flying

from m archive by alexis pauline gumbs

they were addicted to things like hydrogenated soybean oil and mutant chicken. their memories were linked to the tastes of things the studies said were poison. and so they bought other things, things that felt older to them. but they continued to trust the source of the studies, which was also the source of the earlier poisons. we can only understand this through the concept of addiction, which was an ancient condition of being that was characterized by lying to oneself and others in order to continue behavior that was repeatedly harmful to oneself and others.

they really thought they knew what home tasted like. what healthy was. how to cleanse their palates. there were brilliantly marketed packages that disavowed the past which were very attractive to people trying to distance themselves from the mistakes of their parents but who didn't have the bravery to distance themselves from the system that created their parents. they ate these new and different things while they pretended not to be their parents.

they thought they were tasting the future (which for some people tasted like cardboard and for other people tasted like sugar), but they were not. they were avoiding the necessary bitter tastes of the most accessible greens. to say the general palate was unbalanced would not be quite saying it. how could they have known what this would mean after?

the only one who made it had a direct connection to those women who craved the crunch of eating dirt. who sensed their need for iron. and acted.


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they dug in their memories for the one day. for some of them it was a couple of days per month. rock-bottom days. the days in their lives when the world had already ended. they thought back. and asked:

what did we each do then? on the day that everything went wrong. when transportation and communication technologies conspired against us individually. when we personally couldn't get out of bed, dehydrated with crying. when we didn't ask for help. when we hurt the people we loved. when the sun died. when we lost everything. when we lost exactly who we needed to save. when we knew there would be no tomorrow. what did we each do then? how did we keep breathing past it  (because we are the ones that did). they dug for those memories and stacked them in a row.

that's how. that's how we learned to get through this.


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at some point the work of pretending we weren't going to die, that our children weren't going to die, that our deaths and lives weren't going to be forgotten, became unsustainable. it was hard enough to just breathe and metabolize. to find something to metabolize. to find people to metabolize near. now some people call it the true end of whiteness, when the world could finally operate based on something other than fear of blackness, of being, of death. but at the time all we knew was the story had run out. all the stories. of staying young to cheat death. of thinking young people wouldn't die. of immortality via "making a difference." of genetic imprint as stability. of stacking money and etching names on buildings. people used to do those things before. not to mention that they would not mention death and would hide the dying away and strive to protect the eyes of the children who already knew everything.

at some point. all the dead being here anyway and all of us here being obviously doomed, we let go of that particular game. and started breathing. and saw our hands.

we let go.

i felt like i could fly.


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on a screen the size of a wall there was a gif of amazon warriors cutting off each other's breasts to better hold the weapons they needed.

through the speakers audre lorde's voice was on loop. the only recorded reading of the cancer journals.

she looked at her reflection, lit by candle in the small pool, and thought back to yesterday when her sister comrades had surrounded her singing, i'm gonna lay down my burdens. . .

she blew out the candle and began to pray. may that which is not mine fall away. may that which hinders my love leave of its own accord. may that which blocks my circulation dissolve in this moment. may who-i-am-not run through this river back to the ocean. may who-i-am emerge clear as birth.

she cried during the hours she was in there. she squatted, sweated, moaned. she bled and defecated and urinated and screamed. she scrubbed off layers of her skin. she pulled out most of her hair. and at some point she blacked out, exhausted. and the dark room held her.

the next morning when they came she looked rather like a baby bird. tufts of hair, raw skin, swollen eyes, dark red and naked. the midwives stung her with tea tree and she gasped. they wrapped her in cotton and she sighed. they sprayed a mist of jasmine over her and she knew.

she knew she could fly.