holes
I wrote a different Tinyletter-- I'll send it eventually, it's about reading tarot as a writing practice, it's fine-- in the days before the election. I was planning to send it today. I was writing constantly in the run-up, gripping tight to the idea that making my life work correctly might mean that I could will the country's to do the same. Of course every single one of those drafts seems patently ridiculous in the aftermath. Everything does.
Yesterday I sat on C's patio and ate a hamburger and smoked my first cigarette in so long, and drank bourbon and sweated through the ninety two degree heat, which is not normal, in case you were wondering-- this is Los Angeles, sure, but also it's November. C is a med student; she's doing rotations at County, and it happened that this week she started on OB. She has delivered babies; she is a trained abortion provider; every patient she sees is uninsured, and most of them are undocumented. Many are mentally ill. Her parents are immigrants from a country currently being run by a man who has people shot in the streets. She was wracked and wrecked and dissolved by her grief. I held her hand and told her I loved her. Occasionally I checked my phone and there were texts from my friends, from all over the country, saying that they loved me. We checked in on each other. We reminded each other that we were not alone. We made plans to march, to drink, to cry, to write, to protest, to donate, to live, I kept reminding myself. To keep on living in the face of people who don't even always care enough to try to kill us directly: who are content to sit by, idly, while we die.
I sent my mother a poem yesterday, one I have been turning over and over in my mind for months now. It had come to me on Tumblr, the way things do, sometimes, Anne Boyer's what resembles the grave but isn't. When I first read it of course it reminded me of depression: how every morning for the last few years I had woken up and laid in bed and told myself, ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole. How dark and deep those holes were, how incredibly, lost-in-space lonely I felt at the bottom of them. But then, they were mine to crawl out of. I texted a different C, "I just thought that was the worst most powerful thing I'd ever feel. And I was wrong."
I do not know how to be this scared. I do not know how to be this sad. I don't know what to do with this grief and this rage and the grief and rage of the people I love, and how my body is so much less safe than it has ever been, and still, my body is so much safer than so many people's will be, going forward. I keep saying: intolerable, unbearable. But then I tell myself: okay, this is not your grave, get out of this hole. Donald Trump is going to dig graves for people in this country and he is going to sneer at us while his policies fill them, but I am lucky and privileged, and what that means is, he is unlikely to get to dig mine.
"sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying "this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole," all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders to get each other out of the hole that is not a mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together," Boyer says.
I say: I am going to spend the next four years trying, over and over, to reach out and across, to let my body and my life be a ladder, to get everyone out of the hole that is not our grave together, to do everything in my power to extend my lucky hand.