χάρις

[araipira]

But then, uncontained emotion is always distressing to be around, isn’t it?

[araipira]

So that they might remember, we must forget

[araipira]

The women had a story to tell, even if the world wasn’t quite yet ready to hear it, and their story began with three simple words. We were there.

[araipira]

They all spent their lives in plant-filled apartments and cafes with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

[araipira]

I will make my own anthology

[araipira]

After emotions are felt, expressed, where do they go? Is there a place where spent passion collects? Surely it can't simply vaporize, disappear like smoke. There must be a secret hiding place. For every old love affair, a locked room.

Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao

[araipira]

Before Buffalo, I had never heard the phrase “environmental liens.” I was at an art department gathering, standing around with Matt’s new colleagues in a grain silo that had been turned into an event space. Onstage, an artist with bedazzled lips shimmied in front of screen playing clips of a “We Buy Houses” seminar. As darkness fell in the concrete chamber, we could see only rhinestones, crusting a wolfish smile. At the bar, people were advising Matt on the problems of trying to find a raw space for a studio. Lead paint, leaking roofs. You know, some of these old gas stations and industrial buildings, you have to make sure they don’t have a tank buried, that they don’t have any environmental liens. It was real estate language for the cost of finding unfinished toxic cleanups-but said so casually that I caught myself nodding. As if it were common sense to think of pollution as an unpaid debt, a creditor about to repossess the house.

[araipira]

Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.

[araipira]

Yet I couldn't rid myself of the sense that if I stopped moving, the merry-go-round called our family would simply cease to rotate. If I stopped moving, then I wouldn't be loved. And if I was the one moving, then I had no proof that I was loved. What did it mean to be loved, in any case? Was it to be needed?

[araipira]

“And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent’s reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.”

Excerpt From

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

[garadinervi]

Refaat Alareer, If I must die, written in 2011, published online on November 1, 2023

If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale

(transcript by the American Friends Service Committee)

[araipira]

In another universe, I meet my mother when she is a child. We go for a walk at the seaside and she tells me all the things she loves about the world. We share a hundred jokes and she laughs so easily, without a single worry. I want to meet that version of her. Wide eyed and full of joy. Easy laughter and carefree. Before the same world she loved so deeply broke her heart.

[araipira]

In another universe, I meet my father when he is a child.

We play catch in the woods and as we play he tells me he isn't allowed to cry but sometimes the world hurts him and he doesn't know what to do with all that pain.

So I give him the shoulder he needs to cry on.

And he does. He does until the tears are done.

Afterwards, I buy him ice cream and I listen to his laugh, the glowing warm laugh of a child who knows he is safe.

I wish someone could have done that for him.

Been a kind, safe place for the child he used to be.

Would it have made a difference?

Would it have made a difference?

[araipira]

A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.

[araipira]

PENAS ENCIMADAS

Voy a decirlo de entrada

para el que quiera entender:

son penas muy encimadas

el ser pobre y ser mujer

Trabaja toda la vida

apenas para comer.

Tiene las penas del pobre

y más las de ser mujer.

La rica tiene derechos,

la pobre tiene deber.

Ya es mucho sufrir por pobre

y encima por ser mujer.

Está tan desamparada

y es madre y padre a la vez.

Derechos, ni el de la queja,

por ser pobre y ser mujer.

Se hacen muchos discursos

sobre su heroísmo de ayer.

En el papel la respetan.

Pero sólo en el papel.

Y lo repito de nuevo

para el que quiera entender:

son penas muy encimadas

el de ser pobre y mujer.

Carmen Soler (1924-1985). De Poemas, 1970.

[araipira]

“Instead she said, “You’re very angry.”

“Yes,” he said. It was something he rarely admitted to himself, let alone to anyone else. The longer he looked at himself in a mirror, the longer he lived alone, the longer the country he loved stayed under colonial rule, the angrier he became. And the nebulous, mysterious object of his anger was his mother, a woman whose face he could barely remember, but a face reflected in his own scar.”

[araipira]

“There is another world, but it is in this one,” says a quote attributed to W. B. Yeats that I kept tacked to my wall for years. That was the world I wanted to see.