sending you a four page letter

Dear Stacey,

It’s your day, your 6^th day of death and 39^th year of life Next year you will be forty, would have been forty, I did the math just now. Fucking wild.

I woke up earlier than I ever used to, made coffee, threw on my booty shorts that say I’M SORRY on the ass and went out and watered my survival garden of potatoes, onions,greens and herbs, I was just going to do that and then I was like well maybe I’ll just put in the bergamont I bought at Plants for Palestine Sunday, then I said fuck it and dug in the four Paul Robeson tomatoes plus moving around the volunteers that came up from last year. I mulched the onions to keep the water deep, because it was 48 degrees out last week and yesterday it skyrocketed to 96. It will plunge again Thursday and rain for five days, so it’s a good time today for me to make my way out to the farm and lay down landscaper cloth so we can solarize the beds where people heroically weed wacked and macheted down feet of weeds this weekend, plus do an early first nettle cut so they can come back for round two and before they seed all the way out in this feels like 105 degree “record challenging” heat.

I also did the heroic climate crisis task of getting my good air conditioner successfully installed in my living room, by one of the few outlets in my place that takes three prong, to keep my apartment cool enough for survivability if I keep the lights mostly off. This is for me and my cat. Zuri just turned 13, can you believe it? She’s ok, she didn’t eat a lot yesterday because the heat always throws her off, but she is fluffy, cunty, soft and sharp as ever. Everyone still says queen when they see her. She is hyperthyroid and on a urinary special diet she feels mixed about but she gets churru twice a day with her pills. Disabled and aging, like us.

Stacey, sometimes I feel like all I do is write letters to dead people. It’s not true but god damn is it a truth. It’s also true that you’re six years gone, and for the past two months I was on tour with a book whose first section is an on-one mammoth series of grief odes, elegies, love notes and mourning songs to and for you, and the two weeks I have been home from the last leg of it (for now) healing a concussion (which I got when a six foot Scandinavian ass Minnesota classic white man bumped into me leaving Amtrak in MSP “I didn’t see you”, my ass,) I have been trying to write up the epic tour journal notes I kept as I criss crossed North America speaking of you, in mask-required rooms of old kin and new who wanted to be together, into my promised monthly substack. And I have not been able get it out. It kept getting stuck and stupid and too thick, not what I wanted to say. My head, and my head, and too tired. And maybe this letter was what was waiting instead.

Stacey, everything I do today and in general comes from what I learned from and with you, what we learned together from doing it together. I think often, used to teach in uni visits when they existed, how we were prefiguring the crip apocalypse and the crip response to the apocalypse way back, like 2009/2010. Burying the paper and markers in the jar in the roll-up-able rotary between our East Bay houses. Pooling our survival knowledge about how to keep insulin cool in flower pots with dry ice and how to adjust generator settings to keep a vent going, and it was both absolutely real yet and not exactly how fucking real it would get, has gotten. Look at me, us, 17 years after we started those conversations, Super el nino, strait of hormuz 60 day starvation oil cut off, me with 600 masks in a hutch in my apartment, the good p100, the multiracial BIPOC lead all disabled mask bloc, the tentative disabled/ ND BIPOC grief and lung herb and whimsy farm plot, my Medicaid paid for Black surgeon created titanium cyber hip friend giving me another act, the food I planted to feed myself, the everyday sharing of cars and ears and did you see this on youtube. In the queue is an essay I want to write, coming from a conversation a comrade colleague and I had last month where I talked about, vast generalization but still, tour made me feel how I dislike some of the ways DJ is conceived and practiced in some places of coastal elite cities as time goes by. i am glad to be here where it is DJ without people using that word all the time, without the big pronouncements or visibility but DJ in the daily, the regular, the unseen. it’s how you, we did it. we were working class disabled queer Asian mixed kid femmes, doing everyday extraordinary shit, you throwing your sneakers down to ramp a step or saving time by pretending you couldn’t talk when you couldn’t be bothered with a stranger’s bullshit.

What else is new? I think you would really like Kehlani, how she has matured as an artist and she came out, she topped Shane on L Word Gen Q!!! (Do they have tv in the spirit plane?) I’m going to stand outside the fence at Roots Picnic along with everyone else who doesn’t have $300 to listen to Kelalni’s set . You would lose your mind at Cain Culto- another raised evangelical neurodivergent mixed kid from the Southeast?! I’m letting Ganesh DJ for me on youtube right now and that’s what came out. I put on several years old chroma pink Colourpop $6 eyeshadow over my eyes that cried a little, without washing them, for you.

Memorialization is weird, esp as time goes by and public memory fossilizes and fades. In some places you appeared as a cleaned up desexualized good girl sanitized warrior, not the one who loved trash tv, took accidentally too many edibles and watched 9 Marvel movies in one weekend on Moviepass, dated wildly and older than you,. You who loved corny country gospel and screaming at the J Cole concert, lover of the corniest pop shit unapologetically. the one who fucked up, prayed in the middle of the night, made mistakes, was a seeker. A supercrip not a regular ass mystery. Mapping the stories and histories of DJ is really fucking complicated. People died, people are complicated, people have different experiences and memories of who did what when, a lot of people who were around at the beginning are working class/ poor/ rural/ did not publish online, and don’t get named. People are complex, mica layered, not a simplicity.

I’m scrolling back through our texts that appear on this computer I bought almost three years after you died, that somehow show up anyway. You say I love you dear one. Just want to love on you. I tear up again, you loved me before I loved myself the way I do now. I left that ex who did not wish me well, five years ago a few months ago. I every day blessed now, whispering thank you I didn’t die in that relationship. That I wake up everyday free, loved free. That I can have the simple not simple miracle of being autistic and waking up alone and unbothered in my own house, not having to apologize frenetically wheels spinning deeper in mud ground. That the ones in my life love me unmasked easy. That I survived it. You loved me free before I knew how to love myself free, one example of that truism of that it’s not always you have to love yourself before anyone else can love you. Sometimes someone had to show you a certain kind of love before you can know how to love yourself that way.

I’m scrabbling through the corporate archive aide-memoire adaptive device? of socials and clouds and backups, looking for evidence of us, the deep cuts, the rare groove. some of the photos I want are just in my head, like us in your living rooms, us in the meetings, us drinking cocktails from a igloo and you asking me to cut up your pizza. How the fuck does Deathless by Ibeyi come right on at that moment, ok sis I hear you.

(tw for non graphic partner violence mentions)

Grief and memory are wild as time goes by. Sitting here I can remember the bomb blast crater heart hear the few months, when covid was new, lockdown so Kiyomi left flowers on a bench twenty feet away and said I wish I could hug you. I stayed with my turned abusive ex who had moved out two months before because no one was allowed to hug me but them and I needed someone who would hug me, who would hold me as I woke up and started crying over you after that moment where I didn’t remember yet.

They still left a month and change later. Somehow I wasn’t allowed to see a friend outside with masks on or got in trouble going into the tamale spot when two people were in there but they could fly on a plane to New York. It was a blessing in disguise, I guess; we started falling apart again right after they left and I had all the quiet of that big empty house to start to be able to hear myself think again, not just be swamped by every single need and wish of them, always ask for permission, constantly say I’m sorry. I could cook what I wanted for dinner. Risk having long screamed conversations through a thick spit filled cloth mask, me parked in a car, my friend posted up in their powerchair on the curb, or pulled up to a friend’s backyard parking spot and we talked on phones from 10 feet away. I still look like the saddest most destroyed bitch in the whole world in the pictures but a couple months into the photostream something starts coming back into my eyes. I bought clothes they wouldn’t approve of, lace, compression tops, a binder, didn’t tell them. Listened to music they wouldn’t like. Drove to an island that doesn’t have cops on it or a lot of people that they would’ve found a way to veto. Could say what I wanted on the phone without lowering my voice or walking out tense wondering what they’d heard, what I would get grilled about and be in trouble for, how soon it would be til we got into another fight.

Anyways. There’s the intersection of that COVID disabled on disabled IPV story and the story of the first months after your death, that it is impossible for me to tell the story without telling both, though I kept silent about the way my relationship got abusive in early lockdown for years. How I touch on how Stacey you also knew disabled on disabled IPV of a different kind, razed and fled a life you’d built with public eyes on it in 2012, cut back that rosebush so hard and guess what it bloomed again. Another story told and untold. You probably were the wings beneath my wings that helped me walk out the burning house of my own disabled on disabled partnership gone to hell and survive the catching on fire. You knew the world of disabled on disabled love loyalty never leave, gone septic.

And there’s the memories of the first years after you passed, how frenetic the memorialization and how deep the early COVID physical isolation was we did it inside. Instead of having someone bring us a casserole, five of us sat in our bed snarls (well, at least I did) screenshotting and saving as many of your facebook posts and tweets and shit from your phone as possible because we were worried Facebook or family could disappear it. All those things still in a google folder we should probably move to proton ASAP, or download onto a hard drive or print out and stored in a fireproof filing cabinet. The syllabus Alice and I made in a few days of grief bomb firecyclone hyperfocus of every single you thing you’d ever done that we wanted to compile, stick on a wall with a knife, chin up at it and say, go read what our girl did. The public campaigns, the hashtags we brainstormed like #BobaForStacey, the Google doodle year oh my christ ;). the grief gatherings on Zoom, Staceyfest. 2024 when I finally went back to NorCal and I finally got COVID from the FLIRT wave. The years where I made some big plan, I was going to drive across the state to have sad boba with a friend who loved you too or get my memorial tattoo for you, and instead my guts rebelled or I couldn’t leave the couch. In general grandiose plans for your day do not work out, spirit conduiting through my body has other plans.

I’m not harshing on all those years of public work we did to make sure you wouldn’t be forgotten. They try to kill us when we’re alive and after we’re dead they try to erase we ever existed. Your life was epic and ordinary, epic because of how regular brilliant you were. I am glad for the work we did, do, to fight to keep your regular ass beautiful self alive along with all the smart, regular shit you wrote, said, thought, did. As years go by and we go from a few boom years of disabled visibility to something holy shit else entirely. We all face erasure, disabled BIPOC in particular, and this moment is so fucking weird. I feel like I’m sitting at the crux of both how epic and unforgettable our collective story of DJ feels, how much wild shit we did and how we tilted the earth, and how fragile and eraseable, at once. I am glad we have written you into metal and wood and posters and celebrations and syllabi. There’s just something also, to the grief memory being six years out, to the reflection being able to be more internal and personal.

bluekaza posts a screenshot of “ when your friend dies like jesus on her 33rd birthday,” says my poems hold so many of us so tight. I guess I succeeded. I wanted to write poems that held us tight the way you held me tight. tight and free enough to breathe.

two weeks ago today i flew home on a tiny bumpy shitty jet from the last leg for now of tour, my first time touring in person for six years after a lifetime of roads. every access script of every show has me talking about how when I was doing the months of free labor setting up tour is, satchel at one point said oh this tour isn’t just a tour, huh, it’s one big series of disabled grief rituals isn’t it. on april 19, I was standing in the word is change bookstore in Brooklyn when I realized it was LL’s death anniversary. when I realized the store was across the street from an apartment that was the qtpoc rage in the streets all day, party all night house twenty years ago, the one i famously once had sex in for 24 hours straight. packed crowd, one of my favorite shows, I said to them, added to the script, yeah it’s true this is a grief ritual for y’all, but I am part of the y’all. this tour was also the grief ritual I needed.

It’s six years since the day I woke up to three broken heart texts. I’m six months into growing out my undercut of fifteen years. It’s five inches long and unruly, only looks good slicked back, puffs up uncontrollably, is hot and sensory hell, I am this close to shaving even part of it off again. beloved friend says naw, keep growwwwwwing.

Day one of tour, two days after Alice’s memorial, Lola walked up to me sitting “backstage” in the office at the SF disability cultural center. I’m nervous, haven’t left Philly or even my neighborhood for almost half a year before getting on the plane that week, haven’t performed a full set of poetry live for years, don’t know if anyone will come, don’t know if I still got it. They say I have something for you, hand me a small ring box tied with ribbon, watercolor metallic colors. Inside is a Stacey quarter.

I travel with you in my purse’s inside pocket since then. Talisman, good luck charm, touchstone my nails find. You travel with me, with us. Memory sticks around, is in an evolving relationship. Grief sticks. Transforms.

This day I spend remembering the alive you, this day I spend talking to your spirit when she comes to rest with us more closely, this day I spent working on the residency in your honor that is in year 2 now and doing disabled climate collapse survival work. This day I go get an ice cream and cancel my meetings because that was you, too.

the IN CONCLUSION is, there is never any final end to all of this- grief, love, memory- but in this mass disabled grief collectivity, year six of you being gone, things shifted in ways I didn’t know they would. The grief is held different. My needle can move to a different track, not stay in just only the one. We kept going through the wreckage. I see us, more white hair but holding our babies, books, all the things we grew. I’m glad for all our frenetic years of making sure people in the big world knew about you, goddamn it. That continue. And I am grateful to sit here on the edge of my bed, as this world keeps turning, having a quieter less public Instagram ding grief day. Sitting with my love for you, that continues between here and the ancestral plane. We did not give up. We made it to another side. More rivers to cross.

What does it mean to keep remembering?

See you around kid. See all of us around.

xo

Leah

(ps: tour diary part 2 still on its way, watch this space, but this for now.)

(pps, if you read one thing Stacey wrote, start here.)

“Ancestorship, like love, is expansive and breaks manmade boundaries cast upon it, like the nuclear family model or artificial nation state borders. My ancestors are disabled people who lived looking out of institution windows wanting so much more for themselves. It’s because of them that I know that, in reflecting on what is a “good” life, an opportunity to contribute is as important as receiving supports one needs. My ancestors are people torn apart from loves by war and displacement. It’s because of them I know the power of building home with whatever you have, wherever you are, whoever you are with. My ancestors are queers who lived in the American South. It’s because of them I understand the importance of relationships, place and living life big, even if it is dangerous. All of my ancestors know longing. Longing is often our connecting place.

I believe that our ancestors laugh, cry, hurt, rage, celebrate with us. Most importantly, I believe they learn as we are learning, just as we learn from them. We grow knowledge and movements with them. We crip futurism with them. We demand and entice the world to change the way things have always been done, with them. We change ourselves with them. They learn through us. When we become ancestors, we will also continue to learn.”- Stacey Park Milberm