Staving Off Nihilistic Defeat: April 18, 2025
I’m alone at Thai Long-An – a gem, a haven.
A wonder of a woman walks in, magnificent and loud with her booming energy. A decorated gambler hat tilts forward, barely concealing a gorgeous homage to 80s makeup. Creases and lip filler meet bright eyes, warm and genuine.
She’s stunning.
“Oh, wait!” She runs to the kitchen window past the register and adds pumpkin to her dish (she caught the blackboard's special only after ordering). The owner knows this woman; she laughs loudly from the back and waves her away.
I forget how we start talking, but she uses a question about the menu to come closer and stand at my table.
We find our way naturally and quickly to her history – she grew up in the Bronx, deeply addicted to heroin. “A crazy fucking junkie,” she says. She got clean, went north, raised two stepsons, returned to NYC, relapsed, and then landed here in PHX, once again clean. I share about losing my uncle to drugs. “Well, AIDS,” I add at the end.
She lunges forward and words pour. This is a world she knows intimately. She was there, living through the thick of tragedy.
She talks of her time in 80’s NYC, a junkie, watching first the gay community, then her own, die all around her without any understanding of how, of why.
She looks out the window and sees a patch of fake grass.
“I was at this psych ward,” she starts, eyes locked out the window. “And however depressing you think it was, it was worse. People walking down the halls, life gone…” Her eyes are back to me as she animates the walk.
She points at the grass. “And the walls, god the walls – they were this awful, putrid green, like that." There’s disgust in the gesture.
“A few rooms down, there was a trans woman. She was so beautiful, so tall.” Her tone has shifted to reverence; her words have slowed down. “So, so skinny – I mean, she weighed nothing. She was dying, you know?” ... “I would walk over to her room every day, every single day, and I’d put all these beautiful magazine clippings on her wall, you know, to block the green.” There’s magic in her voice; her arms are in the air, gesturing to the walls she so clearly sees in this moment, crystalline even decades later.
Her throat starts restricting, I can hear it. We’re both feeling the burn of tears to come.
“And I’d go over and, I’d do her makeup, and – ”
She’s smiling, tears welled.
.
“ – And then, one day, I went to her room and it was empty and it was just – ”
She doesn’t finish the sentence, the words seemingly stolen. She’s looking down, and I can feel her upper body's urge to curl forward on her arms.
.
We both exist, suspended in that moment.
She shakes her head and wipes her eyes, words back to their original quick pace.
“I lost so many people I loved to that shit.”
She shakes again.
She smiles at me, her memories moving back from the forefront, their weight less outwardly visible.
We hug for a long time.
Her takeout is ready. She tips her hat at me.
She’s gone.
.
.
.
Human connection. Empathy. Love, to Grief, to Love. This world holds magnificent depth and infinite memory. She holds irreconcilable pain alongside unyielding hope. Immeasurable joy expanded to encompass inconceivable loss.
As parts of this world, our stories are necessary. Interactions like this were always, and remain now, a vital antidote.
Through this exchange, I now know these two women. I have in my chest a connection to a point in history – a moment on the timeline that witnessed magazine clippings and makeup in a psych ward with death at a bedside.
Reading this, now too do you.
You know these women existed. You know of this moment they shared.
Which means you also feel the consequence of conservative administration policies (with cultural apathy-turned-violence) that declared through public silence the anguish and death of entire communities ignorable.
This is happening now. On both a micro and macro scale, minority communities are being ripped to shreds through policy. So many of us are silent.
Apathy is violence.
Not knowing a trans woman, not knowing a drag queen, not knowing an immigrant – it shouldn’t matter. Your empathy should be able to expand beyond what you intimately know.
We look back at the AIDS epidemic and see the destruction for what it was: an apathy rooted in fear, rooted in ignorance, rooted in hate. Violence through policies of inaction that were, in actuality, very active in their destruction and cultural influence.
We can do better this time around. We can fight back and support the minority communities targeted by our government’s policies. We can reject apathy as families are torn apart. As lives are ended.
This terror is happening. History will name it aptly.
Resist the impulse to give up. Resist the impulse to look the other way. Place empathy at your forefront.
Keep telling stories. Keep sharing memories. The way to survive this is through human connection. The atrocities of the AIDS epidemic then, and the atrocities against trans communities today, against immigrant families, against disabled communities (hello RFK’s speech on autism yesterday), seem less atrocious if the victims are dehumanized.
Recognize the dehumanization our government is demanding of you. Recognize and with righteous anger, reject it.
Humanity. Humanity humanity humanity.
Hold humanity, and we will survive this.
