051: ruptured motion

Before you scroll down to this month’s dispatch, I’d love to direct your attention to The Sameer Project. They are currently doing life-saving work in Gaza. If you are in a position to direct funds their way, I urge you to do so.

The year ran in rivulets, and at times I felt like I stood on its banks, watching time hurtle by. If I had to pick a word to sum up 2025, I’d choose motion. As in, moving across time and space, but also migrating away from / towards. I lived in motion, and thought about what it does to us. The us that relocates whether by force or by choice. The us that clambers out of a depression trench. The us that chooses motion despite inertia’s appeal. The us that awakens to inconvenient truths and is permanently changed by these realizations.

Last summer, in Portland, I walked by the Willamette, held a newborn, and sang karaoke with one of my closest friends in a college’s student union HQ late into the night. In Dearborn, I walked into the frame of a long diasporic movie and moved through streets and communities that had audienced themselves into a third culture of their own, alive with its own language. During my stay, I watched the city become a simmering cauldron on the brink of a boil peppered with white supremacists who barged into Mayor Abdallah Hammoud’s town hall demanding “their” “country” back. In Houston, I found fragmentation among a community that had misplaced its true north. Back in New York, there was familiarity. The ease of friends’ living rooms and the creeping, quiet, but palpable anxiety of the growing affordability crisis glazing many facial expressions on the subway, at the store, at the pharmacy, behind the barricaded shampoo at Walgreens, in the Whole Foods’ self-checkout line.

In 2025, a lot of motion tended toward hyper-scrutiny, often resulting in fragmentation. Psyops, in-fighting, self-cannibalization flourished in the sludge of murky rhetoric. The world’s horrors moved with accelerating urgency. We had never been easier to surveil and track, and yet rather than beget order —albeit coerced—all signs pointed to increased entropy. The airwaves filled with noise. So I sought obsessions to drown out the chatter.

I listened to I remember, I forget on loop sinking into Yasmine’s voice. The music filled the air with distant memories of the Mediterranean Sea. A sea that never felt further away. Devastating, sad, ethereal, a reckoning of above-mentioned