This quebecois chick with the Grinch finger dreadlocks who called me Caitlyn Jenner backstage claims Metis now. I’ve just finished reading Jake Arrowtop’s chapbook of “unsacred” poetry, Rez Void, which you can order from Bottlecap Press, if you wanna ache like I ache. You can always tell when I’m homesick because my whole apartment starts to smell like thick-cut bacon, spam, and “hiraeth” is one of those words I keep forgetting because it’s more accurate to clumsily stammer my way through this feeling.
Wanting to go home but home doesn’t want you, not really. Home never wanted you. Home was a man who loved you more than anything in the entire world and now he’s dead, his house belongs to some distant cousins of yours who definitely wouldn’t believe you if you said you were related, because since when? Home is a series of memories plus that painting your old best friend did of the man back when he lived here, in Maryland, and home is you trying to retrace his steps like some private detective in a comic, as if echoing his life will bring him back to you.
Coherence is impossible for me to achieve, so I find myself jealous and suspicious of famous Indians whose stories cohere. I know that’s really crabby of me. I also know my pushback against the word “Indigenous” being transformed into some kind of virtuous identity is equal parts warranted and nitpicking, yet another facet of the negative energy I expel from time to time. I wanna be careful, though. I don’t want my Nativeness to be some badge of impunity, make me a god among men, a sage among fools. I’m cooking bacon in my underwear and letting the grease pop my thighs because I miss when we fed the asshole across the street’s starved-out fighting dog. On instinct, I’m pouring all my leftovers in one bowl, like my papa did, only Spike–that’s what we called him, Spike–has probably been dead for almost twenty years now.
The asshole named all his kids after himself. All of them. Even the girl. Before that SWAT team came and took him away, she found out a terrible truth about her father, and I had no idea how to comfort her. We were maybe five or six years old. Probably six, because the Bad Thing had already happened to me, and seeing her cry like that made me uncomfortable. I pulled up all the dry grass in our vast backyard and let it rain down over her head like an itchy baptism while she scowled at me. She had her face buried in the dirt so I joined her. That was the best I could do. The best I can do.
Anyways, I forgot that one Maybe-tis girl’s name. She’d been platinum blonde when we met and talked like Hannah Horvath, but post-pandemic I’ve been informed she has this weird lilting singsong rez voice now. I wonder about the purpose of “Indigeneity” if claiming it means fame but living it means whatever this is. I love the man I’m seeing right now so much because he tells me outright when he’s “cranky” or “grumpy” and puts himself in containment. I’ve started to do that. And I wonder about why GoFundMe campaigns always skyrocket when the person’s got skeletons in their closet but barely break a thousand when it’s someone who actually needs it. I gotta be careful with that, too. Like I don’t wanna moralize poverty and who deserves what.
A guy who may or may not have sexually assaulted me, once upon a time, taught me how to make what he called “Hollywood eggs.” I cut out a little rectangle from the center of my Aldi’s brand gluten free white bread. Then I eat the rectangle even though you’re not supposed to do that, because fuck him. I was too drunk to remember which way it went. I’d been one of those girls who shot whiskey and twirled bourbon like I was some grizzled old white man. I ease the oversized egg into the hole and wince as gravity pulls some of the egg white from its cradle. It bleeds across the flesh-speckled pan and I remember how, the morning after, I poured all of my apple cider vinegar into our claw foot tub so I could burn whatever he’d given to me out of my body. I’m getting deja vu recalling this, maybe I’ve already told you this story. Forgive me. They’re really good eggs when you cook them right.
Growing up, our mother always called Walmart “the Evil Empire” and told us never to shop there. Yesterday, I bought a gold plated spatula from the West Baltimore Walmart and a matching gold-rimmed baking pan, one of those stoneware pieces that probably has more carcinogens than we have names for. While my friends helped me put all my groceries and new cookware away, I paused, regarding my other golden things with a haughty stare.
“Good lord,” I said, “I’m so tacky.”
I flip my Hollywood egg with my brand new golden spatula and wince again as the yolk slips free. Vulgar as ever, I clench, like doing ten kegels in a row will magically suck my food back into place. I tilt my head and realize with a soft, “huh,” that it actually has, and somehow the egg’s still intact.
Around the time I was maybe assaulted, maybe not, one of my friends asked me to explain a cleansing ceremony on camera. After a few takes, they shook their head, beyond patient with me, and asked why I was so confident off camera but all “ums” and “uhs” and “well, like,” on. We never did get a good take, which is probably for the best, since you’re not supposed to film ceremony.
We spent summers in Browning, Montana, but they’re not our people. I’m enrolled White Earth Ojibwe, but I’ve barely been there. Today I called Hayward High School and realized the only voice I recognized was Craig Olson’s, on the answering machine, telling me to dial my party’s extension now. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still in high school, all of my seventeen years poured into a five-foot-ten frame and crumpled in those cramped formica desks, my eyes on the clock, my breasts mottled with gooseflesh as I push them up into the sizzling fluorescent light. While committing to the process of returning to school, this time in pursuit of a law degree, I’ve held my 2.555 GPA in my two hands and Googled “555 angel number,” as if that’ll make it look any better to the admissions office when it inevitably comes across their desks that I somehow ended both my prior school careers this way. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Slinking off into the shadows like the amputated snake fled the ruins of Eden.
I had been a bad student because I had bad dreams, dreams of social, economic, environmental collapse. Dreams of fascism. Wendigo dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up grasping at my own throat, which clicked and whirred and ground itself together like there were teeth all the way down. I thought, why should I make an effort if it’s all already over? If we’re already dead? But as the future breathed down the neck of the past, as the present unfolded in a miasma of burnt bridges and sudden selfhood, I realized I needed to be someone, do something.
So I became an actor. A model. A writer. I never fully committed to any of those labels, I mostly dabbled. You know me, some of you, you might have found my old name when you Googled up “Native actors,” “trans actors,” “Native trans actors,” “two spirit writers,” and the like. The day I found my Google panel was one of the scariest days of my life. I used to look myself up whenever I needed to write a bio for a project because I was bad about keeping score. One day, there I was, arms outstretched, “Protect the Caribou” written across my black leather wingspan in dentalium and bone. Dad used to say we just Forrest Gump our way through life, but now I’m here and I don’t think I can anymore.
Absent of a marketable past, then, I look to the future. The college I want to go to, the one I’m doing all this work for, it’s just down the road a bit. I’ve got all this paperwork filled out. When I first told my Auntie Mary about this prelaw program, she went, “Oh, yeah? You wanna be a lawyer?” and I stammered because not really, but also not no. It’s not that simple. I feel like–
I don’t want anything. Which isn’t true, obviously. I want food. I want warmth. I want sex and love and romance and happiness. I want to bulk up a little bit. I want money. I want to go for a long walk in the woods and I want to be forgiven for every bad thing I’ve ever done to the people I love or maybe I want to be punished for it, not by God but by them, directly. Just one big, cathartic slap would do. Like how when you hit your sibling and to keep them from crying you say wait, wait, no, you can hit me back. I want to meet the other person in Baltimore who moved here from Bemidji and ask why we both made the same decision. I want to see every photo that’s ever been taken of me by strangers in public and I want to be paid for the labor of being beautiful and unprepared. I want a real job, or an agent, someone who can manage all this money shit for me and has my best interests at heart. I want to prove myself because it feels like all this snaking around has rendered me untrustworthy, like I’ve built a house of leaves around myself and now everything that must be seen is camouflaged and the rest of my flesh shimmers. Copper wire all exposed after it’s torn from a condemned building. The rich get richer and the poor get wretched, have breakdowns day after day and dance on the edge of a knife.
I want you to stay here, with me, in hell. I know what I’m asking. I know the weight of it. I want you to stay with us just a little bit longer. I know it hurts. I know it’s the worst it’s been, I know there’s this godawful rift opening up, jagged and raw and bloody as an open, gangrenous wound. I can’t promise you a dawn after this darkness. I can’t promise you anything. Just stay. Crawl with me through this muck, Eden behind us, burning. Bury your face in the dirt and let the dead grass rain down over you.
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
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.
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.
Hey. It’s been awhile. I haven’t written anything on here for what feels like obvious reasons, but I’ll spell them out anyways, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s that what might feel obvious to me isn’t actually that obvious to everyone else.
Banal observations on my own human experience aren’t all that important when the government that currently controls my land is also controlling someone else’s land, and every single day an artist is blacklisted for saying the violence by which the land and its people are controlled is wrong.
What a privilege to be blacklisted instead of bombed. What a privilege, my friend Carmen says, to be burnt out instead of burned alive.
mahmoud darwish
Yesterday was the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I’m in the middle of reading Libra by Don DeLillo, which is complete and total fiction, but parts of it are becoming real to me. The parts in question are that secrets are important and obfuscation is sometimes necessary and also this country I call my home is definitely the bad guy in the long arc of the moral universe.
I wonder if it’s actually illegal still for me to call myself a communist, or if that’s inflammatory disinformation leftist infographic creators just post so they can use fear to become popular.
Earlier this year I was on a video call with one of the leaders of Code Pink, a feminist who has had a huge impact on my development as a Marxist-feminist, and one of the most peaceful hearts I’ve come across. She told me a story about China and the way it treats its Indigenous population. No country is perfect, but her story of the people there having free healthcare and treatment for intergenerational trauma and alcoholism made me so sick with envy and grief, I had to force myself to smile until the end of the call, at which point I stood up and lay down on my brother’s hotel room couch.
I keep wondering what the appeal is of radical rugged individualism. Is it that its believers fear they’re too far gone to be loved? Or is that useless sentimentalism? I don’t really believe in evil, not pure evil. I think there are acts that are pure evil, of course, and the current genocide is one of them. But the idea that the world can be divided into good people versus evil people feels like it’s a slippery slope into no accountability. I cannot be held accountable, this worldview says, because I am a good person, therefore these evil acts have nothing to do with me. My soul and my conscience are clean. No, what I see is people who are selfish because we’re taught to be selfish saying things like “I don’t actually care about the hundreds of bloodlines being wiped out because I can’t afford the gas in my car.” Not noticing these two things are connected, not noticing the threads or the patterns or the difference between complicit and complacent. One means guilty by association. The other means smug and uncritical. A lot of us are both.
When I think about a better world, my brain always goes to the logistical aspect of it. Maybe that’s a reaction to the people I’ve met who want to reinvent the frontier and homesteading, specifically white millennials (this includes white Natives, sorry about your great-grandma or whatever, but you need to turn off Supernatural and read theory) who romanticize the idea of total societal collapse but don’t actually know how to gut a deer or shoot a gun or even carry a thought without making it about themselves. I think about where the food goes. Who grows it. How we’re going to get medication afterwards. Did you know you can harvest lithium from seawater? It takes less energy, too. On a purely dull, mundane, zero magical thinking note, this world literally gives us all we need. I don’t understand why we “need” slavery or genocide or a bottom-tier class of “untouchables” to be constantly imperiled and humiliated. This is not an invitation for you to tell me the world is run by dark magicians doing blood magic or whatever. I actually don’t care. But if you’re reading this and you personally know someone who’d look good in a guillotine, I invite you to imagine the world out of their grasp.
This is my first Thanksgiving alone. I was really happy a couple Thanksgivings back when I realized my mother had married into a white family that knew how to cook. I still remember how good that Polish food tasted in their warm house, surrounded by people who loved each other. I was really happy Thanksgiving of 2019, when my dad invited as many LGBT people as we could over and he joked that we should share pronouns instead of what we’re thankful for during the go-around. I was really happy Thanksgiving of 2018, when my house was full of Indians, including my friend Ishkwaazhe, who directed Mino Bimaadiziwin and spent the holiday sitting on our leather couch, typing away furiously at a screenplay while our dog, Smudgepuppy, buried his face in his hip. I wasn’t super stoked about Thanksgiving 2021, just because it was kind of dumb and annoying, and when I look back, all I can see is the face of the person who broke my favorite synth, among other things, visibly leering at my heavily pregnant cousin. Even then, it was a good Thanksgiving. The food was amazing.
Gratitude is a practice I hope to cultivate every day, not just today. When I first moved here, I slammed my thumb in the car door. The nail turned black and crystallized. Now it’s about to fall off. There’s a new nail already underneath, encased in the mica of my body. I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful for eyedrops and my medication, even though the side effects are what made me use eyedrops today, and I’m thankful for the white faux leather couches that came with my apartment because the previous tenant left in a hurry. I’m thankful for nightmares. How I have them now when I never did before. They tell me I’m human, more human than I remember. I’m thankful for boric acid suppositories and estradiol and testosterone. I’m thankful for PrEP and free books and big sweaters. I’m thankful for my mind and my spirit and the way I can change my behavior like that.
I’m thankful for you, reading this, for reading my work and sharing these moments with me. Me at my ugliest, at my most insecure, or today, making zero sense because I really have nothing of note to say. No history to stitch together. No connections to make. No grand revelations. You sit with me and honor me with your sitting, with your forgiveness, with your active listening and when you tell me something resonates and I get to feel like a node in a vast network of mycelia, feeding the people. Giving.
Tonight I urge us all to think about our country. The war machine. Divestment from it. This endless violence gives nothing, gains nothing. No wealth comes to you or I from all who die in hate. No homeland. No security. Ask yourself, really, when was the last time you felt truly held? Truly at home? Our leaders seem to have an infinite supply of resources for bloodshed and cruelty, but nothing to offer us, the people here who live and die on this land. Hotter summers, more brutal winters. Ceremonial protocols changing because they have to.
I’m an American. I’m a Native American. I say that without a hint of irony. I’m Ojibwe and transsexual and I have absolutely nothing to say tonight but that I’m thankful to be myself, to be here, to have a home and some food and blankets and pillows and a lot of interesting books to read and obsess over and be ruined by. To have people who love me. To love other people. For intimacy and its consequences. For anger and impulsivity and the humbling moment of apology. War, invasion, genocide, these don’t give me those things. These don’t bring me my freedom. You do. You give me everything I have. You set me free.
One of my friends had an art installation awhile back called “until victory, the logic of the people; until doom, the logic of imperialism.” I bought a zine version of the exhibit, printed on tracing paper, and it sits at the top of a bookshelf I bought when I first moved here, the one that makes my books look like one big, precarious pile, but in actuality, organizes them perfectly. What does victory look like to you? Does it look like zillion dollar zoom lectures with grifters who have skeletons in their closets? Does it look like pretty clothes, makeup, institutional acknowledgement? Or does it look like wild rice and stew? Your parents living until they’re well into their eighties or older? Your children trusting you with their biggest, darkest mistakes, knowing you won’t hurt them, knowing you’ll hold their hand? What does it sound like? Smell like? Taste and feel?
Thanksgiving is an excuse to eat a lot of food with the people we love. I’m spending it alone right now, except for my dear friend’s cat, who I’m feeding and checking on all week. You don’t gotta make it weird, God knows it’d be weird if you brought this up unprompted, but just look at the people around you, if you can. Feel the warmth. Let it suffuse your blood, muscle, skin, bones. Imagine this, but all the time, for all people on this big, miraculous earth. Can you imagine?
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.
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.
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,
this post’s featured image is by Dusty Ray (@sloppjockey on Twitter)
CONTENT WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF BODY HORROR & GORE
Your body is on loan let me remind you. This time last year you were in the hospital too. Better circumstances. Better view. You went under one way and came out different. Everyone said you had a glow. New beauty unearthed. Flat chest tall posture. The threads you weave your future out of turned from silver to gold to copper. Electric. Where are you now? Who’s that in the mirror?
Last night you stood up on your strong legs and went to daub your eyes. Your flesh came away in sheafs of pulp fiction and you laughed. You laughed. A few days back, your mother said [] and you went quiet. You’re vain, too. Mirror mirror on the wall.
The place where your skin sloughed off shined at you in the barren light of the bathroom. A red lake. You tilted your face from side to side and did not touch. Your face a map of Mars in less than a week. You eroticize the grotesque and it keeps you sane. Remember your first Clive Barker story? Nightbreed? Objectively a bad film but you love it. Same with Tarsem Singh’s the Cell. There’s a handful of bad movies you live and die by. It makes you the kind of person who can survive the terrible split second when you realize you are alone in a room. By your own hand you are.
Anyways, Nightbreed. Boone with his sexual dysfunction and his girlfriend who pinned him to the hetero-nightmare future she thought she needed. How instead of just trying men he let himself be torn apart by his shrink and annihilated by mounties. In the hospital scene he pulls back the curtain on Narcisse, a paranoid dirtbag with lank, greasy curls who seems to oscillate between seduction and repulsion.
“They’re coming for me,” says Narcisse. “I need my true face to be ready.”
Boone and the audience know and fear what Narcisse intends to do. The scene ends with Narcisse tearing his face open along the jawline. He demands Boone look at him, his voice a twisted maze of orgasmic ecstasy and abject terror.
You look at the pitted red mask in the mirror and remember that. When you sleep you dream of the subaltern made literal. Rachel and her daughter in the dark. Baphomet reaches for you and you pull away.
You’re not mine, you say.
Nor are you mine, it says, and reaches for you again.
The original plan had been to drive down from Cranberry Lake Biological Station and make an appointment with an auto shop in Saratoga Springs. Your car’s been crying around lately and you’re worried about its capacity for yet another long haul cross-country odyssey.
When you got to Skidmore College, you hung up your closing night outfit, the one you couldn’t wait to show Samara and the others at the Flaherty. The one that preceded all saints. You imagined iridescent whorls across your eyelids and meridian points highlighted in white ink down your body. You imagined your crush would be there by some miracle. You hadn’t imagined prom or homecoming as a teenager so this was your adolescent gift to yourself. A golden petticoat. A gossamer body. When you first got sick, you paced back and forth in front of the outfit like a villain, your thumb and forefinger in your inflamed, bloody mouth.
People keep asking you what happened and you don’t know. You cast a wide net of blame but nothing catches. Just like the lake you’re on leave from. You plumb the depths of the past six days and find nothing.
Instead they ask what you do for a living.
I’m an independent researcher, you say.
Oh, so you’re like, legit, said one of the E.R. doctors when you told them this.
You didn’t say anything, which was fine, because at that moment, another bit of rot slipped off and they called an ambulance to transfer you here.
En route to Albany your paramedic asked better questions than anyone had or has since. You rattled off your answers in a cheerful monotone and he looked down at you in your stretcher all cocooned with magnanimous detachment.
Maybe you’re Patient Zero, he said. Maybe when all this is over you can write your next book about it.
Your nurse this morning asks you to call her the Asshole. She’s middle-aged with an adorable lisp so it comes out “ash-ole.” She says the infectious disease expert will come in. The crazy doctor, she says. You try to say you prefer crazy doctors but your lips crack open and you just smile.
In your private moments you think about Hell Followed With Us. How strange it is to have finished that book only to embody Benji mere hours later. You can’t decide whether or not it’s a good book, but on more than one occasion, you want to reach out to Andrew Joseph White and thank him for killing Kalvin Garrah–sorry, “Calvin”–in the funniest possible way. Non-climactic and self-fulfilled. Maybe the hospital has you on enough substances to make you message him. Maybe they don’t. Either way your dreams are desolate and terrible and when people ask you how you’re feeling you keep saying “grateful.”
There’s a few passages in Hell Followed With Us where Benji wonders about the distance between himself and other trans men. It was a prayer answered. You’d texted your aunt about a week before you bought that book: I need another trans masculine person who isn’t a total sycophant to talk to about why I regard most other “tboys” with either distance or derision. Benji isn’t real but he’s enough for now. And when your face falls off you hear his little voice saying it’s nice that people need a moment to categorize him as human before they decide “boy” or “girl.”
Your grown-up brain knows better than to think there’s an angel under your hardened shell. The child within isn’t so sure. Your dreams give no affirmative. You’ve been in what you call “problem-solving mode” all week and every quiet moment shows you the thoroughfare of the not-quite-there. At one point you prop yourself up in bed and see a hollow creature drag itself across your room’s speckled floor. It looks like a desiccated monkey wearing a hazmat suit shellacked to its pruny skin. You’ve seen something like it before. September of 2018. Toronto.
You blink at it and it hisses at you through the hole in its throat. You bring your hand to your own neck and squeeze. A few lesions here but not enough to panic over. When you’re between waking and sleep it feels like there are teeth in your throat. Or a lightbulb in your soft palate. The truest is when you’re roused by a nurse with an insistent “Francis! FRANCIS!” and the silhouette of your body becomes a tangle of roots for some great tree.
Partway through your second day at the hospital, you throw runes on your situation. One of the oldest nurses comes in and asks what you’re doing. You tell her. Everyone wears full PPE around you so her expression is totally unreadable.
Very good sir, she finally says.
You cannot stop thinking about this.
The infectious disease expert gets into a childish spat with the Asshole in front of you.
I’m not the Crazy Doctor, he says. That’s the psychiatrist. I am the infectious disease specialist. Don’t listen to her.
I’m just giving him shit, says the Asshole. He’s still crazy though.
You look at the infectious disease expert and decide he’s probably very normal. The realization disappoints you.
I have to take all her twisted words, says the infectious disease expert, I have to take all her twisted words and spin them back around on her. Anyways, let’s have a look at you.
You ask him about the cultures the ophthalmologists took from your lesions and swollen-shut eyes yesterday. Did they say anything? He shakes his head. We must wait.
Are you sexually active? asks the infectious disease expert.
You nod.
Males or females?
You nod.
But you have normal sex with males? he asks. Because you are biologically female?
You try not to bust out laughing as your brain gives you a quick montage of your deviant behavior to the soundtrack of Samia’s “Limbo.” You nod because it’s easier than explaining anything and he needs all the leads he can get. He asks about the abnormal, non-productive world of lesbian sex and you do try to enlighten him until he clenches his fists in demure discomfort and backs off.
You have had surgery on your breasts? he asks. He points at one of your white-haloed nipples. I thought this was another lesion. A big one.
I had top surgery last year exactly, you say. Nothing bothers you anymore.
He asks you if you’ve been tested for HIV yet. You tell him they gave you a full panel at Urgent Care two days ago and he tells you to call them to fax the results over. When you call them, they tell you to tell him to call them, or otherwise they probably already have the results. You roll your eyes and fall asleep.
You wake up in Midian. Boone-as-Cabal sits across from you with his hands on a decanter of ambrosia. Your father is on a plane to you on the longest day of the year and your brain is ruthless with love for everyone who ever had a hand in creating you. You try to imagine what you’ll become next and your brain turns to television static. Cabal opens the decanter and offers it to you. You hear the steady drip of water from stalactites and see the vast shape of the elder god he’s supplicant to behind him. You take the decanter in your hands. What the Asshole called “those perfect hands.”
They never gave you a sequel, you say to Cabal. Rachel stares into the camera at the end of your movie and says tomorrow or the next and then the credits roll.
Cabal does his little non-smile and tilts his head.
What happens to you? you ask. What comes next?
Live your life and die your death, says Cabal. You’ll get your answer when you resurrect.
Hostile architecture, rosary flotillas, and alien invasions in Saratoga Springs
When I lived with my grandparents in Meskwaki Nation, I used to practice losing access to various faculties. Most often it was my voice. I’d go nonverbal and practice communication in other ways. Body language, written word, rudimentary signing. Sometimes I had a limp. Other times, I blindfolded myself, trying to stretch out my senses to fill in the blanks.
Two days ago, I was at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, on the island I’ve been privately calling “the Island of the Buried Stone Giants.” I packed my shit (overpacking as usual) and made for the shoreline to catch the boat that’d bring me to my car on the mainland. An ashen rain fell gently and the air smelled of brine and rot.
Remi carried two of my bags while I handled the rest. We swapped stories of horror and joy until Larry the boat-man greeted us. I loved Larry on sight. I love old, handsome men with gentle masculinities who take their time to talk and always seem to smile in a surprised, genuine way. I want to look like them when I’m old. I want that energy.
We took the aluminum boat, the one Larry said was “Good in bad weather but not very comfortable.” It bucked like a stallion and split the lake in two. I tried to keep my eyes open, tried to take in as much of our misty surroundings as possible, but the rain stabbed me everywhere in tiny smoky-quartz athamé knives. Marked me deep. I closed my eyes and stretched out my Real Body, the one that filled my hollow body whenever I practiced my aerials, the one that felt pleasure in all things. I remembered a meditation one of the new age people my mother had taken me to shared, back when things first started to be Wrong with me in a more disruptive way. St. Germain, master of the violet flame. I could almost see my Real Body glimmering with that. Heatless fire. And that Kaveh Akbar quote about God. “A bladeless knife with no handle.”
Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air. There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.
In my mind’s eye I saw Larry with his baseball cap and sunglasses. He was short and compact and weathered. There are many moments in my life I tend to bookmark as “dying dreams.” Things for my old body to return to one day when I take my final breaths. This was one of them. Ashen rain and the fury of someone else’s god beating into me on all sides. The brine the rot the men the deep. Tree trunks and brand-new rosaries of eggs thickening in the saturated never-driftwood, those drowned old growth forests bound to the no-nutrient floor.
I laughed. I smiled. I tarried at the threshold between the Island and my next destination and I wondered: what’s in store?
“It’s never what you’d expect,” Smokii Sumac had said to me. We were in Toronto and the clouds looked possessed. Seconds prior to this declaration, we’d been taking bets on what’s next. Aliens, Smokii claimed. It’s gotta be aliens, right?
A few nights ago, Remi and I had been under the stars, talking about the boys we love who are breaking our hearts, when a flotilla of lights broke across the sky in a perfectly straight line. We freaked out until we found out it was Elon Musk’s “Starlink,” and the magic died. I stood in the darkness of my cabin for a long time and wondered where this feeling of mad hope had come from. Prompted by the threat of invasion. Prompted by the unknown. Tim’s insane lines in I Think You Should Leave’s most recent season: “My life is nothing I hoped it would be and all I feared it would become because for fifty seconds of my life I thought there was monsters on the world.”
My first evening at the Flaherty: Queer World Mending Seminar, Pablo de Ocampo gave a speech about the Flaherty’s philosophy of “non preconception.” Secrecy, in other words. The programmers know what’s in store. Who’s being featured. But we, the audience, know nothing until the program unfolds. I smiled to myself. There was no big reason Samara had brought me here, as I say. No transaction, no deeper intention, no… preconception. She had brought me here to share something she found lovely with someone she cares about. But in this moment, I found my Big Reason. I had grown weary of Knowing What’s Next. This would be a good disruption to my usual laissez-faire involvement in the Narrative, my “okay I know, I know, but I’m not allowed to say.” Here I didn’t know, but I was being told, whatever it takes, I must Say.
The first screening of the seminar opened with a question.
What is the difference between desire and pleasure?
After a spell, and an opening short film that I fell asleep to, I woke up with my answer.
Pleasure is when I take what is consensually given to me. Desire is when I make the offering.
Around the second Madsen Minax piece, which I adored and obsessed over and Needed, deeply, for my research, my left eyelid began to flake and itch and burn. I rubbed a little bit of chapstick on it and immediately thought: big mistake. But there were more films, more stories to live, more moments, and my friend Merrill was sitting next to me being the coolest person alive as usual, and I wanted to be here.
I hung around longer than I wanted to, getting sleepier and sleepier, because there was so much to see and do and talk about. I pulled cards for a PhD student called Jacob in a room called “Barbie’s Butthole,” where I’d buried my two hands in a bucket of rich soil and played until someone sat by me who reminded me a little too much of someone else, someone who I’d categorize as “dastardly.” I felt so much hope well up in me, so much hope and fear and yes, lust, in that room. Lust for life, for touch, for strangers and old friends and old friends made new with time and space. Then it was bedtime and I fell asleep in my dorm. Alone and happy.
The next morning I immediately knew something was wrong. My left eye wouldn’t open all the way, and the itch had gotten worse. It burned. My brain played and replayed a scene from Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, when she shows up at work and Allison Janney’s character yells, “Well I’m allergic to disgusting childhood illnesses!” I prayed it wasn’t pink eye, flipped a coin, and went back to sleep.
The dream I had I shared with Samara and a handful of my friends. I will not share it here, only that it was vivid and terrible, like everything you’ve ever felt as a child distilled into adulthood and garnished with an unmet need for intimacy so deep, your want outweighs your fear.
hey im eroticizing the repulsive in an attempt to regain my sanity. who wants me pic.twitter.com/w63MuMwrxX
I woke up to a fire alarm at 9pm and my eye was completely swollen shut. I got in a Lyft, rode to the nearest Urgent Care that was still open, twenty minutes away in Malta, and calmly explained to my attending what was going on while the staff got into a shouting match in the hallway over my biological sex. The shouting match carried on for ten long minutes and my nurse and I pretended not to hear it. At one point, she slammed the thin plastic partition between Triage and the hall, as if that’d do anything, and I snorted.
When I got out of Triage, one of the nurses who’d been trying to argue for my bodily autonomy, Justin, looked like he was about to cry and yelled, “I can’t believe we’ve been talking about this. We should not have been talking about this. We’re better than this, I swear.”
I gave no indication that I knew what he meant and followed my attending to my room.
The young, hot doctor was built like a linebacker and was kind to me.
“Do you have a uterus?” he asked, point blank, gesturing to my belly.
I sighed in relief at his blunt tone and nodded.
“When was your last period?” he asked.
“Now,” I said. As if on cue, another cramp wracked my body, and I winced. “Started yesterday.”
“So no chance of pregnancy, then,” said the doctor. “We have to ask. Gotta know how many patients we’re treating. You know how it is.”
I smiled and nodded. “I know.”
He apologized before he dug his fingers into my eye and I apologized for cursing.
They diagnosed me with contact dermatitis, tested my vision, and put me on 30mg of Prednisone for the next week or so.
My head was all soap opera synthesizers and a desperate wish to be touched. Disgust at my appearance outweighed my desperation, and at every turn, I found myself shrinking away from smiling back at anyone who grinned at me. Mitski’s voice in my head, “If I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn’t know how to be alive.”
Samara picked me up from the ER at around 12:15am. I went to the CVS. Everyone was exceedingly nice to me. I got what I needed and sat in Samara’s car, being grateful. Hoping everyone in the world could tell how grateful I was, I am.
When we got back to the campus, Samara wrinkled her nose at how impossible it was to navigate.
“Everything is so twisty and turny here,” she said. “It feels like they did it on purpose. It’s like they want you disoriented.”
“Hostile architecture,” I said, wildly aware of how little help I was being. Depth perception is real, apparently.
She dropped me off outside my dorm and we parted ways. Even with the pain and the plans falling apart I was glad to be here, glad to have seen her.
Plus, at least I don’t have pink eye. I take solace in that.
I’m very tired now. Last night I dreamt about aliens. Aliens and dogs trying to save us from them, just like they’d done eons ago, before a single white person had even imagined a New World. Laying down their four-legged lives for their people. Saying “I love you” with their last words. I thought I’d go to the 2pm screening today but I don’t think I can. I think I’ll focus on finishing my commission from Karen Goulet. But first, sleep. Sleep and dream and awaken on the other side of another threshold, guarded and barred by non-preconception, fuzzy as an uncharted map in a survival game, haunted as this land of healing waters and old, old spirits.
Out on the water I am untraceable-sad. Or, I suppose I could trace it if I wanted to, but the leylines that bleed from my eyes to my teeth to the unmapped chambers of my heart glimmer a new color. Cobalt, maybe? But they shed bioluminescence, like those delicate flies laden with wet, glowing, bright-blue goop, which I don’t know the proper name of and am incapable of Googling. I am struck by how much I don’t know. I’ve been struck. Every few steps I take these days, I look down and see something old-new and think, “What is that?” And my answer: “I don’t know.”
Anyways. I’m writing you from Cranberry Lake Biological Station. Well, the lake itself. Two person canoe but it’s just me. To weigh down the other side I’ve put my camera bag, which actually holds three or four cameras right now, plus the shotgun mic, a smudge bowl I got from a man named John out in Maine, who himself got it from the Diné, thirty-five years ago, and my backpack. There’s a poem here somewhere but I’m too tired and uncomfortable to unearth it. Something about a work/life balance. Something about being married to the Job, whatever the Job means. Something about wanting a divorce because I need a real human being on the other end with a paddle because I look dumb as hell trying to keep course by myself.
A couple years back, I was sitting across a fire from a professor who’d done a lot of work in food sovereignty. She was charming and introduced herself as one of my close friends’ aunties. We talked in hushed tones about something I will not share with you, but her familiarity with the issue, her strong opinion, her care, it all endeared me to her and gained my trust.
“You’re Meskwaki,” she said.
I nodded. Then shook my head. Then shrugged.
“Yeah, you are. Your people… you bring the weather.”
I sat up. When I was a little girl, I’d watched Men in Black 2 on loop. I think I was in love with Rosario Dawson. Her character could bring the weather. If she cried, the sky cried. If she was happy, the sun came out. The same had been happening for me. There’s that line she says, when Agent K tells her what she is, where she screws her face up and yells, “I’m a Libra!” I, being a Libra, nodded intensely. Then I went outside and stared at the clouds until they parted and I thought: I could be an alien, too, just like her. Her, Gonzo, and me, all abandoned by our ships, always out of place. Waiting for someone to come back to earth. Waiting for something to make sense.
This, this thing the professor shared, this made sense. This drove a stake through me. This bound me to the ground. I was rooted, suddenly, even if my mother’s nation would not or could not claim me as one of theirs. This was something no amount of greed or vengeance could take away.
“Do we?” I asked, trying not to seem too invested.
She nodded, and shared with me a story that will always be true, even if she turned out to be a lie.
I have always been afraid of big things. When my father was getting his degree in anthropology at the University of Iowa, we would walk by their taxidermies to get to his office. I was three years old and the giant sloth was nothing like Sid from Ice Age. The giant sloth was a god to me, and like any good heathen child, I was absolutely horrified by gods.
This carries over well into my adulthood. I think if I saw a whale near me I would throw up. I’ve seen herds of bison return to the Great Plains and trembled. I’ve seen massive seagulls swallow smaller birds like it’s nothing. I’ve seen bears in the road and huge bucks in the woods and I’ve been cut down time after time because something in me minds my manners. Manners older than church. Older than man. Older than anything on my body except maybe the silicon on my wrist and the obsidian on my forearm.
So it goes I fear dark water most of all. When I was small and we’d go ricing, my dad and I, I either saw or imagined I saw a great serpent beneath us, buoying us forward. Keeping the protocols.
Now I float between two islands, an island unto myself with all this stubborn sadness. I know if I had a stone I could push it all into him. I’m normally stone (butch) but today I woke up a girl and I feel raw about it. Like when you’re little and you skin your knee down to the bone but you can’t stop playing no matter how much sand your body swallows. The sun on your skin and the dirt in your hair and the heat in your mouth. All the blood. I can do this, I say. I can be a girl on the water.
Unbidden, one of the “rules” an Anishinaabekwe threw at me comes back up like bile. How when you’re on your moon you can’t do this, that, or the other thing. No eating berries. No cooking. No standing in water. All bullshit, of course, but far be it from me to say that to a woman’s face when I look like this. Even as a little girl, I was always incorrectly female. But enough bellyaching about that. I’m not on my moon. The rules don’t apply, whatever they truly are. I’m in my own canoe and I can still see clear through the tides. A comfort. Look at all those underwater trees! Look at the stones, the silt, the mud, the mulch and the weeds. How many little beings sleep in the wet fields below? Who will I see riding my undertow?
All day I’ve been wondering why I stopped going outside or when. My friends are all farmers, mycologists, entomologists, witches and fairies. They are of the land even if they aren’t of my land. The earth knows them each by name and footprint and cradles them. People ask me what my favorite plants are. What medicines to use. What is that tree over there. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Canoeing is something innate, though. Even if I wasn’t Ojibwe I’m sure I’d be fine out here, having grown up in Wisconsin. Going to the Lake is the only thing we do. Summertime? You’re going to the lake. Winter? Polar plunge. Spring? Get fucked, you’re going to the lake. Fall? Ooh, sorry, I have homework, I can’t.
Bored of the sadness and blaming my own stagnation, I set out for where the lake darkens indigo. The deep. I won’t see any little creatures out there, sure, but it could be peaceful. I imagine myself laying back in the tentative sunlight, far from the dragonfly orgies and the swarms of biting bugs that attack harder when you smack one. Not that I’m a prude, I just don’t like paddling through all that sex and feeling like the asshole who turns the lights on at the club, you know? They only live for like, forty-eight hours. Let them get their rocks off while they can.
Clouds move in the closer I get to the deep. No big deal, I just take off my douchebag sunglasses and let my eyes wander the skyline. There’s so much green out here. I love the different shades of green. How they change from place to place. The Pacific Northwest is an emerald, obviously, but it’s also got a blueish-grey tint to it, like Puget Sound wants to rise up and reclaim it, but can’t, and so settles for a light dusting of salt and brine. Hayward, Wisconsin, my hometown, is the green of a folk horror forest. Amber and gold and red veins to hide the hunger. Ithaca is similar, but there’s a trapped, frenetic energy to every leaf and root. I once saw an Ithaca root push itself out of the earth and scream. It looked like a spongy bone.
I’m not sure what to call the green here, but it makes me sleepy. Although, whether that’s the green or my travels catching up with me is anyone’s guess. They get up early here at the Station. Breakfast is at 7:15, and everyone has a breakneck schedule, so that’s when you make your lunch for the day, too. I feel like a visiting princess with how much laying about I’m allowed to do. I guess that’s what propelled me to get in this canoe in the first place. Hands too idle, mind too full of nonsense with no real drive to write. Did I tell you? I’m the writer-in-residence here for the next three weeks. I couldn’t sleep last night because I realized how short a timespan that truly is. Also, I still have phone service, even out on the lake. My wrist buzzes with an Outlook notification and I sigh, paddling farther and farther. I keep glancing back to make sure the shore is out of sight. For some reason, I don’t want them to see me. I don’t like being watched, even by accident.
Now the wind’s kicked up, which is a blessing. It’s almost like having another person. Almost. I don’t have to keep tossing the paddle back and forth like a baton, at least.
then it grabs me
or. no. there’s an impact
a thud. my stomach lurches with that fear again but even older still and a sense of urgency because this is not a taxidermy
or a far away buffalo
or a song
or an eagle
this is something i catch a glimpse of for a split second and my breath stops in my throat and i realize how small i am
and there’s a tiny sliver of hope for another split second because it kind of looks like a lilypad and a cluster of weeds so maybe?
then the hand. the weeds vanish or coalesce into something else or get pulled down or maybe they’re that thing maybe it’s alive in a sentient way. not sentience but animal
please be weeds. please let me be silly. please let me laugh this off and shake my head at myself with my eyebrows raised because there’s not another person in this canoe to do it for me. please let me laugh at myself and love myself anyways fondness growing in my chest because that’s what i’ve had to do to survive this nigh-endless loneliness, loneliness i don’t can’t have disrupted right now. flashes of lore of sirens and selkies and sailors ripped away from their boats but i’m a girl please see that
i’m a girl
i’m just a girl
I want it to be weeds. I want to have run aground on an impossibly long knot of weeds in the middle of the lake. I want my “I don’t knows” to be here, too, like didn’t you know there’s a species of lake flora that grows in huge, girl-shaped masses of tangled, shiny skin? Didn’t you know that? Here, check the guidebook. You’ll see right here. Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay.
kunst und mammon – fritz hegenbart
Then it—she?—knocks against the bottom of the boat as if to say, “Look up.” And I do.
The wind’s really at it now. My stomach drops the moment I notice. When I idle, when I don’t paddle, even without the wind, I drift. I am stock still now. Impossibly still.
I look down again.
There’s nothing visible but endless water dark as pitch. That tangle of green from earlier is gone. I can’t see what, if anything, has me steady. My heart hammers in my chest and I say “don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic” like they do in the movies and I wish I could feel stupid for it but I don’t. I’m panicking. Something immense holds me down. Images of me being pulled under or inhaled come in shaky flashes. Gone just like that. Would I scream? I’m not screaming now, so probably not. No. That can’t happen.
She taps against the bottom of the canoe. Three little taps with sharp fingernails. Four. The canoe doesn’t shake. Just how strong is she? And where?
I’ve decided I don’t want to see her. As if she can tell, she doesn’t show me again. Probably caught a glimpse of my face when she hit me the first time.
I cling to that. There’s honor there. Care. Or maybe I just look fuck-ugly when I’m terrified, but I doubt it.
I lick my lips and in a voice so small and cowed I scarcely recognize it as my own, I begin to introduce myself in my language. Then I trail off. I know nothing else. I don’t know the word for “lake” or “mermaid” or “kill” or “live.” Maybe if I were calmer I would. I know there’s a mermaid clan and I hope that means something. She doesn’t let me go, though. She drums her fingers along the sides of the canoe. Little waves. Caressing it. I give her an offering. I open my mouth to sing her a song. When Lakota words and my frightened off-key tremolo come out, I almost laugh. Almost. She does, though. I hear it. Not to sound like HP Lovecraft, but it’s… indescribable. I’ll try anyway.
Bike wheels on gravel. TV static. Throat singing. The purr of a cat. Stainless steel on fine china, that scrape you can feel in your teeth. All of this at once.
Certain words in Lakota are gendered. As in, if you’re a boy you say this, if a girl, that. I get to the part of the song where your gender comes through and the girl part cuts loose on my tongue easy as anything. There’s a thump and a smack and suddenly I’m free. She’s letting me go.
I sing in Mohawk all the way back to shore until I’m within earshot of the white people. Then I stop. I don’t want to be anyone’s magical Indian, even if I am both magic and also an Indian. That brings me back to my project, actually. Thoughts of merpeople and drowning subside in a foamy wash of half-remembered lies.
Something happened yesterday. I will not tell you what. Perhaps you will dream about it or it’ll visit you, too, and you’ll know because some part of you still has extrasensory perception or delusion or disillusion or whatever else fuels the things that make us See.
In the absence of the telling, though, I wonder if that’s what happened? More than violence. More than “trauma,” that god-awful mainstream word that seems to be the mainline for grifters like “truth” in the 1970s. Or not “more than,” but in addition to. Yes we lost so much. And also we stopped talking.
It’s still none of your business. When I see Native or “Indigenous” influencers posting themselves doing ceremony, my whole body goes tense. Me, I keep my mouth shut about real things until I get consent.
Also yesterday, though, I went in the woods for the first time in a very long time. I walked with purpose until I stopped and let myself wander. I asked myself, not for the first time, when I stopped going outside and why. I’ve always held onto that rule, “live first, write later.” Maybe it hurt you, too, the moment you realized Life was being taken from us in newer, more insidious ways than ever before, and fast. We claim to be frogs, boiling. We’re more like lobsters. Alive and dead in a flash. Our pain is brief and salient and then they chew us up. I was a child when I could wander. I was a teenager and an adult and I could still wander directionless. Then that became suspicious, that directionless wandering. You had to go somewhere. You had to go somewhere and buy something, too, or else leaving the house was pointless.
When I left Bemidji for this residency, I set the intention to take it slow. I’ve been back and forth across the country so many times. I’ve folded it up wholesale. Everything less than ten hours is “just a short drive.” Part of it’s to do with my lovely Prius, which, after our little freakout, got a brand new air filter and can breathe again, but the lights are still a problem and if I engage cruise control, the whole computer shuts down. Not great. But before all that, I was in Minneapolis. Then Chicago. Then I cut north to Madison to spend time at Kim’s place, which felt like a microdose of the ease I feel here at the Station, her garden around us and the lake just so. We walked awhile in a vast dog park and I imagined bringing my children there. Then from Madison back to Chicago, where I got a tattoo over my top surgery scars that cost more than my top surgery and went viral on Twitter (Lord help me) and met with Jacqui Shine, who met my mother while on a roadtrip by way of the New York Times, a couple years ago. Their task was to define patriotism. From snacks with Jacqui I headed to Grand Rapids, MI, a city that would have been a flyover if not for Ishkwaazhe McSauby casting me in Mino Bimaadiziwin back in 2017 and my own insistence on having as many friends as possible before I die. I stayed there for awhile with my friend Cass and her two kids, aged six and three, plus Cass’s sister Aleigha. Then Hamilton, ON, where I crashed with my friend Daimhin and headed to Toronto to intercept Smokii Sumac before he hosted some big book discussion because he’s all famous now.
Then Ithaca. My siblings. My mother was there.
Then Baltimore.
Just… Baltimore.
After Baltimore, I took a breather with my auntie Mary. You know the rest.
I stopped in York, PA, because I have a friend there named Sunshine who’s heavy in the black metal scene. They described it as a “diamond in the rough,” and I’d have to agree. The band I caught the last few songs of—they were amazing. They’re called the Constituents. I glanced around the room: I don’t think I’ve seen this many people of color at a hardcore venue… ever. We all sprawled out into the bar while I tried to strategize (remember, my car was still going sicko mode and I needed to get up to the Adirondacks in time for my boat in… seventeen hours) and I got to sit with Sunshine’s hilarious friend group as they commiserated about bad jobs, bad pay, good life and the Amish.
“I gotta go,” I said. “I’m getting hungry and it’s dark and I still have a three hour drive. Or more.”
“If you’re looking for some good eats,” said Sunshine, “the Round the Clock Diner’s right on the highway there. You gotta go that way anyway.”
“Hey, thanks.”
At the Round the Clock Diner, the waitstaff was all gathered around watching a video of a police officer in town doing some kind of atrocity and incredulously discussing it. It was surreal to see. I guess I expected the 24 hour diner to be relatively empty this late, but the place was hopping, and everybody knew each other. Behind me there were two men dressed kinda small town nice. One of them had the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard in my life. I couldn’t figure out if they were on a date or just friends or maybe related. The younger one, with the younger, less sexy voice, said, “I stopped watching the news. Had me too keyed up.”
“That Fox News is some…” started the older man.
“Exactly,” said the younger man, cutting him off.
“You know, I liked them well enough. Back when they first started.”
The younger man said nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him smirk. “You would,” he finally said.
Date, then. Maybe.
The younger man opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I just… there’s too much. There’s just too much. So and so said this. This couple you don’t give a heck about broke up. This politician got caught doing this crime. This country invaded that country. I can’t. I can’t. And the takes! Everybody’s got a take! Everybody’s got something to say!”
“Like hell they do,” said the other man.
“Exactly! And it’s just… I get… I get wanting to speak out. I get… needing to react. But just… just don’t become so hateful that you end up looking exactly like the thing you claim to hate.”
They leaned in to each other then, and their conversation took on a more personal note. I turned away. A father and daughter came in and the whole waitstaff greeted them both with so much love, I thought, again, as I have this whole trip, about Adrienne Rich’s Lonely poem. I wanted that. I wanted to live somewhere long enough to have banter with the kitchen. Maybe? Maybe that’s what I want.
I guess what I’m getting at is that even in this time of forced lifelessness, we are alive nonetheless. I might not be in the world I occupied when I could walk for hours and not grow tired, but I am in a world where I can go to a diner and people-watch and drink coffee way too late at night. Me and the graveyard shift man by my side.
When I went to get gas, the two cashiers, who were identical, greeted me with “Good morning.” It was 11:45pm. I had two thoughts: it’s morning?? then: I guess I’m one of them now. I mulled over my apparent sudden vampiric nature all the way to the disgusting men’s restroom, at which point I forgot everything and wished desperately that the new stand-to-pee prosthetic dick I ordered from Gramma’s Sausages was already in my pants so I didn’t have to look at whatever bomb went off in there. Good god.
On my way out I thought, I’m fucked. They get up mad early at the Station. I’m so fucked. I’m doing okay though (I say, despite this being my first full day) with the schedule. I anticipate sleeping early tonight, but that’s what I said yesterday. We’ll see. Like I told Sunshine, I’m gonna try to use this residency to reroll all my stats. I came here a night owl fighting tooth and talon for a crumb of productive energy and I’m leaving here a full-throttle morning person. Mark my words.
There is one more thing. An image or a sensation I can’t quite get out of my head. It happened when I was driving the rest of that night. I used to like driving at night before Fiadh pointed out how dim my headlights are and I realized yeah, she’s right, I actually do enjoy being able to see where I’m going. I was making my way across Pennsylvania when the car…
…or, no. God, what am I trying to say? The road? It curved. It curved up. No, not just that, I was almost vertical. Parallel with the road, which was less a road and more a steep drop, and I felt that sort of dip and lift you get before you go down a particularly intense rollercoaster, but what was worse was the other side. Two hills. I was going down one. The other was just ahead. In the grey-dark, dimly lit by who-knows-what, all I could see was vastness. Like I wasn’t in a car at all but actually dangling over the earth. Or this curve was the crest of a top lip and the bottom lip was swift approaching me.