A few of my students were deported. It’s happening everywhere, and we talk about what we’re allowed to in the halls between our training sessions. The kids I lost were some of my best artists with great families who tolerated my compliments of their kids’ work in my poor Spanish. I’ve screamed a lot. And felt sad and still, then screamed again. TPS ending has been devastating to our communities.
I held my hands the way your voice held my mind.
In those years, I understood faith only as a transaction, and I could not abide the idea that I lost my parents because I did not pray enough or we were bad people. But as time passed, I knew I had reached an unhappy plateau. I found myself wanting to believe in something mystical but not knowing how.
Some people told me it was simply a matter of making a decision, that I could even invent my own higher power if I liked. But I required proof. A burning bush. A voice that shook the heavens. I waited for signals and signs until, around the time I started Midnight Radio, I learned to laugh at my absurdity. I mean, dig the size of my ego: demanding the divine prove itself to me rather than the other way around.
Now I believe we’re meant to generate the signals and signs ourselves.
Sometimes it feels like we’ll never get to the end, that the books are growing back on the shelves as we remove them.
I miss you, man. That’s why I picked up my phone, scrolled to your name, and sent you 15 reels on Instagram.
I Noticed Our Friendship Was Waning, So I’ve Sent More Instagram Reels
I very much want to write…but at the moment I just don’t have the wherewithal. “Wherewithal” is a funny word, but an appropriate one: if you lack wherewithal you lack whatever it takes to do something you want to do. The elderly Harold Bloom wrote to the elderly Ursula K. Le Guin to plead with her to write another novel as great as The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness and she replied that at her stage of life “there just isn’t the wherewithal.”
…this was less a mantra than our only way forward: Find a way to separate what happened from what happened to us, to decline participation in most of the ceremonies and pageantry in favor of figuring out on our own our family’s new geometry…
The Worst Day Of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction