In Summer I am possible. In Summer all our wildest freedom dreams be reality. In Summer I can fly, I am flying, crying joyful liberation tears cradled in the lap of open air. But the fall soon come; and on its heels a certain Thursday night phone call that always brings me back to earth. Then, I weep. - Me, every year at this same time.
I often write about the fact that I am a dweller. I dwell. Usually, I write about this tendency in social media posts where I lament that there’s a journal entry or poem or essay that’s still making its way out of me and I can’t quite find the words to say all the things bubbling in my brain. This dwelling most often happens around my birthday when I’m trying to sum up another journey around the sun, while trying to unpack the impending end of Leo season, while trying to plan for the end of Summer one month later. I spin myself in knots trying to pin down every traitorous ending and most daysweeksyears I just don’t write anything. This also happens around the end of the calendar year. I’m terrible at end-of-year wrap-ups. Or, maybe it’s endings in general that I run from. Because this year I realized there’s another reason my spirit is always slow to recognize the end of Summer. Eleven years ago today my baby sister, Chelsea, died - and Summer ended for me permanently. My own personal equinox of grief.
October 18th, 2012 is when I got the call. But exactly two months earlier it was still Summer and my birthday and I was skydiving and crying for no reason at all except that I felt SO free. I think my body remembers this and, in keeping with the ways of grief, I’m mostly fine these many years since her leaving us. Until around October 10th or 12th or 15th each year and then I look up all of a sudden one day and notice that Summer’s over. This year it was the 12th. I want to tell you about the way it hit me but the only way I know how is to first tell you about poetry and pan-African organizing (which is really global organizing bc Black ppl be everywhere) and wholeness and music and my Summer.
Aja Monet’s debut album came out and I bought the wax record to go with the other 5 or 6 in my baby record collection and I’m making an experimental short film that’s 3yrs coming and I’ve been married for 10 years and I organized with Cop City Vote and I was inconsistent in my organizing and I fell into a loop of Tracy Chapman songs and Luther Vandross songs and the Tramaine Hawkins LIVE medley (the 24min. cut is the only version I acknowledge) and I’m waiting in joyful hope for the day transphobic/homophobic church folk have their ‘come to jesus’ moment and actually become changed like the song says and in the meantime I’m making progress on a womanist praxis rooted in actual wholeness not that tap water talking point *some of my folks* like to tout in name only and Black August is always my favorite time of year even when I'm just watching other ppl’s Capoeira practice online or rereading that AfroFutures syllabus I made for the 2017 solar eclipse and did I tell y’all that I’m building out a course of study for an independent PhD rooted in womanist maroon tradition bc fuck the academy but damn if I’m not a scholar at heart and on this #InternationalPronounsDay let it be known that I’m still a privileged cisgender woman but my pronouns are e/she/her bc wholeness and I’ll tell you more when the time is right and my mentor has been amazingly supportive but I still gotta put together a research committee/community of accountability (I cringe) and the poems have been POEMING y’all like frfr and I got stuff out on submission that makes me shake with pride bc the way that Bernice &family have shown up in my mouth(!!!) and writing poems is still fucking hard man and I been applying for all the fellowshipsgrantsawardspublicationsresidencies and I got into Baldwin for the Arts after coming back from The Stay at Nearview and MacDowell and I’m (hopefully) going to The Watering Hole in December but Elizabeth George Foundation still told ya girl ‘No, Thank You’ and a buncha others too and the losses still sting but I keep picking myself up again like I keep getting back up after falling out of my would-be organizing saddle bc I know nothing will work without collective action and I’m still building my practice and finding my political home and Noname’s new album came out and I listed to boomboom and oblivion and gospel? and beauty supply on repeat for like 5hrs and my dad announced he was coming to visit for the first time since pre-covid and I had a mini panic attack bc daddy’s girl and parental expectations and you’re never really grown and when I said Bernice &fam been in my mouth I should have also said that I been in my hoodoo bag which has been very tied to my matrilineal AfroCarolina (h/t Michelle Lanier) gullah geechee womanist practice and I’m still plugging away at the novel and the cultural criticism and the health&wellness bc I almost forgot I have Lupus and I really be doing too much sometimes and health insurance is a shit deal and I read the original chapbook of Melania Luisa Marte’s Plaintains And Our Becoming two(?) years ago so you know I was hype when the full length dropped four days after my birthday and I wore a Coraline blue wig and smacked my lips real loud and nobody ever told me that friendship is so hard in adulthood not like capitalism or work in exchange for living or like I’m not blessed to have the best most down ass people in my life but like I have so many words I wanna say and love I wanna send/give/extend and there’s never enough time but somehow me and the #1 bestie in New Jersey been going strong since ‘94 and two of my dearest writer friends had book releases this Summer which felt like two vicarious book babies for me (maybe I’m a book Auntie now?) and there’s countless other irl and internet friends that I try and fail to find the words for but the struggle is a beautiful one and I’m back drinking my water like I should and the saltwater told me to tell you that South Carolina gullah folk been just as much radical muslims as they been radical christians and who gon tell the purists that it was all Black subversion anyway and how ya girl gon observe Ramadan and Lent next year when they overlap I need HELP and I been trying to read the same book for over a month and my brain just refuses to sit still so spirit can do its work and I still got many letters-postcards-love that ain’t been mailed out since June and nary a social media seasonal recap has happened YET but I’m alive and it seems like I’m gonna be here for a while longer and I’m writing this dispatch as an excercise in the long poem which has been on my mind lately but craft class aside it’s probably time to stop avoiding the point of this very long thing which is really to tell you how I know Summer’s over and we’ve entered Fall. The answer is all the death.
The loss of Chelsea is what radicalized me. I’d never been very politically conscious and then suddenly here I was grieving a sister at the same time Black people were grieving Trayvon Martin. And before him Rekia Boyd. And then Eric Garner. And Miriam Carey before him. And then Mike Brown. And then Tamir Rice. And then Korryn Gaines.
A lot of what I’m calling “radicalized” was really just displaced grief. Which is not always helpful. I spent the first 5yrs after Chelsea’s death not really facing it. So when I also began to spend that time trying to be an organizer, my intentions were good but it never really stuck. I said that I wrote that neverending story up above to avoid the point of this blog post. But maybe that’s only half true. I’m also trying to be clear. Sure in my own mind that I’m not mixing my metaphors or conflating my own personal grief on this day with the collective griefs I’ve been feeling for a while now… the most obvious of which have been all over the news and our social media feeds this past week: Sudan, and Haiti, and forced births and Black maternal mortality, and more police shootings and subsequent cover ups and prospective cop cities, and mass homelessness, and untreated mental health disparities, and on top of all that… the genocidal bombing of Gaza.
And so, of course, I’m trying to be better than I have been in the past. Not pretending to be in the trenches where I’m not. But also not gaslighting myself into the misbelief that my words hold no power. Did I not just say that I been in my hoodoo bag which is to say that really we have all the power because Fall is about death, yes… a death which must be properly mourned and felt and grieved for the loss of what was and what could be and what SHOULD HAVE BEEN were it not for these evil white supremacist warmongers, and that mourning will never stop… But some days or weeks or years into this mourning we will come back around to Summer again because seasons and cycles and the nature of the struggle. So in addition to this reflection about baby sis, I also want to offer something towards the getting through this moment of grief and better preparing ourselves for the next fights. Fortifying ourselves for the opportunities to come.
But it’s all tied to the moment I realized Fall hits me every year on 10/18 and I really thought I could unpack both things at once. Do all that labor in a single post (the part of me that thought I could be an organizer and grieve my sister at once, probably). But I’m seeing that it’s 11:45est and I’ve spent the whole day in the same spot just trying to say this much. Have I mentioned that I dwell? And so maybe it’s okay that I didn’t finish because it’s not a race. And bc Chelsea deserves her own space and I want to be clear for what I have to say tomorrow. But there will be more tomorrow.
Long Live Summer. Boycott Fall.
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