Transitions

I.

The visiting consultant, Nancy, is flying back to China again this week. She greeted me with hugs in her last week, since I’d spent the weekend helping with her research statistics. She was constantly feeding me too. We’d just gone to dinner with one of her previous residents, and a cardiology resident and I am driving her back. 

“You must be excited to see your son again,” I’d said, when I’d parked outside her house. Her street was dark, lined with trees and to turn around I’d three-pointed in the driveway of one of the larger, gated houses. Not that it was one of those kinds of streets. It was just a beautiful house, all silent and glowing from the windows.

Her little boy is all she talks about. He’s adorable. Handsome, too. I’d seen photos on his first day of school, when she’d been jittery on ward round and we’d asked why.

“Yes,” she said, hesitantly. Then she made to say something else, stuttered, and changed her mind. “I’m just…anyway. Yes. I just tried not to think about it.”

“Why not,” I asked.

“You wouldn’t understand.” She gave a sigh and waved her arms impatiently, brushing off the subject.

I shrugged. My little brother was 4 when I left him. It’s amazing he didn’t get stranger danger all these years, because I only go back to see him once a year. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it might be. “Is it because you’re scared he’ll be different around you because he hasn’t seen you in ages?”

She suddenly jerked up. “Yes! That’s exactly it. —” Then she began to pour everything out — everything, not just this thing. Her fears about her son, about parenting him. How much she loved him. I unbuttoned my seatbelt and turned to listen. It was hard to tell if she was crying — the tree covered the passenger side in shadow but she sounded like her nose was blocked at some points. I tried to locate a tissue box but remembered it was in the back of my car. 

Her little boy intrigued me. It sounded like the kid’s a genius - one of those old souls who seems a little too good for the world. At the same time, his own reactions at age 3 and 4 and even at 7 remind me of things my mother used to say that I did. My attention to detail. Even my earliest memories are of small details: dipping my hand down in a crack in a trampoline, and the texture of tyre grease. The words on a sign (a book shop) that my mother and I were walking past. Dragonflies (at eye level). Oily fingers from those deep fried crouton sticks.

My mother had worried that the world would eat me up. She’d always say to me, “Toughen up, you’re too sensitive,” or “Snatch your toys back” when I’d cry in her lap at night about how someone took my things that way.

It seemed funny suddenly, watching Nancy wring her hands in love and frustration and fear. My mother, way back then — is this what she might have done to one of her friends?

If I could talk to my mother then, what would I say to her? I wish the old her could see me now to save years of worry. Of course, she’d worry regardless. It’s what you do if you have something to lose. As a mother, I’d be a wreck. To love something that much again - to have something from which the loss of I might never recover from…

I put my hand on Nancy’s arm. I wanted to say something reassuring about the future, but there’s nothing reassuring about the unknown as a doctor. So I told her the best thing my parents ever gave me was a happy childhood. Something to cling onto in the darkest, coldest days. That the internal life, when it was caging, would calm by the thought of that. That mythical thing called love, when things are forgotten or there appears no reason to believe it’s possible. It’s possible. We carry on.

Before she got out of the car, she hugged me - a long, relieved hug. 12 years difference - we were both born in the year of the dragon and we were very similar. She often told me that I was a lot like her, at least in terms of early career events.

She is flying back today. I hadn’t seen her since that night. Despite repeated assurances to visit if possible, I have a feeling that we’ll never see each other again. It’s strange, the people who walk in and out of our lives, and what they leave there. It makes me wonder if I’ve left deep imprints in others’ lives I’ve never been in.



II.

It’s later in the week. The night’s gotten colder, though this time no longer blamed on sea air. Outside the tea lights are blurred behind the glass.

I’m curled up in a chair, happy. Overwhelmingly so, really, at how well the day’s gone. Number one: Brighton had been lovely. A calm, peaceful few hours and I was surprisingly cheered up about it. Number two: someone else had driven, so I could have drinks (something I’ve not done for ages, having driven everywhere possible in recent memory).

I’d been to Brighton earlier that day, just as the sun set. C, a friend of S’s from school whom I’d met once at her house in New Zealand, had invited me to a beach property for a BBQ co hosted by S’s ex (Also an S), whom S had left me for. Athena’s a mutual friend of ours, and in the recent months Athena had been here I’d seen this girl a handful of times. I hadn’t seen C for a long time, and had always been meaning to catch up. She is doing 4th year now, in the same course as me. It’s the hardest year in the curriculum, and I wanted to ask her if she had any questions. More people fail 4th year than every other year, and averages get dragged down constantly.

I’d clearly moved on in life, but a stubborn part of me just wanted to segregate the past from the future.

Athena’s boyfriend, would later say when I explained that Athena had been watching the rugby with me the same night that she was meant to be at S’s place, with great confusion, “Have the two worlds collided?” He knew both S and S together through Athena, because they’d worked together for a long time, and were close. For a long time there was some kind of unwritten rule that made Athena feel the need to warn me whenever S would be at the same event as me, even though I never let it stop me going to things for friends. I actually had nothing to do with the rule itself, it was just something Athena seemed to invent for herself.

“I should go,” I’d said for the nth time that morning, while icing ninja-bread men (not a typo) at Renny’s place.

“Just go,” she’d said.

“It starts off with a BBQ,” I’d said. “It might be an off gathering next. But then you just passively absorb details about someone’s life over time and suddenly you’re just..in their lives. Or they’re in yours. Whatever.” I thought about all the details of S’s life that I’d known from mutual friends and S over the years. How she wanted to move to Melbourne two years before she did it. How her dream had been to study English at the university of Melbourne here. Some of her relationships after S (back when she was rooming with Gaayathri, a good friend of mine). All details that just happened to crop up in passing, not all of it intentionally told to me. It was ridiculous.

But all my whining was just whining about something I had already made up my mind about.

I’m at a cafe in Glen Waverley, and it’s freezing outside. The day had turned on itself, bitter winds coming inland - at first I thought it had been Brighton but even here it’s frosty. Jason, the kid from the respiratory lab, is with me. I shouldn’t say kid - he’s only two years younger than me - but it feels like it. Two years difference is an eon. Does time accelerate/decelerate at will? It makes me feel old.

He reminds me of a strange combination of people I’ve known in the past, including myself. Or perhaps his current situations just reminds me of something that happened to me once, that I wish had had a better outcome. We’re incredibly different in personality after all - in fact probably the exact opposite. Our moral compasses are way off.

It did make me acknowledge that I’m drawn to people with familiar sounding stories though. Recently at work I’ve been finding myself struggling with people who have been in similar situations as me. I feel myself wanting to wrench them by the collar, shake them, and tell them how stupid they are. Nicely. “He won’t ever love you.” or, “Have some self respect!”.

Probably an inappropriate way to feel about other people’s lives sometimes, but there you go.

I seem to be having similar conversations to this one with many people over my life. In fact, I feel extremely good at these kinds of conversations and cheering people up after break ups.

Then I realised: I’m a good at helping people through transitions because that’s pretty much how others have treated me in relationships. Someone transitioning them through parts of their life before they find someone they really want. Inadvertantly, obviously, because nobody does that kind of thing on purpose, but it’s what ended up happening nonetheless. 

Argh.

Epiphanies are few and far between these days. Why are they never good ones, like they used to be?

The places only we know

Day 1 of general surgery: I’m awake, barely having slept. The sky’s an off-putting grey, although I later find out that sunrise is just a slight head tilt away from the window pane I’m leaning against.

I don’t know why I couldn’t sleep - it’s probably the evening shifts having messed up my sleeping pattern. When you arrive home at midnight, it always feels wrong just to crawl into bed without your usual routines - checking emails, eating something, etc. So I lay in bed sighing every now and then, thinking about the oddest things: the colour of hay before it’s fully dried, melted chocolate, the vein at the back of my right hand that moves when clench and unclench my fist…

I take back what I said about Emergency - I met my first mean consultant last Thursday; actually, I’d met him before and thought his choice of sotalol for reversion of paroxysmal AF strange, considering that it was shown to be about the same as placebo in the guidelines. Also, he’s he kind of consultant who will listen to you before he finds out you’re a medical student (the first case I consulted him on) — but as soon as you say you are, he cuts you off half, makes a snorting noise, rolls his eyes and says, “I’m going to see them. Just don’t say anything.” — before I’ve even presented.

After a long process where he repeated everything I did only half heartedly, demanded to be shown the Xray and blood results, before he says he wasn’t sure why she was short of breath, and to admit her under the medical registrar. So of course the medical registrar laughed in a ‘my life sucks’ way when I referred to him and said it wasn’t my fault, but the whole thing was ridiculous.

“Her potassium is 6.0,” he said. “What have you done for it.”

“Um. Nothing as yet,” I sighed. That had been my question too, in my head. Should we do something about the potassium? There hadn’t been ECG changes but I wasn’t sure.

“Does your consultant know?”

“Yes. But he said to talk to you first.” (He’d done so by making a shooing motion with his hand in the direction of the medical registrar and moving off before I’d finished asking if he’d like to lower the potassium in ED).

“I can’t believe this,” the med reg replied. 

So I sighed. I can see what friends have previously meant by disliking how they’re the buffer in between two people — people take things out on you, when you’re following orders of someone else because you yourself don’t have the capacity to make certain orders/decisions (for instance, I’m not allowed legally or ethically to order drugs/initiate therapy on my own such as for this woman’s potassium). Except professionally you can’t say so.

Which makes me all the more grateful that the staff I’ve encountered in all the other days while I was there have been so amazing. On my last day one of the consultants decided to yell out “Everyone, say goodbye to Melissa, it’s her last day!”. There was that awkward moment when I went bright red and everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me and muttered an obligatory ‘See you!’…some uncertainly as I’d never actually spoken to a few of them my entire life (ward clerks, nurses I’d not worked with yet, etc., med reg, surg reg, plastics and ortho…). 

But the blush on my face made it to the depth of my heart and all of my insides were blushing too. :) A happy, warm feeling.

In my last week of Emergency I’d been thinking a lot about change (I guess I touched on it the last post too). Someone I’ve known a long time, but whom I’ve not seen in years sent me an email (one I hadn’t had time to answer until now) and it made me think about how I’ve changed in the last few years.

You’d think someone as introspective as I am would have thought about this before - and maybe I had. I talk about change lot, I know - about childhood and now, and moving country… but not really how I used to be compared to how I am now. The way I think. My hopes and fears. Certainly not in the last one and a half years, at least. Funnily enough, one of the moments that triggered this was when I walked up to my car at the witching hour, cold, and noticed all the windows fogged up on the outside but thinking that it was impossible that the inside of my car would be colder than the outside (what keeps it so cold?). So I ignored the laws of condensation and tried to make the fog go away by putting air conditioning on and winding down the windows even though it was freezing. The next day I was giving some people I didn’t know particularly well a lift home and asked one of them about it and he said to turn up my heaters and point them at the window which made me feel incredibly sheepish. Well duh. I did senior level Physics and Chemistry at school too. I’m meant to be doing some degree for bright kids.

Wow Melissa, you’ve changed, I thought with a smile in my head. A sheepish, ironic smile. Because it was funny, and because I knew that it’s not at all what that email probably meant (not in the least because I have dumb moments like that all the time).

How human it is to forget about all the horrible bits and remember the happy bits in your life.

I saw two children playing in Emergency before I left, holding hands briefly when one of them wanted to show something the other one. They were siblings of other kids who were sick, who’d found the toy area.

It’s kind of a big question. In five years time, they won’t go a mile within each other - the age of boy and girl germs and all. A few years after that, they’ll fall in love again.

Time changes everything. Although, the more I think about it, perhaps there are some things that time don’t change. Perhaps we just get better at convincing ourselves otherwise. But you gotta reach a point where you’re at peace with it all. And to tell yourself the truth about it at all times. And to live a life that’s fair for you.

It’s easy to forget that we’re creating our lives from scratch every day.

A happy life. :) Long, and full hopefully. Filled with solidifying dreams. :)

Kafka on the shore

I came back to Melbourne in the midst of humidity thick enough to lower swim through, though that part may be due to the rain. A huge difference from when I’d left Auckland airport — a beautiful sunset which it felt like we flew into. Impossible, isn’t it? We were supposed to be flying west, unless we took off in the opposite direction.

Another year. Another place to call home, however temporarily. The same old me, however. I took a good hard look at my face in the mirror, pale with lack of sleep at having to get up so early.

Now, sitting at what I rate as the best room I’ve ever rented since coming to Australia, I’m a bit regretful that this is all temporary. This room belongs to another student, who through a breakdown of communication with the lease holder, forgot to tell her that he’d already sublet it when she let me move in. The student being a friend of hers who had been living here for a long time, it was clear that I would need to relocate.

Still, what a nice place. Everyone seems so friendly. The bed is so comfortable. There is a bookshelf. Why that is so important is a silly question.

I’m staying up late, trying to adjust my holiday clock. Unregulated, it means sleeping at 4am and waking up at noon in extreme cases. I’ve been much better since early uni years. Midnight, and then nine in the morning. Nothing to boast about.

That quote from Janet Frame’s ‘Owls Do Cry’ that I used to know by heart  — the one that describes the adult world from a child’s mind as a deepening of silences… it comes back to me every now and again. Times like this, really. Sitting up with tea, reading a novel, searching up articles, daydreaming outside, on the train, watching horrible pictures of the floods on television… all I can feel is silence.

A lot can be said about silence. A lecturer once said that the capacity for human beings to filter out white noise was infinite. Atom hitting our ear drums technically registers in our brain, but we filter it out. A willingness not to hear silence.

I remember those lectures amazingly well. Not because they were memorable, but because I spent hours in the basement of Hardgrave Andrew library with Dan and Alvin and Brian copying chapters of lecture notes by hand, sketching micro-anatomy. I learn best that way — the simple act of doing, and of touch. A muscle memory, as well as a mental photograph. Sometimes, when I’m alone very late at night and doing something incredibly boring I think of this.

And of silence. And of places I’d like to go someday, if I got the chance.

Recently I read ‘Kafka On The Shore’ by Murakami. Murakami always makes me think about deep places with hollow echos. In my mind those places seem almost synonymous with silent things too — only empty places echo. And emptiness always reminds me of notingness, which in my mind, swallows sound. A paradox, I guess.

The book is very old. I got it out of the Matherson library, home to Arts and Economics books of all generations. An Alfred K. Knof publication, New York, the mustard hardcover has nothing on it and is frayed. The binding (navy blue) is ripped and faded, and it’s bound in a way that books printed before a certain time almost always is. The edition date is 2005, which seems like a lie. Five years and it’s been destroyed. The title on the spine is barely legible. What wore it out so badly? I run my hands over the covers. It might be things like this. Hands like mine.

At the back there is a single page between two blank ones titled ‘A Note On The Type’. The text of this book was set in Electra, a typeface designed by W.A. Dwiggins(1880-1956). This face cannot be classified as either modern or old style. It is not based on any historical model, nor does it echo any particular period or style. It avoids te extree contrasts between tick and tin elements that mark most modern aces, and it attempts to give a feeling of fluidity, power, and speed.’

I read it all in one go, like devouring the heart of some small living thing. Outside wind roared and the shutters clanged awfully. I got up a few times to make more tea.

On page 148, he wrote this: “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

Whenever I read Murakami I’m struck by the isolation of his characters. Their own inner world seems to exclude them in some way, even when they interact with others. Maybe it’s the translation, but there’s something disjointed about his narration too. The same appeal as listening to someone with strange way of ordering words speak.

Someone has drawn a line in the margin to underline that quote. After I read the whole novel I realise it’s the only passage underlined or highlighted in some way in the book. Maybe someone else was drawn by this too. It’s a warming thought.

Moving forward…some people are really good at it. Like a obstinate little engine just carrying boxes and boxes of stuff, never opening them, adding new crates at every destination. Others handle each of the boxes by hand, cradling them in their arms, opening each one. Feeling the weight of each thing, and the weight of the value they place on them — a physical weight in this kind of reality. Then all you can do is stand there and balance and focus on carrying each thing. 

That’s when you get stuck. It’s hard to know what to do.

Anyway. Just wanted to share some thoughts and say that I’m thinking of you guys in Auckland. Enviously, I guess. The weather here’s been dramatic. At work lots of people call up, upset by images of flooded Queensland and parts of Victoria playing over and over in front of our eyes. It feels like every year at the Australian Open there is something to hold a charity match for.

Uni is starting next week. Very excited to be working with children again. :) That happy magical place that is Paediatrics. More to come soon.

All the good ghosts

A friend from Auckland came over to Melbourne today. It must be summer. The past always comes to visit before the beginning of summer.

Vaibhav, who has actually been living in Adelaide for almost as long as I’ve been living in Melbourne, looks exactly the same. Exactly. We wind our way through the laneways and smells of lunchtime in the city to a tea place in Block Arcade, which has apparantly been there since the 1800s. Lots of chai tea, chicken salad, zucchini flowers and raspberry cheesecake later, we felt well acquainted with the minutiae of our everyday lives.

How was my research? How was his Spanish? How were his exams? His family had moved across to Australia a few years ago and now his younger sister was also in Adelaide. They had moved in together in a shabbier suburb. He’d almost gotten mugged once.

Hopes and dreams was an art gallery thing. The red cobble of the upper National Gallery fountain looked from afar like autumn leaves, which was confusing. We wandered around upstairs in contemporary art, then at photographs of urban sprawl from the 1990s. A security guard snuck us into a preview of Unnerved, an amazing exhibition of New Zealand art.

At the end of it all, we ended up at Cafe Segovia, staring out at the rain dripping off the eaves in lane and people trying to pass in the narrow sheltered spaces without getting dripped on. As we’d left the gallery low hung rain clouds had made the world seem like a dream. Towers reached into the sky and disappeared. I thought, we’re in Babylon and we the world might be divided again.

My tummy rebelled at the thought of wine. We began this trek into the past. First with lovers, then with love, then to those we loved, namely N who is common to both of us, and the places where we loved everything, everyone - namely, Auckland.

He laughed as we walked to the place where we would part. “Do you remember the time when I dropped you at your house — your old one? As I backed out of your driveway I ran over a recycling bin and dragged it with me up the road. I just remember you laughing so hard on the curb as you saw me. You had a look on your face that said, oh Vaibhav.”

I laughed too.

I love our common past. In Auckland, you could do anything. Or maybe it was the age, before we became communities with professional/personal boundaries and eyes and ears that were pasted to the wall. People who don’t call you back, and people who you don’t call back because you are afraid of being hurt (who you think about with guilt constantly).

Perhaps it’s an age thing more than anything.

But I like that we’re here now, in Melbourne and Adelaide. He told me that it was only when he saw me that he started to think of all these things and I realised it was similar for me too. Our everyday lives held us up to the present: “When I leave tomorrow, we’ll both go back to ourselves.”

We hugged on the corner of Little Collins and Swanston. I had a lab dinner in Chinatown that couldn’t be missed. So early to part, and yet so late. I took a photograph.

That’s what I’m blessed with. I’m so grateful that I’ve been loved my entire life. Good years and bad. A legacy of love.

I’ve been so lucky :)

En route, in motion: leaving Atlanta (by Mia Mingus)

via dreaminghome

“Mia and Stacey are two queer disabled diasporic Korean women of color in the process moving from the South to the Bay to create home and community with each other.” These are two of the bravest, most inspiring people I’ve come across. What an amazing (and ongoing) story of love and humanity.

Part I:

Dear Stacey,

I am supposed to be in bed, asleep, so that I can get up tomorrow and pack the rest of my house into boxes.  I am exhausted, but I can’t sleep. 

This last week, I have been slowly realizing that my time in Atlanta, as I know it now, is coming to an end after twelve-plus years, after arriving here when I was 17.  Even if I come back later, it will never be the same; it will be different and so will I.  I am realizing that my “lasts” are quickly approaching: the last time to sit on the east-facing benches at Candler Park, the last ATJC meeting, the last trio night, the last long talk with L on my couch, the last Saturday afternoon spent with the door open to a cool breeze. 

I have been taking the long way home lately, looking purposefully around me, taking in a city that has birthed me in to my queerness, held me through some of my deepest sadness, and where I skipped class on a whim to go to my first political disability event, which changed my life forever and catapulted me in to disability justice work.  A city where I found love and lost love, lost myself and found myself, again. 

I have been driving up and down streets, trying to burn the memory of them into my brain for good. The way the air smells, the trees, the thick pillars that carry the MARTA rail through the sky from one end of the city to the other.  The way I know these roads like the back of my hand, remembering my first year learning them in the passenger seat beside Adrian. 

Atlanta was the first place that ever really felt like home, it was the closest to belonging that I had ever been.  It was the first time I had ever experienced queer people of color community, all four (state-side) seasons, and the longest amount of time I have ever spent in the states.  It was the biggest highway—road—I had ever driven on and I was terrified.  Our highway in St. Croix is four lanes, two for each side.  When I first saw the 14 lane highway that is 75/85, I never imagined I would be able to maneuver across it with ease. 

Atlanta was where I learned about my self as an organizer and leader, where I learned about the deep, resilient history of the South, and where I first found reproductive justice.  It is where I got to witness first-hand the way the South is (and Southerners are) forgotten about, ignored and blatantly under resourced in our movements and funding.  It is where I began to connect the histories of the Caribbean, the US South and the global south.  It is where I finally found a landing place, a political home, for the legacy of work I had been carrying with me around sexual violence and child sexual abuse, taking the form of the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative.  It is where I could finally understand the violence I experienced as a disabled korean adoptee girl within the medical industrial complex as just that: violence. 

These days I cry a little everyday for the city that I fell in love with and that I will love forever.  And I take it all with me:  the way Dekalb Avenue at the Krog St. tunnel looks as the sun sets and the feeling of winding down Ponce.  The two trees at the corner of Clifton and Ponce that grew side-by-side in perfect-mirrored reflection, making the illusion of one giant tree, that watched over me when I totaled my car under them and came out alive without a single scratch on me.  Sitting on the quad with Liz all day and into the evening just days before she killed herself.  Mrs. Nelson and her 32-plus cats, a garden and a melon.  141, 745, and 659. 

I hope someday I can show you some of it, Heck.  I think you would have liked it.  It is part of what has gotten me here today and it is a part of this dream too. 

Nostalgic love,

Mia

Part II.

Dear Stacey

I made it to California late last night.  I will reach the Bay area tonight. 

The last four days I have been in constant movement, no time to be still.  It still sometimes feels like I am just on a long adventure, after which, I will return home to Atlanta.  I don’t know that it has sunk into me yet, that I am not going home. 

Moving out of my loft was so overwhelming, I had no time to feel the regular crip panic, anxiety, shame and guilt of not being able to lift boxes, carry heavy furniture and having to depend on people.  Usually I am strung so thin on moving days, feeling every possible emotion: anger at my body for everything it isn’t; jealousy and awe of other people’s bodies for all they can do, the ease of their movements and the security it provides; enormous gratitude and appreciation for the people around me who offer their time and love to help me move; and alienation from the acute internal isolation of an entire crip world on to itself playing out inside of me, always on the verge of cracking open, spilling over and exposing me. 

But instead, my heart was full and my head was racing as the rain fell outside and one by one, friends and loved ones came through the door to help.  Sarah, Carol, L, Moya, Cara, Glo, Mara, Jillian, Lewis, Connor, D, Jocelyn.  They made the load-up so smooth and easy, so loving and gentle, so full.  Little by little, I watched my house empty.  I was the last to leave, looking around a bare and dark loft, feeling an emptiness and a sadness I hadn’t felt since the first time I came home to the loft after my ex had moved out.  There was no turning back now.  There was no returning.  I let myself cry for a moment before turning off the last light and slowly closing the door. 

Since then, I have been driving.  Watching the landscape change and the highway signs fly by.  “Welcome to Alabama,” “Welcome to Tennessee,” “Welcome to Oklahoma,” “Welcome to New Mexico,” “Welcome to Arizona,” “Welcome to California.”  Driving through the deep south to the desert has been beautiful.  I have seen giant wind turbines, stretching up through the Oklahoma sky, fields of cotton in Alabama and Mississippi, huge red rocks in Arizona and shooting stars in the night sky.  I have left Atlanta, I have turned 30, I have changed.

I keep wishing you were with me.  I had dreams about us making this journey together.  I had dreams about moving in with you once I got to California, about being able to unpack and set up a home with you to hold my heart, heavy with leaving the South, heavy with leaving home.  I know it is ableism that keeps us separated still, patiently waiting to find a crack in the concrete, in which we can plant a seed together.  I know if we had different bodies, we would have found a home together already and possibly driven across country together, driving in shifts, listening to music, navigating roads.  I think about this all the time.

In many ways, I feel like I am not just leaving the city I love and have been formed in, but I am also leaving an able-bodied-washed version of myself behind, ready for the clearer—crisper—version of my crip self that lies ahead.  Excited to be fiercer and more bold.  Excited to hold more in letting go and remember the leaving as a hope sent out across state lines, shooting through the night sky, bold with everything that has every been possible.   

Love,

Mia

One of these things is not like the others

Friday night:

1) Eat a pear
2) Vacuum the house
3) Mop floorboards
4) Get a video call and find myself web-cammed into a party Auckland, New Zealand at 2am, and hang out in a (slightly drunk) circle of people I love/people I’ve never met and listen to music/sing along together from two different cities, across the Tasman sea.

<3 I miss you guys.