no. 6
I made a playlist about this week's obscure word, and would you like audio versions of this here letter?
from the after/hours archives: BUSINESS IN THE FRONT. [February 25, 2022]
It was hilarious to me that the week I ended a letter with a plea for your responses was my most silent from y’all. That’s not a criticism; it is another of the infinite reminders of how variable this all is, how fleeting, how rare. Amidst sorrows, grief, war, despair, silence, is joy, and each seems to chase the other in a cosmic playground game. Humans do too much, and most of it seems unimportant because damn – all these feelings persist. Indeed, we persist in writing our little notes and listening to our little songs and stretching our little wings. And yet, I’m inclined to believe that is a decidedly human place: the spot where the past slips through our grasp, becoming the present, and back around again.
I’m sure it’s why we cling to tightly to love.
How else can we stop time?
It’s love that seizes our attention, encoding a memory, making it rich. Grief, sorrow, despair, and even war have their roots in some kind of love, and I am determined to be a reminder that we can love more and take flight and tamper hurt and hold grief and end war. Let the cosmos play its inevitable games; we could do less.
There’s no such thing as perfect, but love comes second.
Live footage of me trying to pack + also pray for us all.
Q: OUR PERFECT DATE.
To be fair, not actually a question.
I used to write a series on the ‘gram called #oursomedaystories. They were dreams, mostly, sketched in those hazy days of toddlerhood when I didn’t know which end was up or forward, but I was bundled in her gaze and my triumphs. I dreamed of how our family would be made whole, and how his presence would offer some kind of completion. A missing ingredient.
& I don’t know that I’ve ever shaken that memory of that dream.
I don’t know if I’m trying to.
I was madly in love with the someday of my dreams and I hope I always remember how fucking boring it is to hope the world of my imagination falls in my lap. How fucking boring to miss the brilliant, horrible world right before my eyes all while stoking a fire of fiction called someday.
A: Mono-no-aware.
We have entered a season known affectionately as “Deep Gras.” From the Thursday prior through to midnight on the morning of Ash Wednesday, it’s the Mardi Gras homestretch and it’s time to buckle in. Once Muses hits Canal, revel is the name of the game, and the new year is afoot.
As I’ve geared up for my trip to New York tomorrow, I’ve spoken softly to the sleeping giant in the room: a first love gone stale. I had loved the city all my life and to leave it, whatever I’ve professed anywhere else, was the loss of a version of someday I had loved my whole life long.
Thank glory for second loves.
The joy, the devastation, the wit, the fear, the someday I built in New Orleans is the kind of second love that only comes with the first’s bitter end. You think I’m fun on mountains, bitch, catch me down on Frenchmen – my second love gave it to me good!
& how fleeting..
In the weeks since I booked my trip, I’ve scrolled and tapped through hundreds of pictures of people masque-ing, parading, and ringing in the season. I suppose the universe has a sense of humor, and her favorite punchline is “Sychronicity!” To return to my first love, contented in our closure, while longing for my unfulfilled second has got to be a joke.
The sounds of each city, their particular stenches, their peculiarities and turns of phrases, their soft spots, their hidings and revelations – I know these places, and to touch them is to slip past the veil into another worldly self. It is a kind of remembering that only my marrow and the city’s tissue know. We revealed ourselves to the other and there’s no going back; we’ve seen the other naked and bare
& yet, this body and the city, we are brand new to one another now. I get to be this fat and delicious and better dressed with a credit card in my own goddamn name and an itinerary chock-full of visits to the cultural delights I dreamed my city adventure would entail.
True to form: I didn’t even know I felt that way! It turns out, there is a someday story I’ve been holding onto.
Someday, I will go back whole & I will dance my whole self through the streets.
I grew up in an atheistic household. I didn’t know it, and knowing the word wouldn’t have made much difference to me anyway. We didn’t talk about God, anyone of the books, or even the fact that a global majority of people believe, what I’m told are, some good words. In second grade, I ran face-first into God and race, in the form of recess.
It’s important to know that my mom is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and how I know generational anything is a real is because I say “mahm” like I, too, grew up in White Folks Bay. All that to say, I picked up her speech, including the frequent midwestern OMGs of any decent SNL sketch. It must have been in one of those unexamined blurt-outs that he reprimanded me, this classmate, with a quick, “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!” I’m proud of the patient girl I happened to be that day to wait until I was home before asking, incredulously:
Who is the Lord?!
My father’s don’t worry about it seemed simple enough. I decided right then that there wasn’t any way to know and so I certainly didn’t need to teach myself any new exclamatory phrases until some sort of definitive outcome was made clear.
When I won a blacktop foot race that same year, I let my competition know that it was likely due to her very big feet. I don’t make the rules; gloating is par for the course of seven-year-old games. Her retort was harsh.
At least I’m not mixed, she retorted.
My folks had more to say about this one, but the evolution of my racial identity remained as agnostic as my spiritual one for decades. Two, to be exact.
We had tickets to see Leonard Cohen perform at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre in Armstrong Park. It was before Pearl was born, and I wore a killer dress, and we had met one of the backup singers in the Quarter the day before and kinda schmoozed them enough to get backstage passes. It was this kind of charm that we most excelled at as a couple – we got doors opened. What I remember most was his spryness, his agility, and his variations. It wasn’t a question of whether the audience knew the words; he had come to sing his hymns as he felt them at that moment.
Backstage, a gorgeous Black woman, refined and matronly in the exact opposite sense that word usually implies, a backup singer with such pipes! She poured a small glass of champagne to toast with me in celebration of the performance and she said what all people say of New Orleans:
This city feels like home.
I smiled; it’s the thing to do when tourists tell you that love your home, and I knew because real locals always smiled at me when I at all likened my three years in heaven to their lifetime. She spoke again.
I love being a Black woman here, it feels holy.
Y'all.
That Blackness could be home.
That home could be holy.
That place could speak.
That language could free.
That peace is divine.
That I am love.
Sis, I became a believer. I was not uncertain or even questioning when I tell you divine fucking magic is lurking and just waiting for you to notice at that moment. A piece of me was born at that moment. In that moment.
There’s a nugget of that moment in my triumphant escape from an emotionally abusive relationship. There’s a nugget of that moment in my mournful scouring of the news. There’s a nugget of that moment in my devotion to loving + teaching + mothering + beauty-making. It wasn’t the first or only moment that I came home to love’s transcendence, nor the last, probably.
Yes, this week's images are more “someday” film inspo, but they are also mono-no-aware personified, I think.
In this moment, the world’s constant (war) rages on. Nothing changes but the players, and I look again to the universe as she laughs. I’ve fallen again for the same old yarn: synchronicity. Somewhere I’ll be toasting to words as sisters swing to brass bands as families flee, and it all fits, divinely + imperfectly, inside the whole of this life.
Falling blossoms, the moon’s phases, earth’s cycles, absence, fear, revelry, kismet moments, the way my mother’s voice fills my throat, masquerades, violence, somedays – each plays its part in the whole. Where this scattered letter, and its fractured notes on vacays and Mardi Gras and terror collide is in how we spend the time, and I swear to all holy things: we spend the time trying to fall in love – with this place, with each other, with ourselves, and to tell someone else about it, in this moment.
I love the broken places.
I love you + you.
I love me, very much.
& I just wanted to tell you that.