turd ferguson

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city.

...I find the grammar of justice maddening. It's always 'rendered,' served,' or 'done.' It always swoops down from on high - from God, from the state - like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth's final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one another, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia 'justice' has meant both 'retribution' and 'equality,' as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.

For as long as I can remember, this has been one of my favorite feelings. To be alone in public, wandering at night, or lying close to the earth, anonymous, invisible, floating. To be 'a man of the crowd,' or, conversely, alone with Nature or your God. To make your claim on public space even as you feel yourself disappearing into its largesse, into its sublimity. To practice for death by feeling completely empty, but somehow still alive. It's a sensation that people have tried, in various times and places, to keep women from feeling. Many still try. You've been told a million times that to be alone and female and in public late at night is to court disaster, so it's impossible to know if you're being bold and free or stupid and self-destructive. And sometimes practicing for death is just practicing for death.