gnawing on the hand that feeds you
truth and belonging and maybe outgrowing
It’s May 2025 and haven’t we had enough words?
-Anatomy of a Fall, 2023
I was a child much like many others raised on the belief that strong adherence to the rules could be likened to not only living well, but loving well. I was taught that love was not in the frothy words exchanged on birthday cards, but in loyalty, and the unwavering obedience to the values that had been handed down to me with great resolve. I was told to look at the great sea of people who believed in nothing, and believe it was my great privilege to suffer for the truth; that only at the center of that stubborn might something fracture towards pure joy.
These are the love songs of the indebted. They invert my internal world into indistinguishable colors. They purple my laughter lonely. They twist my gratitude into guilt. In the mirror I see myself more clearly if only briefly, before the shapes flicker into vanity and distraction. Infinite fractal of liberation condemnation. Daily, my phantoms increase two fold.
Here in The Land Of The Free, it seems the kids shows and science fairs on Breaking The Rules and Thinking Out Of The Box were not enough — we have somehow, sickeningly, returned to a world of blind, stubborn adherence to our predeclared beliefs. We crave martyrdom and humiliation over accountability and truth. This month I am in Sacramento watching a white man explain a mural depicting the role of Chinese immigrants in the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The people nod and take pictures. I am the only asian in the group, and he avoids my eye contact as he neglects to mention the Chinese Exclusion Act. We satiate ourselves with stories of triumph and sacrifice for the illusion of autonomy in the machine — for how can there be systemic suffering with these treasured flashes of golden progress and victory.
We watch each other process the extremity of this world into our stubborn binaries. I watch my loved ones continue to think they will be safe in their imm*grant status simply because they can imagine someone more foreign, more vile, more criminal to be taken first. We make a certain safety of each other’s vulnerability, lining our wrists and necks. And somehow, this disfigurement of reality is an act of loyalty — to a school of thought maybe, but to many, a God.
from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography
If we are to believe in a cosmic timing or some greater narrative to the Earth, I think it hard to ignore how the late pope spent some of his last days trying to corral the monstrosity of american politic. I imagine v*nce bringing his kids to the Vatican for an idyllic lenten season photo op while his phone pings the accelerant dismantling of livelihoods in our fabled nation of immigrants. It is a perfect illustration of an administration trying to co-opt the aesthetics of christian morality towards the restoration of power in their image: the rich, the masculine, and the ruthless. Bullshit.
America is chastised on Saturday and the pope rests on Easter Sunday.
crypt walk this April
There’s a certain populist bend to this season’s conclave. I am in a boba shop parking lot at 11:00 PM and hear two people discussing their thoughts on Pope Leo — exchanging the handful of his quotes in the last decade that the New York Times has been regurgitating hourly. I’m sure part of the boost in public consciousness is in the wake of the Ralph Fiennes movie and just an artifact of being older; but I also think there is an American posture for Wanting To Be Saved From Ourselves as our country cannibalizes itself in red white and blue — and thinking the papacy as one of the few forces left to do it. Something we have been quick to wave off as utopian idealism are the very real, socialist foundations of the catholic faith. At its best, that is the realization that heaven is constructed on earth when we feel obligated towards and protect each other. At its worse, it is a perfect reconstruction of carceral logic — the sense that your own righteousness is your ticket to salvation, that love is a matter of deserving, and that deserving can be calculated and proven.
There is something so viscerally American about that misconstruction. We make a great spectacle of deserving in this country. Who deserves to be a refugee? Who deserves freedom of speech? Who deserves to protest? Our answers become increasingly articulate at the cost of our ability to see each other and realize the oxygen leaving the room.
I have been weeping to this daily I cannot tell if the feeling it gives me is pure love or despair
But maybe these are the easy things to point out. The truth is I have fallen for this trap many times this month, this year, and in my continuous reconstitutions of self. I struggle with the twin fires of hypocrisy and loyalty, nearly indistinguishable in these times. The math continues to figure differently in my relationships, where love makes uninterpretable what we owe each other; in conflict, in betrayal, in neglect. I think of Toni Morison’s Beloved, wherein anything can be justified in the name of love. It is hard to admit and name obliquely the fragility with which we remain in each other’s lives. This year I have lost people in my life to whom my soul felt truly known. I don’t know how loyalty and truth shake out with these ones. There is a particular trauma to becoming unrecognizable to the people who have loved you most, to being outgrown by your greatest tethers. It is such an intimate violence to become oneself in the wingspan of another person, and for that fluency to erode so casually. I have not become wise in this yet. Time has passed but my heart still writhes. This is a chasm. Sometimes I treat myself to covering it with betrayal and anger, the easy emotions, but a part of me knows the person these feelings will allow me to become. The violence of abstraction, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, leads us to no greater honesty, no truer love.
Sf bench, witness to much
I rebrave this writing on Mother’s day. There is no greater lighthouse for me in these feelings than my mom. It is becoming more obvious to us that time is passing. The siblings are growing up and into new life stages. The differences between us have become less abstract. Maybe there is the fear in both of us that the distance will grow too big. She is giving me a ride to the apartment this month, and as we speed through the night the dread in me for the life to come creeps in. She asks how I am doing and I know that she means it. She asks about the people in my life because she knows that I love them, and that is enough. In this I know she is breaking the rules: choosing to see me clearly instead of just the parts she can agree with. When we arrive, I open the car door and see her tucked into the driver’s seat, waving, and suddenly small. I don’t think we choose what we remember, but as I wave back I know I’ll carry this image for the rest of my life.
When my sister and I were young we’d play a game in the middle of the night called knock-talk: 1 knock said hello. 2 knocks asked for company to get water. 3 knocks asked if the other was still awake. We had many codes, I think the numbers went up to ten. The existence of code 3 does indeed replace the need for a code 1, but such is our precious redundance. It was a stupid game. But I remember feeling clever to avoid our parents’ night watch and safe to have this sacred stupid, our fluency without words and without sight.
My mom and I hug in the parking lot. There are no good words to say. I tap on her back three times, distracting my eyes with the skyline. She’s there on my shoulder, three taps back. There is a lot of reason to let the fear win these days. All of this change, and all of it done in silence. But the three taps also tell me none of it is done alone.
me and mom mom and me :)
What I am grasping towards is — I don’t think we will save ourselves via righteousness. This season I meet a priest who says we make all these rules but the murkiness is where God is. I think of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: “The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward… remaining in the quotidian of disturbance is our way of staying honest until another strategy offers a new pathway.”
The extremity of love and loyalty are making a great deal of murky. We are indeed making a great deal of disturbance exasperatingly ordinary. I hope we are all being pushed to take less for granted in the pursuit of truth. I hope we can unpry the economy of heroics from our sense of right and wrong and progress. I hope in the sobering that there is no one coming to save us, there is also good lucid in the feeling of finding new shapes to show up for each other. I hope that all this murky can actually lead us somewhere good.
something written from my murky,, poem 4 a friend who I hope is well <3. prompt from dustin
A Good Friend What does it mean / To be good to each other? / Is it saying the hard thing / first? / Is it outgrowing each other / with grace? / Is it seating your failure / next to mine? / My days are littered / with the ghosts of us / And you know / I am a sucker / for good haunting / Memory permeates my vision like dreams / Every bench a story / Every song a dance / My friend, / I fear / I am someone the ghosts can find / But I can be this for you / I want to / Someone once told me that love is never wasted / But I don’t think that it’s recycled either / What I mean to say is / This world has made tempting / The utility of love / But I could never subject you to it / So thank you, / The scattered infinity / The coffee poured and the dog eared pages / For laughing at all of my unfunny / For holding kind all my mistaken / For letting me feel so knowable / And if knowable, possible / And if possible, maybe even good / My friend, I keep having this dream / Where I say what I mean / first. last line after jane wong.
Finally someone has more or less pointed out that Anatomy of a Fall and Conclave are the same movie