Girlpocalypse

I know the birds I eat a few grapes I wear glitter to the function I love abundantly I say what I think and feel and want I ask my people to do the same

I listen when my body says Pay attention Try one more time Stay in the sun a while longer Sit near the water This is good Trust it is good

To those who have been here Thank you For witnessing For conjuring For conspiring in The ever-unfolding Tale of my liberation

My love is an overfilled cup of tea. It’s sticky sweet with honey, spilling from the mug I’ve picked, steaming and pooling unceremoniously on the countertop.

It is hot with the memory of being told that my feelings seem to be further along than yours. I hold myself back from saying it because I cannot put it back into its kettle once decanted. I flinch in anticipation of a burnt tongue.

My love is messy and uncontainable. My love is restorative and delicious. My love is comfortable and uncomfortable.

I wonder how long I can keep my love to myself.

While I wait, I pour myself a cup.

Wander together

chasing comfort and the sun

Pass it on.

My mask protects you. Your mask protects me.

It says, “We’re already missing half a damn generation of us.”

It is what harm reduction looks like.

Your mask tells me that we already share values.

It says, “I want you to be safe. You belong here.”

It shows that you consider the way your actions impact others.

Your mask is a middle finger to the medical industrial complex.

It says, “A condom or an N95 can’t keep me from loving you.”

It is solidarity with vulnerable bodies.

Your mask tells me you are critical of the system.

It says, “I will not serve their agenda at the expense of lives.”

It is a rejection of mass disablement and white supremacist eugenics.

Your mask tells me how you show up for others.

It says, “I am in community with you.”

It is radical care shown to strangers.

My mask protects you. Your mask protects me.

It says, “Their norms do not serve us.”

...of all the songs I haven’t been able to stop looping since we met (and I’m embarrassed to tell you so I wrote about making it instead, which may be, in fact, more embarrassing)

“Quaranta giorni” The Italian phrase where we got the word quarantine The length of time a ship sat in the harbor Ensuring disease didn’t make it to shore Biblically, Noah’s time spent at sea in a great flood Or the forty days that one guy spent in the desert Forty days of restraint and discipline and self-denial (Couldn’t be me)

I checked my calendar and noticed It’s been forty days since we met Forty days of unhurriedly chasing what feels good Forty days of unspoken understandings Forty days of rejecting rules other people made Forty days following the lead of our tangled bodies Forty days of good mornings and sleep wells A plethora of soups, softness, cuddles, and curls

Since we met I have taken more photos I have written more poems I have wandered more I am finding this burning planet extra beautiful

Right now you are quarantined Waiting out the sniffles (in case they're the scary kind) So I write about the echo of you Savoring the warmth of the sun on my face As we people watch over crunchy snacks Basking in the comfort and ease of the way You hold my hand in a movie theater Of these heart-pounding, tingly feelings Of your hands at my waist, pressing me closer Of deep breaths as I quietly hold you Of kisses on foreheads, cheeks, necks, legs...

Forty days of prolific, bass-riddled, sexy playlists Full of sweet, excited longing and patient desire Knowing there is all the time in the world Always searching for a song that says what I can’t articulate In my latest song hyper-fixation, a falsetto voice sings, “You been haunting me for 40 days and 40 nights" It may be the best kind of “spooky” season I’ve known

I want to stop being so damn preoccupied with curating a picture of who I am and let folks know the real me over time. I often question if I know who that person even is. Trips around the world in the basement at the art institute help me try on different versions of them.

I leave this body and sip champagne in an 1895 Parisian parlor amid the echoes of a chanson recital in the adjacent salon.

I daydream about being independent enough to sit on planes and go to all the corners of the world I wanted to venture to alone if my pre-Lyme disease, able body were restored.

I take two steps and hop across oceans to see the light pouring though stained glass in an early 20th century bungalow. I look at the butler's quarters where the cooks and cleaners lived and remember that tending to a home, a job, and a life was not meant to be done by one person alone.

I feel surprised often about how much I have to sit and take elevators - there is a finite number of steps and levels to climb in me each day. I can't afford to borrow against the energy budgeted for tomorrow. 

Taking my breaks on the stair landings at work, I pour over the miniscule, intricate details of hand carved wood of handrails and grand entryways and think, "They just don't make things like they used to anymore." I don't know if I am talking about architecture or myself.

I want to walk and walk and walk and walk and run and dance and fuck and laugh and sing without my body being so utterly exhausted. I resent that I am forced to quit well before my heart and mind are ready to stop.

Perhaps projecting a version of myself is simply my way of hiding that I am hurting.

I carry around this full size anger and grief and continue to awkwardly shove it into miniature places.

A friendly reminder that doing anything fun in a disabled body takes SO much planning... (bathrooms? stairs? water? contingency plan for overheating? getting ADA seating wristbands just in case I can't be on my feet for a whole show? masks? profilactic COVID nasal spray? snacks? ear plugs?)

But most importantly HELP.

My people are so often silently caretaking and making things easier on me as I move through a day, even when I "seem fine," to save my limited capacity for as much joy as I can (read: standing, able bodied ppl loveeeee to stand lol).

One crisis away from...

-Burning every bra I own -Starting a band -Big chop / bi bob -Giving a shitty TED talk -A tattoo of the four stars on the Chicago flag -Moving to a house in the boonies on the edge of Lake Michigan somewhere and starting a leftist commune / dog rescue -Telling off my rude ass neighbor -Remaining indefinitely under the covers -Dropping $300 on a fancy meal because I finished "The Bear" -Picking a direction for an unplanned road trip -Colonizing more alley cats -Compiling my shit into a memoir, probably

Small victories...

-Painting my nails on my right hand well -Eating the produce before it gets slimy -Making a new friend as an adult -S H O W E R -Getting out of the car right as the song ends -No cavities, bitch -A single maneuver to parallel park the whip -Keys in the first lockbox I try -Propagating a plant to give to a loved one -A low pain day -Going on a hot girl walk -A meal with multiple food groups -Hobbies! That I don't monetize! -Successfully containing multitudes

The ancestors' genes really went hard on me.

Though I believe I fully present as a tall Filipina, I do have a white Dad. The most notable genes I got from Larry were depression, height, and some leg hair. The rest is from Florence.

I was too brown to fit in with my Dad's Iowan extended family; too white for my Mom's family. On my Dad's side, I always felt like my mom, brother, and I were these out of place, exotic signs of a brave new “post-racial” world that everyone patted themselves on the back for over lunches of mayonnaise-based "salads" and sour cream casseroles.

In nomenclature I was always deemed white by people who knew my parents, thanks to that good ol' one drop rule. To be fair, I was much lighter skinned as a child, but only because I was ordered to hide in the shade when outside. Even now, when I spend a day in the sun I hear the full cacophony of aunties and uncles in my head: "We didn't leave Cagayan for you to look like you spent the whole day working in the rice fields!" I was generously gifted colorism, but gate kept from owning Filipino culture. Lucky me. 

Once, at the beginning of a bright, shiny new Trump presidency and the resulting cultural emboldening of public bigotry, I once met one of those aunties for brunch when she visited Chicago. I recounted the tale of being shouted at by a man in his car to go back where I came from on my way to the restaurant. Without a beat she assured me, "Well that's okay though, you're white!"

By school age I had fully internalized this message that I must claim whiteness. I felt isolated and weird as the lone non-white girl in my Kindergarten class, and so badly wanted to be just like everyone else. When it came time for my very first school birthday party, my Mom asked me what kind of treats I wanted to bring in for my celebration. I reportedly said:

"Mommy, I want a white Barbie cake because I'm a white girl."

People told me I should be white, so I tried to be. I lived in white spaces for so long, all I wanted for most of my childhood was to be seen as one of them.

I went to the Philippines for the first time when I was sixteen. The motherland had these ideal island weather conditions, which meant that suddenly my hair (which I had been dutifully wearing straight like the card-carrying emo girl I was), suddenly had beautiful, beachy, vibrant curls. After that trip I threw out my Chi flat-iron and never straightened my hair again. That was the first way that I ever gave myself intentional permission to reconnect with my ancestral roots. (Get it?)

My Mom had waited to bring us to her home country until my brother and I were old enough to have our wits about us, since traveling with my six-foot tall white father as a mixed American family was dangerous. The difference between the way I was treated when I had proximity to my Dad's whiteness by strangers in America versus the Philippines was staggering. People in Manila and the countryside alike didn't like that my mom had "betrayed" her people by being with my Dad, so it was safer to leave him at home when we went to the market or ran errands. For the first time in my life, my brownness kept me safer.

At the same time, whiteness made me a commodity. On that trip, family, friends, and strangers would fully walk up to me, stroke my cheek, and say things like, "Oh my god, wow, you're a SINGER? Maganda, you're so tall and so light! The next Charice or Charlotte Church! You should be on television!" I was gifted bottles of face lightening cleansers and serums to take back to the states with me so I could keep my "white" skin beautiful.

This Summer at our family reunion photo shoot, the photographer was arranging the adult cousin generation for a group photo and asked us to sort ourselves by height. This of course erupted in overlapping cries of, "Send Anna to the back because she's SO tall!" The chaos peaked as my petite dietician of a cousin who was sitting in the row in front of me enthusiastically turned to everyone announcing, "Yeah, she's soooooo tall because Anna's WHITE!"

Without thinking, I shoved my arm next to hers: "OH YEAH? PLEASE, POINT AT THE PART THAT IS WHITE. SEE YOUR PUREBLOOD FILIPINO ARM NEXT TO MINE? HMMM, IT LOOKS TO ME LIKE MY 'WHITE' ARM IS SIGNIFICANTLY DARKER THAN YOURS, HOW STRANGE!"

In that moment, I felt the collective rage from all the years I was told I was "such a big girl," by my Filipino family. Giant. Fat. Huge. Tall. White.

It's not even like my cousins have more of a claim to Filipino-ness than I do. In fact, I, only a half Filipina, planned said reunion. I, a mere half-breed, am the only one of the cousins organizing in my city and creating Fil-Am spaces for Filipino music and community. Practically none of our cousin's generation even speaks Tagalog, as we were raised in the peak age of first-generation assimilation. Our families thought they were doing right by us by keeping us from the mother tongue. They didn't want us made fun of for our accents; didn't want us academically behind since the prominent thinking at the time was that introducing young children to multiple languages was detrimental to their development. They wanted us to be American, full stop. Though I now see that our parents were just doing what they thought was best, I used to be really angry that I was kept from Tagalog. Everyone always responded that my lack of language made sense, since I was "only half."

Somehow, my flat, wide nose is the smallest one of all sixteen grandchildren. My delicate disposition made me the only one of the cousins who has a recessive blood disorder called Thalassemia (similar to sickle cell anemia and common in southeastern and south Asian populations). I am half Filipina, but I have whole insecurities about the flatness of my face. I am only half, but have this Filipina medical problem that will leave me systemically tired and immunocompromised for my whole life.

For our cousin's Christmas Secret Santa exchange a couple years ago, I was given a 23-and-me DNA test. The results were predictable:

25% Germanic 25% British Isles 49% Filipino, indigenous to the Ilocos Norte & Cagayan regions 1% Spanish

The thing that shook me to my core was the way my 23-and-me reports outlining my risks for certain diseases and genetic conditions compared me to other "average caucasian women" of my age. Over and over again across the page, the data read:

Anna: WHITE WOMAN Anna: WHITE WOMAN Anna: WHITE WOMAN

Me. My brown ass. A woman who gets clocked for Mexican or Latina or Filipina by strangers everywhere she goes; a woman who gets so dark in the Summer she wears five separate shades of foundation depending on how sun-kissed she is; a woman who is yelled at from cars to go back where she came from -- which, if you were wondering, is Liberty, Missouri.

I'm not sure when exactly I decided to give myself permission to stop introducing myself with an asterisk: half white, half Filipina. Those words always felt demeaning to me - after all, I couldn’t divide myself into a brown half and a white half.

What I do know, is that I am utterly exhausted from this lifetime of being told who I am.

I look in the mirror and see a whole person. She rides the line between identities in a world that subscribes to binaries and therefore belongs to nothing. Not gay, not straight, but a secret third thing. Not so disabled that you see it at first glance, but not well enough to keep up with able bodied people. Not brown enough for the brown people, not white enough for the white people.

I look in the mirror at her lidded eyes and cascading jet black hair.

She is not "half" anything.

And she is abso-fucking-lutely not a white woman.

(CW: Disability, gender, sexual harassment, accidents, death, race, gun violence, seagulls)

“I'd make a pretty good beginning of a thriller right now,” I think to myself.

"Be careful so close to the edge," my partner says in response to my fluffy-haired selfies by the water.

I am considering how far to roll down the windows while I sit in my car to write something after an afternoon at the beach. (By write I really mean use speech-to-text. I have an autoimmune condition that causes pain and fatigue in joints and connective tissue as well Fibromyalgia which effects nerves and *also* causes pain, making typing difficult sometimes. Usually I will speak things out loud and go back and edit them a few sentences at a time.) I want to maximize airflow in my idle car by leaving as much space in the cracked-open windows as possible while still being narrow enough to keep a man's arm out. In my mind's eye I imagine a faceless stranger unlocking the doors, holding me at gunpoint, and demanding that I drive us away. Preventing this kind of situation is something I think about virtually every day.

I write most of my favorite things and take most of my favorite photos when my phone is running out of battery and I am in a race with time to get to a charger. Today I did both. Somehow, I made it to 25 without a whisper of ADHD until my self-diagnosis; a classic tale of the American public school system (capitalism) only serving those who it was designed to protect (white cis hetero men). I am a textbook case: a dysfunctional ADHD brain often saves its best ideas for when there's a deadline or something to avoid or a phone that's imminently going to die.

I realize what an wild tale, thriller, or headline I would make in this moment:

Local disabled, bi, Filipina, spoonie entrepreneur, singer, oversharing lady-Realtor Barbie found dead in the same body of water where she found a 26-year old man just a month prior.

I stop writing this because three men are congregating near my car.

One man is older, white, and likely transient. The other two are younger brown and Black men. I wonder if I'm going to need to drive away because their conversation is getting loud. They notice as I roll up my windows and check that the doors are locked. I reflect on whether my feelings of uneasiness are for the right reasons or if I need to check myself and my biases. I consider whether those two younger men are safe in present company and if I should stick around in case there's an incident perpetrated by the white man where my intervention or documentation is needed, or if CPD is called to "help." I decide to give it a beat and reassess. I check to see if I have any cash to give in case the first guy needs something to eat. I don't.

I look down to write a little more, and when I glance back maybe ten seconds later they have all moved down the sidewalk, away from me by the length of a couple storefronts. It becomes clear that they are just neighbors shooting the shit on a lovely Chicago day. That's why it was so loud among the three friends: their joy.

These men moved simply to let me know that I was safe. One of them meets my eyes in a way that says, "Hey fam, we see you." Another's eyes are a low-key apology: "Sorry if we scared the shit out of you!"

I feel safe. But I do keep my car windows up.

I reflect on the difference between the eyes of these men in my community who moved for my comfort, and how I remember the eyes of the fish fryer and butcher: Fellow Asians, two men in their late teens or early 20s whose eyes met mine in a way that made my body freeze and my heart race as I perused the flavors of Yan Yan at the end of the aisles. I was there with my mom at what she still called the Oriental store (it was like 2003 so we're letting it slide).

When I recounted to my Mom how these men chopping fish in the back had been ogling my ten-year-old body, she told me that the thing I should do is meet their eyes to let them know that I see them watching me and that I'm not afraid. "But what if I am?"

She clarified: "That's okay, all that matters is that they think you're not scared of them." She explained to me that this tactic could take away some of their power.

I have such gratitude for that lesson from my Mom. I think of her each time I meet the eyes of men who are taking up space that isn't theirs, when I feel their eyes on me in that way that makes my body freeze and my heart race. I look at men in public and hope they cannot tell that I am faking my bravery.

AOK was last heard from by her partner who observed her location on a map at the Lakeshore path between Foster and Hollywood beaches. Upon noticing her remaining 5% battery life Anna reported that she would check in when she reached her car and got to a charger. She was never heard from again, just like Noah Enos, whose body she had discovered in the north branch of the Chicago River at a Pride event on June 17th, one month prior.

Instead of Dead Anna, the story of my evening alone at the lake concludes with uneventfully sitting in the car for an hour writing this story, perhaps feeling some kind of hope for the crisis that is toxic masculinity and misogyny in America in 2023. It's much less interesting than the true-crime podcast version, but that's okay.

I will always carry Noah with me, I think. I haven't yet figured out how to grieve for a stranger whose life was lost so senselessly. We should all have the chance to live a long, full life. Young people should make it to their 30th birthday.

Please consider sharing your location with those who are invested in your safety. Travel with your phone charged and a spare battery. Make sure someone knows where you are supposed to be. Send your people "I love you," messages when you get home.

I am pleased to report that I didn't fall off the edge into the lake unbeknownst to my loved ones never to be heard from again! Instead, I got to experience all the mundane, beautiful moments of this day:

I got to see a trio of seagulls throw down over what looked like a beak full of Doritos from a tremendous distance. I watched in horror as one of the cheddar dusted delectables tumbled through the sky into Lake Michigan in slow motion, accompanied by the saddest, most guttural cry of deep loss from the bird with the face full of tortilla chips, fighting for its dinner.

I get to cackle to myself about such things that no one else notices, even if it outs me in public as the truly feral weirdo woman I am.

I get to send "I made it home," texts to the people I love.

I get to fall in love again and again, go on adventures, eat dessert, walk my dogs, take too many photos, and collect my little observations in my notes app about things that I am so struck by that I can't help but write about them. Amid mundane ugliness, I get to parse out the pretty parts. I get to marvel at how incredible the world can be just as it's falling apart. 

In a wild turn of events, this reporter was able to recover photos and poems from just moments before the phone, and Anna herself, died. They are decent.

I am happy I didn't die today.

Just as I shift to drive away, I get boxed in by a firetruck. There are raised voices and I hear an EMT say they're going to have to batter down a unit door in an adjacent midrise apartment building. I brace myself and wait for something awful, but luckily, there are no additional tragedies for me to bear witness to tonight.

I'm going to drive home now.

I'll text you when I get there.

I love you.

Hoping he was a mannequin, or a fallen tree. Clinging to that idea like the lifesaver he never got. Turning away so I didn't have to see his face.

My nervous system, annoyingly waiting for this kind of day to shine. Adrenaline’s cool, calm, clarity on the phone with 911; notifying the Salt Shed staff; warning everyone in the vicinity what they were about to see; giving a statement to emergency services.

That ADHD superpower of being infallible in a crisis quickly fading when I saw a body bag whisked away by people in scuba gear. Breaking down, held by my loved ones, standing under a banner that cruelly read: “Queer Without Fear.”

The push notification I got later that night with an article confirming his identity, as if I were just an unaffiliated, concerned Chicagoan: Noah Enos, 26. Missing after the King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard concert.

I can't seem to stop raining tears for him. They splash in my glorified kiddie pool of a backyard hot tub; hide in the spray of the shower; well in my eyes over the glass of water I've been lovingly reminded to drink.

Unraveling in the aftermath. Finding myself, over and over again, standing at the edge of Lake Michigan.

This place has always been the perfect vessel for me to pour in what doesn’t fit inside of me. The waves churn with eleven years of my secrets and overgrown feelings. The water bubbles with the dreams I left here for safe-keeping. Where did Noah’s secrets and dreams go when he died? I wonder if they’re here, swimming around with mine.

Though I never met Noah, our lives will be forever linked. Where our stories meet, mine continues and his ends. What happened to him is random and unfair and I cannot make sense of it.

My tide rises, from my legs up to the lump in my throat, filling me to the brim. If I take on more water, I might drown, too. When I can't hold it all anymore, I have to let the excess wash away at the lakeshore.

So, I let my saltiest tears fall into the very body of fresh water where Noah lost his life; somehow still beautiful and magical as ever.