monday after losing sleep Sunday night. You get in your car and you listen to the growl and the gurgle of it, as if it’s drowning in its own fluids. You look at all the lights in your dashboard. You’re taking it into the shop tomorrow. Then you’re hightailing it out of here, even though you know what you know and feel what you feel. That’s your—what? Burden? Responsibility? Resignation? Erotic, furious, sadomasochistic joy? You’re not sure. It probably doesn’t matter. What will happen will happen whether you’re in Baltimore or Minneapolis or even here, nestled away in the author’s overwrought cabin, touching his father’s mezuzah because you and everyone you love need all the gods they can get.

You’re helping a friend and clan-cousin for the day. They promised you food but you’d do it for free. You love menial tasks and manual labor. You love to shut the fuck up and get your hands dirty. Nobody in your family believes this about you. This is because many of them have had the same “you” in their heads since you were fifteen years old and you can’t really argue with it. It’s too much effort to try and convince them otherwise.

This is also why you are leaving. Maybe if you’re gone long enough, they will forget about you and you can be someone pleasant and utilitarian when you come home. Someone worth knowing and being related to. Hearing the same stories told about you over and over again as the world burns has turned you apathetic and cruel. You can feel your will to live blunting. Your family is also wonderful. You would choose them over anyone and anything. You will choose them forever. You are loyal and intolerable. They are the only ones who will ever love you. This isn’t true. It feels true. It’s still not true.

Anyway, you end up walking a road made of sand with your clan-cousin’s baby. The brush on either side is scrubby and hardy, peppered with purple flowers and pale green leaves that look furry. The baby looks up at you. They are small and brownish with hair about the color of their skin and eyes like copper. In the frigid evening sun, they look especially tiny. Earlier, they had asked you if you had a baby. Not yet, you said.

“Do you have a big kid then?” they asked. They were examining your car.

“No,” you said, “not yet.”

Then you made the long walk back here, hand in hand, popping bubble wrap you’d found in your trunk.

“I want to walk with you to see the tomatoes,” they say.

“Are there tomatoes over that way?” you ask.

The baby shakes their head. “Not yet.”

That’s when it clicks. That’s the moment, the raw, sharp, gut-punch realization that this is it. President Biden approves one fossil fuel project after another as an earthquake wracks California in the middle of a hurricane, Maui and Yellowknife burn, and you have loved ones in all three places who are panicking and cracking jokes and fundraising and texting you stupid shit for you to laugh at whenever you get around to it. You’re simultaneously more confident and more insecure than you’ve ever been. You write your little manifestations down because you need all the gods you can get. Then you’re holding Margie, the author’s cat, so-named for the protagonist of Fargo, and you tell her this:

“I don’t think I’m gonna make it. I mean, I don’t think I’m gonna do what I want to do. I’m telling you this because you’re a cat and you don’t care. You just want me to touch you. I had all these opportunities and I kept avoiding them and now it’s too late. Isn’t that so stupid? The world is on fire and I finally have the guts to admit I want attention.” You laugh. She purrs into your hand.

from “The ‘trauma’ of publishing a novel” by Megan Nolan

“Not really. I guess what I want is a chance to do all the things I said I was gonna do when I was really little. The things I forgot I wanted to do. Don’t worry, though. I’m still gonna act like I’m doing it. I’m still gonna sit down and write and practice my music and do my art. I’m gonna pick up contract gigs and pay rent and act as normal as possible. I’ll pay off my debts to my siblings so they don’t hate me anymore. I know they don’t hate me but, you know. And I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best until I can’t anymore and then I’ll just do okay and it’ll be fine. Okay, Marge?”

from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

It matters that the baby trusts you with the future-tomatoes. It matters that you can stare directly into the sun without burning your eyes. It matters that you know how to be nice to people who go to church. It matters that you’re nice to strangers, in general. It matters that you drink your water and take your meds. It matters that you get your car fixed. It matters that you keep living, because you know you have no choice.

Sometimes you have to imagine that this is a movie. You’re not the main character, but you’re looking out for them. It’s important that you’re not the main character now, specifically, because when you peel back the inflamed layers of your heart, you feel a little bit pathetic. Well, a lot. And you let yourself feel pathetic and wretched and godawful because that’s important, too.

For some reason, you’ve been reminiscing on Netflix in the early days. Maybe it’s because streaming services have been mass-culling their movies and TV shows—even or especially if they’re exclusive to their “channels.” Maybe it’s because it’s August, and you have a subconscious association between Netflix and summers with your parents. Your dad and his wife lived in married student housing back when she was deepening her relationship with you and your biological siblings. It was a tiny basement suite in the U District of Seattle, Washington.

There was an oldish TV set on top of their cabinet. You would watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 until everyone was sick of you and it. Then you’d switch to something else. You and your family would flick through whatever Netflix offered pre-algorithm. A lot of indies. Really good ones, too. You probably wouldn’t recommend them to anyone, but they were well done and showcased people who, at least to you, looked realer than the sanctioned studio films.

Maybe you’re nostalgic for the way the late summer wafted in through the open windows at night. How your parents would stand out on the concrete back porch and smoke and talk and laugh quietly. Maybe you miss wrapping yourself in a Pendleton. Maybe you miss how much time you wasted wanting to be normal.

One image, one sense-memory keeps coming back to you. It’s some indie film you genuinely can’t remember. A white guy with sandy brown hair is in an office wearing business casual, gripping a mug. He’s saying something utterly banal and the equally white, somewhat less sandy-haired protagonist is narrating how bored he is with everything.

Outside, the streetlights flutter on and off and on again. You catch the scent of something cataclysmic on the wind. In your mind’s eye, you see something deep within the ocean turning in its sleep. Its snore rumbles the ocean floor. It is dreaming about you. Well, not really, but one of your ancestors who looks and acts a lot like you. You haul your father’s iBook out of wherever you’ve been keeping it and you open it up. You need to write it all down. All the visions of what’s to come. All the hope and fear and agony. You need to people the barren, cracked landscape of the future with what your parents call “a ragtag band of misfits.” They’ll know what to do.

You are thirteen years old. You have had a hell of a summer. You went to your first pride and almost got impaled on someone’s flag because they were dressed like a stormtrooper and didn’t see you. Across the city, your little sister was almost beheaded by a killer robot. These things happen. You won’t go to another pride again, at least not at the time of writing this. You’re thinking, right now, at age twenty-five, with no small measure of bitterness, about the lyrics to Sylvan Esso’s PARAD(w/m)E:

You wonder why white people have the right to be suicidally bored but you have to keep surviving. A couple days ago, you told the person you’ve been playing house with, “I feel like I’m not allowed to lose control. I feel like I’m not allowed to do anything anyone else does.” He reached across the space between you with his eyes and nodded. “Same.” You deflated. You wondered, not for the first time, where he’s been and where you’re going and why. Why any of it.

It all gets wrapped up in a pretty little bow. You in the sand and the baby in the sand. Every time they pop a bit of puffy plastic they shriek “It’s YOU!” before dissolving into giggles. You and the baby’s parents finish your work for the day and go to the casino for dinner. This is what you’ve done your whole life. For the first time, you actually notice the patrons of the casino. The ones who aren’t Indians. You ask your clan-cousin’s sibling where these people came from. They laugh, “I know, right?” And you laugh, too, because you’re not actually looking for an answer, you’re more just shocked that it took you this long to ask the question.

You say your farewells and you get in your separate cars and you look at the smoky, violent skyline like a boy comes home to someone he’s getting ready to break up with. All the love in the world and so much heavy resentment.

Are there tomatoes over there?

No.

But there will be.

August 21, 2023

apocalypse, blog, death, grief, nonlinear narrative, personal, personal posting, stream of consciousness
in the company of saints

I am waiting for a friend of mine to arrive so I can feel less crazy. I’ve been sleeping poorly or not sleeping at all for a multitude of reasons, which I wrote down in a text to another friend when they asked me why I haven’t been sleeping. Well, what they really texted was “insomnia?” because they are going to be a very good doctor one day and I can tell because they ask direct and blunt questions.

At 9:46am Central Time, I get a notification from my Chani app that says, “Ready, set, go: The Moon is trining Mars. Channel the momentum by doing the thing you keep putting off.” I don’t read it until I roll out of bed at 2pm of course (wow, remember when I said the Station would turn me into a morning person? And then I almost went blind in one eye and my sleep schedule got fucked even more? That was pretty funny) and once I do, I start turning over stones in my head. What could she mean by this! I’m putting off just about everything! What’s the thing? What now?

I don’t actually believe in astrology, not in any way that matters. My estranged ex-best-friend who I quote all the time used to say, “When you tell me what should happen, it keeps me from imagining what could.” It was a wise and astute observation. They had (and have) a lot of those. Still, I have the Chani app because a lot of my other friends are really into astrology. They draw comfort from it and I draw comfort from them.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think my ex-best-friend was referring to tarot? It’s funny. I read tarot. I’m really good at reading tarot. I think another aspect of my sleeplessness is coming from my lack of ritual. To give you a general idea of what my life looks like right now:

The coldest room in the house is sequestered in the far side of the upstairs, farthest from the staircase. It has a flatscreen Fire TV on top of a treasure chest, which I’ve unceremoniously dumped my first Gramma’s Sausages packer on like some kind of flaccid altar. It’s the one I need to repair because it’s coming apart. It’s been coming apart for quite some time. I have the patch kit in my backpack, but just below the treasure chest is everything I brought with me from Seattle. I was in Seattle for two weeks, you see, right after leaving Cranberry Lake. DG and I took a train from Minneapolis to get there.

So much has happened. I keep wanting to update you as it happens, and then more stuff happens, and I sit in front of a blank screen, exhausted, wondering what portion of myself to give away until I get sick of myself and annoyed with my tone of voice, and all that fills my brain is this poem by Jeremy Radin:

Specifically that last line, on repeat: oh god who will put up with me. oh god who will put up with me. oh god,

who will put up with me?

I am afraid of the answer. My father puts up with me. My siblings do. We are, of course, capable of making each other feel awful in that special way only your family can. We are also the only ones who can build each other back up all the way, or at least, that’s how it feels to me, even as time slips through my fingertips and everyone pairs off and absorbs partners into the family like the Blob eats American teenagers.

Ugh. Even now, I bristle at the idea of posting this. But part of me—call it my “higher self,” if you’re extra annoying, call it logic and reason, call it the cold analysis of one who has been told the same things by the same people over and over again, enough to form a pretty good assessment of their place in people’s lives, God help them—part of me feels there’s something important in showing you this particular bloody and raw self-inflicted verbal embargo. Something about telling you that, as much as I love to portray myself one way, there is another way beneath it that often rears its head. There is insecurity, and annoyance, and all the ugly, non-grammable things that we either keep to ourselves or spread around in miserable bouts of sarcasm or untenable anger.

My nephew is not yet a year old, but his temperament reminds me of my own. He is happy, smiling, genial, a complete ray of sunshine and warmth, and then all at once, crying, screaming, angry, frustrated. I do this, too, and I wish I didn’t. Going, going, gone off the rails. I have a way of filling the room with pressurized malaise. I can make the house bend and sway. Now, he’s a baby, and has absolutely no control over himself, but I’m an adult. I do.

My friend has just pulled up in their boxy little car. My mood has improved by a lot.

Right. You know those memes that are like, girls will spend one hour with their friends and post “my heart is so full?” I’m girls.

We talked about a lot of stuff. It always goes back to sex and death and what it means for our community. Also the apocalypse. But right now I want to divert from my friend and I for just a moment. I want to talk about our grandma.

There is a kind of self-consciousness I’ve dealt with lately around grief. I think because I feel that word has fallen to the level of other overused words, like “emotional labor,” “toxic,” “trauma,” and the like. I brush against the word “grief” and a legion of tenderqueers rear their shorn heads to tell me I’m “valid” and I can be as selfish or all-encompassing as I need while I deal with my little bit of sadness. While I tend my broken land.

When our mom passed, all my older brother Smokii could talk about was grief. He is a poet and his world is full of people who need to talk about everything. People who hold space for catharsis and complexity. People who make complicated emotions more accessible to people who, say, just sort of mindlessly scroll and might need a bit of care in their lives. I love my brother and I love the work he and his peers do. I also cannot be that. I cannot do that. Radical vulnerability, when boiled down and reduced to bite-sized morsels to please an algorithm, is a deft art I do not possess. I am, to quote my father, “a real piece of work.” These spaces and this movement and indeed, this moment, often find me a pinned moth, splayed and ever-beautiful, my pain never concluding, my life never free to rot and fall apart.

If that sounds dramatic, it’s because it is. But I need to exorcise the drama here. Otherwise, it comes out in inconvenient ways. In “toxic” ways.

source: hot grief summer, by kat mills martin

Before we lost our grandma, I lost a friend. I wasn’t going to talk about that here, but one of my screenshots, which is from Kat Mills Martin’s Substack, MAKING, opens with an acknowledgment of the things we feed in spring that die in summer. All the potential futures we lose. Thank God, my not-a-friend is still alive. They just got fed up with my bullshit. Don’t comfort me for saying that, please. Don’t say I’m in the right. For one, you don’t know the situation, and for two, I’m not putting myself down. I have bullshit. You have bullshit. We all do. We all have the capacity to be selfish, cruel, callous, and ignorant. Even abusive. Sometimes the people we love realize they don’t need to take this from us and they move on because they know they can take something (anything!) more congruent from someone else.

After my friend cut me off, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I didn’t understand how much of a fixture in my life they were until the option to text them whatever silly thing I wanted to share was denied. We had been growing closer, closer, closer all spring, and then summer came and we grew apart with sudden swiftness. In the aftermath I can see how many mismatches there were, of course. I can know I wouldn’t have been good for them, long term. We need to spend time with the people who actually care for us the way we want to be cared for, and I wasn’t caring for them the way they wanted.

Which brings me to our grandma.

See, the other self-consciousness happens when someone dies. I feel like I don’t have the right to be sad. I wasn’t there enough. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t nice enough or present enough. I couldn’t have loved them enough because here I am, tearing my way through the universe, youthful and self-centered and navel-gazing, meanwhile the whole time, this person’s getting older. And the guilt of my absence keeps me from reaching out, which deepens the absence.

Hey.

Call them.

I don’t care. You shouldn’t, either. If they’re still alive. If you’re even a little bit cool with each other. If it’s been awhile or it’s only been a day.

Call them.

I’ll try to do the same. I’ll try. But we try and we try and we do bad and we drop the ball because we’re people. But we need to try.

So, I’ll try to tell you about her. I won’t go into too many details. She lived. She was very beautiful. She was mean and everyone knew her meanness deeply. She had the prettiest smile I’d seen. When I was a baby, she said she was going to take me away (as a joke) and I bit her hard, hoping she’d drop me. She was married for her entire life to a handsome white man named Arnold who loved her so profoundly, so earnestly, and so openly, that I didn’t realize until much, much later that heterosexual couples are often miserable in each other’s presence. That misery is normal. That his utter devotion to her wasn’t.

My baby brother called Arnold “Grandpa Arnold” when we were very small, and it stuck. I remember that moment very clearly. We were in the Meskwaki Casino, in the buffet dining area. I used to eat so many shrimp I would make myself sick. One of my uncles told me something about how if I ate shrimp tails, they’d cut me up inside, and I got so scared, I stopped forever, but at this point in time I only ate shrimp, tails and all.

Misko was bald or close to bald, with a little tuft of copper hair. He loudly proclaimed something I don’t recall, but I remember he punctuated it “Grandpa Arnold” with such assuredness, everyone laughed. That was how he was, when he was small. Blunt and loud and brusque. Deanna, hitherto known to us girls as “Auntie Deanna,” then became “Grandma Deanna,” a title I never once asked her how she felt about, because it became one of those indomitable, forever-things. She would always be Grandma. He would always be Grandpa.

She was very Catholic. She talked to me a lot about Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Sometimes it was because she was working on an icon of the saint for her church, and she knew I was an artist, so the long, arduous, holy process of icon-making became our conversation topic. Sometimes it was because the more fucked up my skin got from eczema, the more insecure I grew, and she noticed and told me Saint Kateri was covered in scars. This mattered. In these memories, I am always in her kitchen, touching the soft magnets she and Grandpa Arnold have on their fridge.

Even with all of this in my mind and in my hands, I worry it’s not enough. And that’s ego. Again, a quote from my estranged ex-best-friend: “You are both more and less important than you think.” They were right. They were often right.

At the funeral, all us godless heathens who carry her blood shared furtive glances amongst ourselves, while the mere three Catholics in our family held it down in prayer. The glances, roughly translated: what are we supposed to do now? All these rituals. All these atonal songs. Did that soprano up there know our grandma? Did we?

Of course we did. Of course I did. And the proof lay in the way we all looked at each other in silent acknowledgement of all that goes unsaid when someone you love dies. All the bit-back imperfections. All the things we can’t say.

My friend and I sat on the porch, where I write this now, and talked. I like listening to them talk. Even or especially when they get on my nerves, although I worry about writing that, because I know we live in a time when insecurities sting extra hard because everything’s falling apart. I think they know, though. I think they know I love them and they drive me up the wall sometimes.

We were talking about our tribe. We’re both from White Earth. We’re both… chaotic, shall we say? And on the wind there came a sense-memory that definitely wasn’t mine. Someone who was built a little bit like me, sitting on a porch with someone who was built a little bit like my friend, and these people were talking about the same shit we were discussing, just a long time ago, on the same land, in a different moment, a different context. I stared at my friend then as they spoke. I tried to memorize their hairline and their teeth and their bizarre little mannerisms, all the things that draw me in, all the things that annoy me.

“cherry tree” by xenia rubinos

Grandma Deanna had dementia. Alzheimer’s, they call it, after someone dies. I still don’t know why they do that. Why they wait until the person’s gone before they name the disease. I suppose that’s a Googleable question.

A couple years ago, a different Catholic mother and I stayed up very late. She was from Panama and English was her second language. She was a little bit elderly, so I treated her with reverence, though her children were my age. I was curled up on her daughters’ couch. She sat at their little round table, her golden-brown hair illuminated by a single overhead lightbulb. The rest of the apartment was in shadow.

She told me the way her mother staved off memory loss was her rosary. Every night, she prayed the rosary and named everyone she ever loved or hated. Everyone who helped her at the grocery store or the library, everyone in the hospitals, her daughters, her sons, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“When I call her,” said the mother, “her mind is sharp as a diamond always. It is because she prays. It is because she works and walks with God.”

Grandma Deanna was pious and precise. If anyone worked and walked with God, it was her, even near the end. I know there are other forces at play. I know there are things beyond our control, things that steal your mind away no matter how much you roll the rosary across your knuckles, no matter how good you are.

I know she probably remembers everything now. Everything she forgot. Everything she didn’t know she could forget.

The man who ran her funeral said we know Dee is now in the company of saints. For some reason, I imagined that company to look a lot like this. Like a porch on a cool summer’s night and everyone knows you well enough to say exactly what you need to hear. Like all your friends saying, “I remember, you told me,” and you nod and say, “I did tell you that already, didn’t I?” And the sun goes down and the streetlights come on and you don’t have to sleep alone ever again.

August 9, 2023

blog, death, friendship, grief, nonlinear narrative, personal, stream of consciousness
THIS LAND CALLED MY DAUGHTER
see also: “in defense of the poor image” by hito steyerl

works cited (sorry for the lack of italics, i couldn’t figure out how to do all that and, of course, i was doing everything last minute)

Leaving the land of the half-buried giants

an achingly vulnerable nonlinear postmortem

All that and I still wanted to give a talk. It felt necessary. That’s what my we’enh Jim always said about anything he said or did: is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? He had a way-of-being that felt unattainable to me when I was younger, full of piss and vinegar. Then I got older and did something horrible and the people still forgave me and I understood. So I try. I try. I talk a lot of shit but my intentions there are that I’d say it to your face. I would. I’d say it to your face and back it up with my body if I had to.

So it went that my father returned with me to the land of the half-buried giants. I kept asking people, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, who lived there, what the original name of this place was. There was a stream called White Sucker Brook or something to that affect. No suckers, though. Somehow I knew this place wasn’t called Sucker Island or Suckerfish. Robin, who is Nish like us, didn’t know, either. Okay, well, she’s Potawatomi, but that’s basically Nish. My family has known some of her family for quite some time. On one of my last days there, she and I had a strange, circular, subversive conversation about the ways in which the settlers like to consume us.

“This thing you’re talking about,” she said, swallowing a bit of her salad, “this… this energy. I wonder if it’s something people strive for? Thrive with? Or is it something we… endure?”

I thought about it. I don’t think hard, I think soft. I spread my mind out on the walls and floors and ceilings like dust or sunlight filtered through Venetian blinds.

“I suppose,” I began, “when you’re estranged from your family. When you’re estranged from what’s real. The obsessive consumption, the shiny of it all, it feels a little like love. No, you think it’s love. We think it’s love because we’re being watched, right? And picked at and fawned over. And then the moment you get real love, whether that’s through your family or a partner or your friends, then you endure. Then you do what you gotta do to… to survive.”

After my talk, I visited with acting director Terrance Caviness in his cabin. We were decompressing from everything: my lecture, my health scare, the smoke, the parents and the students. I sat across from him and looked at him. When my friends ask about him later, a handful of people will ask if he seems older or younger. I’ll take a minute to reflect and say “both.” He carries himself with a guarded strength and religiosity oft reserved for much older people, men specifically. There’s a kind of never-was masculinity in the way he moves, a dream of something better. I pointed this out, actually, in conversation with the actual director of the Station, Emily.

“You have good men here,” I’d said. “They’re just… good.”

She’d furrowed her whole face and smiled at the same time. “Right? We got very lucky, I think.”

There’s also a sense of youth about him. Terrance, I mean. Before making every announcement as acting director, he’d squeeze his hands together and swing his arms back and forth quickly, shivering.

“I hate making announcements,” he’d say. To himself or to whoever was nearest.

In the cabin both the young and the old Terrance were present. In this entirety, he was exactly twenty-seven rotations around the sun.

“Your story about the little girl was a little too real,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, actually. I can accept… I mean, I feel like my role, or my purpose in life, as corny as it sounds, is to be… this. To be a supporter. To be here cultivating space for other people to do their thing. Here, in this place. This place that I love so much. This place that takes and takes and takes but gives back everything and more. But I still want to be a parent. And how do I reconcile that? It feels almost selfish, uncharacteristically selfish, to think I could be that. That I should be that.”

I shook my head. “Parenting is playing a supportive role too, kind of. Doing all that, just for a tiny person.”

Somewhere in the world, Jeff Bezos was on a yacht and Tim Cook was in a meeting. Somewhere in the world, an armada of orcas gathered in the stormy waters beneath, summoning sea-wolves and their ilk for another plot. Somewhere in the capitol, the FDA prepped their motion to approve Elon Musk’s brain implants for human testing. A pipeline leaked. A skull turned in its grave and gnashed its teeth. An old man stood in his one-room house, where he’d lived his whole life, turned on his heel, and disappeared.

And here we sat in the turmeric warmth of the what-could-be and the preordained.

“One of your students is like me,” I said, just to say something. “Experiences time and space the way I do.”

“Which one?”

“The one who asked the really beautiful questions.”

This was a trick: all of the students had asked really beautiful questions, but what I meant was that this particular student was special.

“Was she sitting…”

“He. Or they, actually, he kind of had a vibe.”

“Oh! The one who… in the back, to your right… no, left! The one who looks like a total jock but when he talks, it’s…”

“Sweet and present with a sort of gravity to it.”

“Yes! His name is {}.”

“I know! We met afterwards. We visited.” I took a sip of my seltzer and conjured the moment. “He told me he was born to a metaphysics researcher. And the way he describes time is that it’s liquid… liquid… liquid and…”

The memory came to a halt, there, distracted as I’d been by the overwhelm of attention after my talk. As my father had pointed out, these past few weeks have been the most socializing I or anyone in our family has done, even pre-pandemic. The most “being around people.” I get weird when I’m not around people for awhile and then I am. Like a dumb, preening animal I get, all “thank you” and glimmering hope and fear.

“Liquid and formless,” I finished. “That’s what he said. Liquid and formless.”

Terrance nodded. Then, tentative, “Do you always know what’s going to happen? Have you ever been wrong?”

I looked down at the floor and up at the window. Then I smiled.

Robin asked my father and I if we’d been swimming yet. The smoke was back.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…
T.S. Eliot, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

We felt it in our throats. I kept bringing my hand to my neck. To Robin, I shook my head.

“The water here is special,” she said, in that besotted, conspiratorial way of hers. “Soft. You go in and your skin, your hair, everything softens.”

We jumped into the lake. The pink haze and the red sun and the indigo, broken clouds. The water warmer than you’d think for the frigid air. I stood with my feet in the black sand. Robin was right. It was soft. Everywhere was soft. My dad flipped onto his back and floated. Then he looked at me.

“Can’t you swim?”

I shook my head. Cold began to set in.

“Amnesia took that too?”

I nodded. My teeth chattered. I could feel my timelines splitting. Maybe I would swim maybe I wouldn’t. The black sand and the soft water and the smog of the dead.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
T.S. Eliot

Larry took us across the lake on our last day. I turned over the events and further, unwritten conversations with Terrance in my head. Over and over again I turned them. He is Catholic and spoke of God with care and determination. I found traces of his God in the water and the sky and Larry, of course, because the God Terrance spoke of was an Intentional God of words and kindness and well-worn rituals. As we’d packed our things (so many, so many things) I expressed gratitude to the land, to the immense boulders and the moss and the liquid, formless time. Remi watched us pack up with a frown-smile. Other people in the TA Lodge said it’ll be weird without us here.

“Last day of summer camp,” Dad quipped.

“For real,” said Remi, shaking her head.

As we docked on the mainland, I tried to mimic the others I’d seen tying the boat, before I sighed and said, to Larry and my father, “I’m sorry. I’m a poser.”

Larry laughed and demonstrated how to tie the boat up. His patience and good nature reminded me, once again, of that way-of-being, which seemed more attainable to me with every passing moment. I absorbed it as the other passenger, a self-described “city boy” with a big guffaw, hollered, “When it comes to knots, tie lots!”

Every time I blinked I saw the next few days in heat-mapped flashes. I worried at my thumb and tried not to rub my eyes, which were open, now, my face miraculously healed. That student’s question to me had been this (paraphrased):

“You say you experience time out of sequence. How do you temper that? How do you sort of, I guess, punctualize it?”

The word “punctualize” became my mind’s new mantra, especially as the heat map grew hotter and I found myself short of breath at the visions, all the maybes and the probables and the parade, que sera, sera.

I made a list of punctual exercises in my head.

There was more than this, I knew. Like the way the water and air peppered my face with sharp kisses every time we crossed the lake. The sense of being suspended above the earth when the boat jumped the waves. Looking at my dad and realizing I’m an adult now, and when did that happen? I was small and pretended to be asleep so he could carry me inside. I was small and knew how to read and write early and crushed myself down into a cube when he caught me being in love with someone for the first time, at age five. I was small and lay in the backyard for hours, watching the clouds, listening to the horns of the angels and the thrum of the bugs. I was small once but here we were, and he’d seen me give my talk and hugged me for longer than he’s hugged me in a very, very long time.

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

T.S. Eliot

Whenever we told people where we were in the Adirondacks, everyone, unbeknownst to each other, hummed a little, straightened their posture, and declared, “God country.”

Wandering the hills and vales of the land of the half-buried giants, I’d have to agree. When I rose from the placid lake, my eyes unclouded, I began to shed layer after layer of skin. I smelled of sweet fresh blood and melted pine-pitch, ovulation and annihilation and the pyre we roasted marshmallows over in silence, the students around us in the worlds they made for each other, the worlds we would never inhabit.

I remembered what Terrance said about being supportive and had a sense-memory of walking to his cabin with my dad the first night Dad spent at the Station. I said the ground felt suspiciously hollow, but that wasn’t quite it. No. It felt porous. Buoyant. As though with every step I took, there was someone or something pushing up, pushing back. Carrying me in its folded hands.

The day before I gave my lecture, Remi paddled me out to a rock island in the Lake and left me there to take some footage of me. I lay with my back on the stone and the moss, haze above me, water all around.

Time for you and time for me,
T.S. Eliot

I felt the heartbeat of the god of this place in the furrows of the stone. I felt the recursions and the variables swarming around me like bees in the prairie. All possible futures. All closed loops and no-choice open doors. I felt the buoyancy and the desire and the calling-toward-home of it all and I said, murmuring into the rock,
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screenshots from Surviving Romance on Webtoon.
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July 19, 2023

blog, nonlinear narrative, stream of consciousness