I picked up a letter from a friend today, we live several states away, and this letter has been sitting in a pile to be opened for two weeks. The half-size manila envelope is full and thick, the paper inside must be crisp because the package barely bends as I lift it out of the stack from its corner. There is a duck sticker sealing it shut and inside I find several pieces of connective paper with tiny looping handwriting that I have come to learn over the years of our correspondence. Our relationship exists nearly entirely in the context of envelopes and while we delve into our personal lives in these letters, we share a tendency toward the philosophical in uncovering ourselves to the other. I feel I have gotten to know them better through acclimating myself to the eccentricities of their hand, not to mention their penchant for citation (which I adore).

In my last letter I shared some personal difficulties over the last year, along with some of my very initial digestion. I knew when opening their reply, I would encounter an eloquent remolding of the theoretical clay lump I tossed in their direction, and so I put off opening it until I couldn’t stand to look away anymore. It’s difficult to describe the nature of their writing though it is deeply poetic, personal, and intellectually lithe (they are a dancer, so this translates). To give you some small idea of the treasure I hold in my hands they signed off this letter “from my raw edges to yours.” Our friendship, our correspondence, our edges rub the personal and political, we are continually surfacing and resurfacing together/apart what it means to be human in our social, political, intellectual, and certainly bodily contexts.

And now that I have read the letter and am sitting with their reflections as well as the time between my last letter and now—in which I have knit two large blankets and rarely found time to cohere my thoughts and feelings without coming up against the blunting of my mental acuity—I feel an urgency to surface something despite my frustration. So, bear with me (or don’t!).

I have repeatedly said over the last year that I have “reached my limit” and yet I continue crashing through them into the next. “No really this is the limit this time,” I say through bloody teeth, but I am never certain it will be. All the less so as we witness what should be impossible violence, cynical justifications, climate catastrophe, mass debilitation by disease/negligence/violence, and an onslaught of machine hallucinations which are evaporating our water and burning the library of Alexandria. All the while the normal thing to do is turn away, to brush off any discomfort, and punish anyone who refuses to do so with isolation and condemnation.1 I do not keep my political stances secret. In my everyday life I tend to be outspoken about interconnected violences and my desire for hope and resistance amid our enforced complicity. However, I’ve been struggling to speak at all lately, as if there is too much weight on my tongue and the muscles continue to fail, too many words that cannot possibly come out in the right order and so instead come out as a wail.

To be coherent amidst these interlocking violences—the carbon footprint of bombs dropping on schools filled with refugees leading to more and more environmental disasters near and far—feels an impossible task and so I continue to consume and consume in the hopes that by some miracle my tongue will learn the shape of a resistance that can be heard by those like the DNC donors who cover their ears as they walk past those solemnly reciting the names of slain Palestinian civilians. To be heard requires open ears, and to be understood requires an open heart and while I never wish to close mine, I find it breaking in every conversation which tacks quickly back and forth avoiding engagement with any subject which may raise emotion or require political orientation. The taboos are mounting, and I feel myself on a tightrope between acting the killjoy in every moment and becoming a zombie.

Perhaps this current limit I am exploring can be encapsulated in the utter pleasure that our current flavor of online spaces fosters in each of us practicing glib condescension. We hone our own minute superiorities so finely that each edge cuts away both our humanity and that of the other. Context be damned. “This thirty-second video/ten-word tweet/partial quote from James Baldwin doesn’t consider my very personal experience.” Take a part for the whole. “This popstar is too human/not human enough.” Benefit of the doubt for a stranger online? “No one owes you anything.” Scroll on. Outrage. Comment. Scroll. Repeat. And I cannot stop consuming it with the foolish hope that from so many fragments I will be able to cobble together a coherent argument/thought/observation. I picture a barely trained cobbler with inadequate tools and uneven stones paving a road meant to be walked on in stilettos. It feels foolish, at least fools know how to fall.

Here are a few substacks that I have been reading lately, words and thoughts that I cannot grasp alone, but which each of these writers solidifies elegantly.

moonseed

writing and art about diaspora, mental health, endurance, care

By Hala Alyan

a rose, a weed

an occasional walk through roses and weeds; celebrating equally the lush beauty of achievement and the spare persistence of survival. my newsletter on writing, rural life, fighting white supremacy culture, landscape, reading, and anything else i please.

By taylor roseweeds

housekeeping

thoughts on capitalism, modern media, womanhood, and the little crummy things that fall into the cracks between.

By caro claire burke