on grief (miss vagabond)

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“do you know what it’s like to live
someplace that loves you back?”
“no need for geography
now that we’re safe everywhere.”
      -Danez Smith, summer, somewhere

1.            if anyone asks, you are from nowhere. an eclipse in the sun, a refuge for hitherto unanswered lungs collecting dust like amber roaches in an oakwood-dry casket. an ashtray, so to speak. you were molded from clay upon clay upon mothers’ clay, ran through the wheel enough times that your hardness shows not through callouses, but rather everything beneath your skin. if the lord broke you open, he would find neither bread nor marrow but a third, more mysterious thing – a freefall tendency, that beautifully fugitive melancholy built up from years of learning how to pack shit up & head out, muttering “safety” before even at the door.

in another world, where the term wasn’t as unfortunately occupied, one might consider this “being on the down-low.”

1a.         We are grieving. Consistently, profusely, and menacingly so. If one squeezed our bodies, gingerly twirled our waists between their fingers before compressing flesh, sorrow would gush undistilled from every pore on our skin, flooding until we both drowned under the weight of our fathers’ sins. It is an incredibly disabling force.

While the onset of my grief can be traced as a long history of generational curses, I began noticing it permeating my body during the latter half of my high-school years, which coincided with the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite not being infected with the condition at the time, months of living in an inescapable abusive situation wore down my psyche in a way that put me on spiritual life support. Lest I contribute to the sweeping wave of virality that took hold of our communities, fleeing at the moment was not viable – so I slept.

Rotted for days on end, let the dirt and grime and filth of my folds decomposing weave a tapestry over my body thick enough that one couldn’t see limbs writhing underneath, assuming the minor figure of a corpse for the unsuspecting eye. Even after years of successful escape, the habit still sticks with me – to make home in my body that is not my body but still my body when home as a place seems untenable. When community is insurmountable, when skinfolk are not kinfolk, yet kin must bear the same skin to know where your heart and soul have been.

“When the going gets tough, you gotta get going” – I know the phrase. Vagrancy is my maiden name, the fairy godmother of maroons for modern day Esther Browns. But goddamn, where are my sisters? Who, too, has forsaken everything for the reshaping of flesh in their own image, cleared room for their rebirth and laid stricken with grief when their own kin desecrated the manger? How do you come back from that? How the fuck do you come back from that?

2.            you are full - so, so full. tender, full of love & wonder the way a mother’s milk is rich in hidden meaning. lifelines gleamed in swung cadence & galvanized with the soft t, you run deep, roots stretching far beyond the mortal eye’s reach, yet still begetting her grasp.

it has always been difficult to remain anonymous. even with your lips pursed, your presence spoke for you, a crimson-stained carpet laid tattered before your every step.

at first, you thought yourself ill – vomiting, nausea, the occasional fever – but soon you began to notice the signs: slight bloating, incessant cravings, increased irritation & a propensity for disabling distress. stretch marks slowly growing larger across your abdomen; irish goodbyes into hidden rooms, doubled over, fireworks of pain & clogged ears too full of dreams to handle.

after some time, the toll of carrying in public became unbearable. you transformed into a hermit, married to your dreams, forced to doctor yourself as stillbirth after stillbirth gestated into something far larger, greater than the vessel you initially sought to craft. in the odd occasion you do show your face, the smiles of old friends seem to contort with every kick, churning away step after wobbly step until you swear you can feel your water break – only for the cycle to start all over again.

it is obvious. your want, that is.

2a.         How do we come back from this? It is a question I find myself asking again and again in-between wafts of ginger-peach and scorched lavender. Of course, the primary entry point for this inquiry becomes “what does ‘come back’ mean?”

Back to the past? Begs the question – which past? My past is untenable. Years of abuse and ostracization, culminating in untreated CPTSD and depression, have ballooned into a mist through which the light of memory seldom pierces through. Friends I have known for years often mention events or conversations that I cannot recollect; the few memories I do possess are disparate, shattered glass scattered in an ether that only strained hands reach. Every one I manage to grasp leaves my palms cut-up and smeared, oozing like slow dripped honey in a teapot.

If I’m particularly put together, I can at least manage to brew a proper cup with it. At my lowest, however, I am not above lapping it up straight from the source.

What else? My family’s past? I am of Cameroonian-descent; my mother hails from the Bangwa tribe of West Cameroon, herself mothered seven siblings and an ailing mother before meeting my father, getting a degree in accounting, and having to grieve the weight of stillbirth before immigrating to the american empire in hopes of a better life. For her, but also her children. She arguably spent – and still spends – her entire life running from the past. It seems to be a shackle for her. Bearing the burden of our generational curse now, I understand the impulse. Understand, but do not align.

I am illegal in 72 countries[1]: a common phrase shared humorously among online queer spaces in reference to how many nation-states have criminalized queer relations. As a travelling crisis worker, I wonder how many of these places my father has stepped through during his tenure with the UN. How much has colonialism and the Western powers that fueled such during the 20^th century impacted knowledge-systems that could have housed our trans and queer siblings? What sort of worlds were destroyed, set ablaze by the unyielding greed of capital and an inability to witness love? What sort of life could my family have led if my father came home with something else, something other than tracked blood and trembling fingers in his eyes?

What sort of place could Cameroon be if I could step there, even now?

2b.         Writing from the Southern Tier, it has taken me years to realize how much a childhood in NYC has spoiled my sense of community. The Bronx held me in a cradle of vibrancy and culture; Harlem was always just a train ride away.

As a grade-schooler, I would spend hours trekking through the most forest-like parts of the borough, feeling the concrete shift under my heels while listening to Nujabes through the cheapest pair of plastic earbuds imaginable. Years spying on my father taught me how to curate my favorite tracks through iTunes and install them on my phone, spurring my nigh religious fervor for beat-making and composition writ large. Everywhere I walked gave me the impression that home was just a corner away, even when it wasn’t.

Nowadays, all I see while walking is empty. The great, big, american empty. The non-walkable nature of Binghamton as a city has been a slow death for me, a fermentation of wanderlust that my younger self would’ve spilled blood for many times over. The world has grown larger but emptier with all of us in it, excavated of meaning as information carries us at high-speed, across screens and checking accounts stretched out to the widest margin until foot alone is insufficient to see thy neighbor.

I still see people all around me, many who do and don’t share my visage. But the question still remains: art thou my neighbor? In a world where the contradictions of capitalism are heightening with such non-salvageability to the point that prisoners are putting out fires in america’s backyard, where the culture is so exceedingly fixated with cutting off the everyman that we hail billionaires as revolutionaries, where Black trans women face such an extreme disposition to pre-mature death that I claimed a statistical midlife crisis at the age of seventeen, can I trust you to be my neighbor?[2]

Do you even know what that means?

2c.          Everyone dies all the time and I’m so damn sick of it. Doesn’t it set your teeth on edge? [3] The hypocrisy, the violence, the wanton gluttony of the american empire? My chest tightens with every passing year, each solar rotation seemingly a cruel mockery from the timeclock to the Gregorian calendar. Numerous nights I have laid spiritually paralyzed, in the full disabling sense of the word, at the sheer amount of grief that permeates every facet of our life and how deep it runs when you learn to recognize it.

Consider the mass proliferation of violence that social media and news tends to condone on a daily basis: whether the domestic terrorism by state-sanctioned military weaponry utilized on the daily against our own neighbors or the ongoing american-sponsored coloniztion and genocide occurring abroad in Gaza, the inevitably of violence by the oppressor dominates our minds and souls through hyperawareness or learned ignorance by design. Even the most basic building blocks of our world is centered around institutional violence left to cancerously grow uncheck. Every unassuming road sign, every abandoned house, every overpriced supermarket – our reality is both fabricated by and interwoven with death en masse.

And it haunts me. Caresses my exposed sides after tearing apart the thin, meager fabric covering my body. Begs for vindication, lingers for the off-chance that a mortal soul heeds history and takes up the baton pass in the march towards liberation. That we, too, may feel the religious fervor that characterizes the push for something beyond what contemporary reality can handle, walking with one eye in this realm and another towards the next.

Can you sit with us?

3.            you are tired. terribly, terribly tired. i know, love. your bones have been aching since the day you jumped ship – braved those icy waters, prayed the cold would take warmth before life & life before soul. as your skin slowly froze, blood mixed with oil turned into boils, blisters & popped flesh, the ocean floor proved as fruitful a mother as the one who physically birthed you: yes, full of strength; yes, embodied wisdom; yet, inadequate as a lung as those ruptured under her pressure-valve grip. in an effort to hold her seed, they have only ever truly known her conquest. still, gasping for breath, they ask: “is this love?”

i know love. she is a woman built strong as an ox yet born for silk presses & chardonnay. she is a woman whose foolish ambitions stand taller than she has ever stood. she is swimming right in front of me. she is you.

3a.         These days, it is difficult for me to breathe. The steady swell of my lungs syncopates to the frequencies lost with every lung that doesn’t. Haunting choruses echo between my ears, deafening any semblance of Reason one may still grip onto in such a maddening state.

And it really is mad, isn’t it? To look at the grand machinations of this world and yearn for something better. To lash out against physical restraints on your wrists as an unruly child, to clamor for breath against the heel on your neck as a waylaid elder, to occupy space in the name of falling and fallen brethren as an unlikely survivor. Aren’t we blessed? To live in the heart of such machinery, numbing ourselves to the taste of blood with spray-painted plastic masquerading as chalice?

Sit with me. Breathe. Feel the weight of generations of survival culminating in your heart, flesh and soul. If you are aware, are conscious of what lays dormant within your dreams, consider reaching out to them, bearing the anxiety that rumbles through your bones when one’s grip makes contact with a curse. Do not let go. Every curse, whether generational or not, houses a story. Charting trails of sand through the ether of history, they mark experiences had, decisions made, orientations taken both within and against the cis-heteropatriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalist[4] cultural imaginary that has been deemed reality.

Undoubtedly, there will be many who are reluctant to examine such a thing in their palms. To those, I extend my understanding. However, and I say this with the most conviction out of anything else written here: there is no way to uproot a curse without bearing the foundations of what cursed you in the first place. While immediate first-aid is always necessary, trying to treat a gash with merely water is the fastest way to invite pre-mature death. One must be willing to look at reality and recognize its foundations before imagining what other possibilities lay beyond the realistic. And that requires the understanding that the same structures responsible for neocolonialism in Cameroon, humanitarian crises in Sudan, and labor exploitation across the entirety of the global south is the same as that which alienates you from your own being.

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?[5]

The prestige of Fenty and Telfeezy; the glitter of chandeliers, three-course meals and all-expense paid trips – none of it excites me. The growing puddle of crimson under the table is too palpable for my soul. The sweet whispers of ghosts and the worlds they imagine is too loud to ignore. I love my niggas too much to not delve into the muddy water between work and play, to refuse what has been refused to us and create worlds big and bright enough for our dreamstates. I am a woman of pure rage, a woman of pure love.

I am swelling.

[1] Colloquial knowledge, closest referent example.

[2] Anecdotal, closest referent example.

[3] Sampled from zine of the same name.

[4] Elaboration on bell hooks’ “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

[5] Fred Moten, The Undercommons.