The Ordinary Circulation of Disaster

This will not be my usual address. Nor is the day in which this finds your inbox usual. I assume blood has been shed. Our state wields its billions through batons. Bullets, however, we fund. I assume you have done the usual reposts; I surely did. A veteran ICU nurse? How much more can we rewrite the promise of life expectancy?

More mothers will die giving birth. More children in Jamaica will watch the flesh around their mouths and noses eat itself slowly, trying to forget the storm. In turn, it makes them hate their reflection. What little is left of it they see as they spit-shine dust off shattered jewelry boxes—the last thing they saved—clutching to cubital fossae as hands grip soggy birth records. Gold-dripped Americans with camera phones ask them to smile and pick up their smaller, hungry, usually weeping, waddling siblings. They’ll be back in April, maybe.

This is the ordinary circulation of disaster.

Where does one place their sensitivity? For it is not abundant; it is rather our most scarce moral resource. Bloodshed, I say. I say it and you do not flinch. You know what it exactly looks like. To some, it is a clot—remnants of a great night with a big, strong man. How strong could he be? I am staring at a puddle of my waste. A waste of liquid, life, and love. There it goes, swirling with the curve of the Western Hemisphere. East is least, west is best. You said it in high school, but now it feels like rhythm—keeping you out of the loop of your own humanity, orbiting.

This is how geography becomes habit.

Where the sun rises, the cells of a wayward life spread out in the funny four-way seam of Gap jeans, every fiber white, crimson, and darkening with each second of exposure.

If it is not a clot of blood on your first period, is sensitivity in your heart after two hours of YouTube body-camera footage? Is it watching pedophiles get slammed to the ground, scammers of the elderly in the slammer? Is it the sliver of your mind space saved for JonBenét Ramsey or the Osage murders?

This is how attention gets rationed.

The connective tissue of empathetic storytelling stretches like a shitty fitted sheet across a plasma TV. Corners snapping loose, fabric too thin to hold, forever tugged into place. You’re trying to move your mind out of old rooms, but you keep packing your most precious tools in flimsy, disposable wrapping, mistaking coverage for care. Think again before you call that change. A turned page, a scratched record, or a dancing pole offers us a truer vision of the human experience. They are unclean, but hygenic—they ask the body to stay.

Slowness, it turns out, still teaches.

I never played gun games, or really watched SpongeBob. It is funny. but it wasn’t worth the fundamental inability to focus—your tapping leg through every period and slurs hanging off your lips. Our conditions are, in fact, conditional.

What we call disorder is often adaptation.

I unweave my anxiety with every prayer, unearth my forgotten days, months, years in each stretch, unburden my spirit of shame. I am ashamed.

Naming it does not absolve me, but it does locate me.

To name it, however, places me ten steps ahead of where I was yesterday. And yes, I love to get ahead. Much of my absence is explained by that fact—my capricious, yet prideful, war with productivity as we know it. I would have thrived as a paper-only student; alas, blue light roars through my weeknights. I will lose the battles with success if it continues to rely on an online presence. I simply do not care enough.

Visibility has mistaken itself for value.

After sixteen years, it is my last phase of continuous education. I will miss the friends the most, as I cherish the unique memories the classroom grants you. I am happy to move ahead of time, of its relenting, crashing waves. It folds in on itself to me. Memories meet the present. People meet ghosts. Family meets your fears. I choose to use this THIRD SPACE for me now, again. No more packaged commentary.

No more translating grief into digestible insight.

I write to imagine and experiment. I write radically. I write to piss you off and make you cry and make you pay—and push me, and pull you in.

Welcome to THIRD SPACE, 8,000 people strong, in 2026.

———

I have no interest in asking why good things happen to bad people. They already do. That critical word—happens—lets understanding escape into a dive of deathly fantasy. What occurred may not return. Instead, it will rhyme to its own song.

May that be the smacking hum of first kisses under moonlight on the last night of summer, jeeps pulled in backward, treading the sands of underage time. Oh, how you miss the days before statutory language enters desire.

Before you realize the narrow pigpen that is the street of the Modern Metro City at nightfall. Even the lit halls only accentuate your whorishness, your shame. The meek puddles—milk, rainbows, sludge—dare you to dredge through them. Enjoy your reflection. Lap it up. Or light it on fire. Eat under the flame like a Baked Alaska.

In food, you find memory—of friends. Your favorites are ranked by how many meals you’ve shared. Food only feels good with friends, with family, with freedom. So you continue to eat and pray over your food.

Love is more difficult. There, you struggle. Finally accepting that each of us is a star, a burning ball of light, it feels like you are at last equal. Rejecting yourself as above or below others becomes an exercise dreaded more than a five-minute plank—the swirl of vanity, humility, fear, and degradation churning in your belly.

It is easier to imagine that a life alone will be unfilled. But that assumes we even get the choice to evaluate life. Instead, we know where it ends: six feet underground. Bones gathered by the trembling hands of grandchildren, grandmothers buried with blunts and roses. Your death is not yours. It means nothing to you, and everything to us.

My grandmother left me five pounds of home-grown weed, disgruntled voicemails, and eighteen hundred dollars. I’ll take whatever wealth I can get.

Now my days are Propaganda and Persuasion, Harvard and Native Lands, Made to Feel: Race and Affect in the Americas, and Introduction to Public Preaching. A good use of $59,320 in tuition. I will find love in the texts I read, the songs I sing from my diaphragm, and the real smiles that slowly grow into signature wrinkles.

To being older. To the beginning of my end at Harvard. I am ready to speak a new language, to usher in a new chapter, and to ask—with all my heart—that we each be kind to ourselves. Pray for peace. Work toward longevity. Ask better questions. Get this novel idea off the ground.

Until next time,

M.E.D.

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Editor’s Note:

This piece expanded as it was being written. Memory, appetite, shame, education, and inheritance often fold into one another. Rather than discipline it back into a single register, I let the work remain cumulative. Enter where you can, stay as long as you’re able.