I’ve had a terrible time writing lately. It’s possible, though maybe unwise, to date this particular episode of writer’s block to my grandmother’s sudden passing a few weeks ago (a few weeks? five weeks, exactly), which feels a bit like cheating, like I’d be instrumentalizing her death or something by using it as an excuse for shitty writing. I don’t know. I’m incredibly sad about it still, I guess. I’ve dropped out of so many things lately. I did write a book review for the New York Times that should be coming out soon, for a novel called Supper Club; and I’m really pleased with it, but it was torture getting it out onto the page. I kept setting the bar lower and lower in the hopes that I’ll be able to stagger over it: 300 words, 200 words. I felt like that fancy kind of tomato paste that comes in a tube instead of a can, the kind you slowly choke out of its aluminum casing with your fingers like toothpaste. Squeezing my brain out so I can brown it in the bottom of a cast-iron pot.
I haven't been keeping up with your posts, probably because they are too delicious and I am too undeserving, and because I am obsessed with the fate of the country and the world and the migrants and the poor and the Black trans women who are slowly being crushed under the weight of our collective indifference except to fundraising in their name and tsk tsking over the hardness of the world while we eat our oysters and cream puffs and feel a bit sad. And yet here I am at 5:11 a.m. finally reading these words and realizing that oh yes I am not the only one with world-ending fears and deep invasive trauma and thinking of who I was when I was younger and in the prime of life with all the expectations of success and yet the sadness ate at me daily and nightly and morningly and afternoonly and no one could understand what the hell least of all me. And this is what I hear when I read your words and I wonder how I could have survived all that, particularly because no one knew or could even comprehend what I was or what I was going through or what my world was reduced to. All this to say nothing about me, which is meaningless history to anyone but me, but to say someone was thinking of you and what you are enduring and that I have nothing to say in the face of that except I am here and that in spite of it all you mean something to me, which I know is less meaningful than the smallest microbe in the deepest crack of the ocean but as a denizen of that ocean crack it is everything.
I haven't been keeping up with your posts, probably because they are too delicious and I am too undeserving, and because I am obsessed with the fate of the country and the world and the migrants and the poor and the Black trans women who are slowly being crushed under the weight of our collective indifference except to fundraising in their name and tsk tsking over the hardness of the world while we eat our oysters and cream puffs and feel a bit sad. And yet here I am at 5:11 a.m. finally reading these words and realizing that oh yes I am not the only one with world-ending fears and deep invasive trauma and thinking of who I was when I was younger and in the prime of life with all the expectations of success and yet the sadness ate at me daily and nightly and morningly and afternoonly and no one could understand what the hell least of all me. And this is what I hear when I read your words and I wonder how I could have survived all that, particularly because no one knew or could even comprehend what I was or what I was going through or what my world was reduced to. All this to say nothing about me, which is meaningless history to anyone but me, but to say someone was thinking of you and what you are enduring and that I have nothing to say in the face of that except I am here and that in spite of it all you mean something to me, which I know is less meaningful than the smallest microbe in the deepest crack of the ocean but as a denizen of that ocean crack it is everything.