НИО

you wake up a few times halfway through the night you wander off to the bathroom before making it back and quickly falling back asleep. you hear some words and you think they're your partner but you might be imagining it. there's a loud banging noise but god knows where it's coming from. someone asks you about classes tomorrow but you don't remember if they really did or if you just imagined it. you go to the bathroom again only to realize once you're there that you never got up out of bed.

an experience we’ve had. could probably write an essay on it and maybe one day I will

and now mourning is political, too.

i'm so sorry, murry foust. i keep thinking about how tired you must have been. how tired all of us are. how humiliating it is that even when we die alone, people still laugh and debate whether we deserved to live a happy, dignified life at all.

there are trans kids online right now learning your name – and the names of juniper blessing, lucas redbeard knapp, aleanna belcher, and davonta curtis – through grief. through fear. through that horrible, familiar ache of "that could've been me." and i hate that this is part of our inheritance from one another. not just chosen family and resilience and beauty – but memorials. vigils. apology letters to ghosts.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.