anti-ordinary.

What will sustain you with any difficulty in your art is your love for that art. So if you’re having problems with your art, you’ve got to re-immerse yourself in your love of it … I always tell anyone who’s a writer who’s like “I got a writer’s block” like, fifty novels in a hundred and fifty days. You will be reminded of why you love this shit. You won’t even get to fifty — no, the love will return. I think part of the problem is that we think that we can muscle through this shit … if you grew up like me, powering through shit was the way we survived. You’re like, I’m two-hundred dollars in debt? I can work thirty-six hours straight. Art doesn’t respond to that. Art does not respond to the whip. Our bodies do, but art isn’t about our bodies. And so you’ve got to move away from the “powering through it,” it isn’t going to work.

I love lipstick. I want to write an essay about the politics of lipstick. I like lipstick that’s deep, deep red. I like lipstick that’s purple, lipstick that’s black and dark for when I want to dress up my melancholy. I like sharing lipstick with sisters. and I laugh at boys that think I wear lipstick for them to notice, I laugh, lipstick is an art you can’t ever understand. from picking out a color, testing it on the inside of my wrist, pursing my lips during the application of it. I like when I kiss a baby and leave lipstick on their cheek, when you hug someone and leave lipstick on their shirt, when it gets on your teeth and you use your tongue to get it off, when you sleep in lipstick and wake up with it on your pillow case. in 1997 mama left for Ethiopia to see her mama for the first time in 12 years. I was six and I cried the entire way home from the airport. and when we came home there on the kitchen table was the teacup mama had been drinking out of. at the bottom a sip of tea and black cardamom seeds. and there on the rim of the cup the lipstick imprint of my mama’s kiss.

Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence.