I’ve been many days in the hollow, many days in the wail, many days in the fire that burns in my muscles and renders my grief to flame. Slows my cognitive process to coals. The word came, we all heard; some of us fell to tears, some of us dissociated, some of us channeled the rage. Some of us made art, some of us held our families, our loves, our babies, our hearts. Some of us honed our words, clear like bells in every octave: from the low, slow, mourn of a drum, stretched taut across hip bones at the bottom of our grief, to the unifying cries to action chanted across generations; an ancestral legacy of protest and power. The liberatory force of Love as hearts on fire, shameless and thundering and caressing softly in the streets.
I’ve spent many days quiet.
My words lost in my body.
My body humming with heat.
The words still come slowly. I can’t write anything until I write this.
I scoop my hands into the river, haul up a prayer that slips through my fingertips.
I like to imagine, as rain falls into river, that actually the water is boiling and what I’m witnessing is water springing up into air, liberated into the expansion of changed state.
Five souls sprang up into air, into the expansion of changed state. Non-consensually. Through violence. Their bodies as holy as their spirits. They deserved liberation lived here on Earth. In slow sunday mornings of Queer communion, feet interwoven with those of their lover, sheets still warm from sleep. In sweat rolling down chests in the thick of the music, bodies moving together in the space that was supposed to be ours. In walking their dogs and calling their moms and hearing their children call for them. In every yet-unlived dream in hearts that dared to dream, to claim, to name; these precious bodies, these holy desires, these life forces, voices, all changed state. All names ringing out like bells in ripples of grief.
Our community, an ever-growing prayer so many bodies wide.
My jaw is so tight - sometimes the words stop in your mouth.
Sometimes the magnitude of impact can only be measured in silence.
My silence, a wash of half-dissociated days.
In the echoic silence of my body, so many people are grieving.
His mother crying.
Her child in the dark, waiting for her hands to come again.
A community, sanctuary desecrated.
Young Queer and Trans kids, seeing what could be their future, arms around each other in a circle.
My peers who have lived, knowing this could be us, our arms around each other in a circle.
Our elders and ancestors who have passed, some in the wisdom of their bodies, some through splashes of this same violent stone, who know how to hold souls on the other side of slipping through changed state.
The hundreds of names we gather to read every November the 20th, all ancestors, all a wide web of hands, all holding you who crossed on the day when all of the names are read. All of them deserved liberation here on earth.
All of them, empty beds. All of them, grieving spaces in friend groups, all of them babies whose mothers cannot find them. Some of them babies whose mothers intentionally lost them; casting them out into dark streets. All of them divine. A prayer for each of you, lavender on your eyelids. Softness around your bodies, a basket - a bed - of mugwort, prayer and smoke holding you, crossing the barrier between the living and the dead, our prayers, our love, our wails, all holy bells, all ether, all sound, all where you can hear us. The modality of sound, so close to spirit. They say that sound is the last thing that we lose when we pass. Did you hear the sound of the nightclub, did you hear the dance music? Did you slip into a dream where you were dancing with your friends, the thrum and the sweat-drip and the close shoulder-to-shoulder kinship alive in your bodies? Are you dancing now?
This piece left unfinished, like the grief.