Nelson’s blue has pulled me toward my own fires, my own shadows.
“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about the blue-tinted death I imagine for myself. She tells me that drowning people say it feels like being embraced.” (134)
I keep thinking about how death can be imagined as a wave, how grief can burn at a core that gives way to darkness and then, somehow, to light.
After my sister passed away I had this urge to create visually, I could barely write and Nelson's words brought me back to the first words I wrote after she passed:
"It almost feels like you are a ghost- your body is here but your mind isn’t-" Those are the words my mom would tell me for several seasons. still to this day.
This past month has been a real new experience that has been very painful in the sense that I have connected with death and living like I have never before. I guess it is part of life and sometimes it hits you when your guards are down, In spite of all my love, you will arise Upon that day and wander down the air Obscurely as the unattended flower, It mattering not how beautiful you were, Or how beloved above all else that dies.
It almost feels like you are a ghost- your body is here but your mind isn’t-
My mom kept telling me this when we were on a trip to Morocco and I decided to make images of this feeling." You feel trapped in your own freedom of expression. The cloud, the stillness that must part a beautiful soul of my life from me. From now on You will live in my dreams." I kept telling myself.
Back to Nelson's words, she remind me that sorrow asks to be embodied in color, in flame, in story. And yet my sorrow does not always arrive blue. Sometimes it comes as fire, as the dare of a child, as shame twisted into survival.
She writes: “Blue is the flame that draws us in, and it is also the flame that consumes us.” (144) When I read this, I felt it in my body. To burn is the only way I know how to return, shame was the first language I learned. Desire followed close behind. I was too young to know the difference between a dare and a sin.
Sometimes it comes as the thought that damnation itself might hold the seeds of resurrection.
What her fragments offer me is not consolation but permission. Permission to believe that sorrow can be born if I put it in a story. That to write is not to escape but to stay with it, to walk with it, to risk it.
Courage isn’t about being untouched. It’s about burning, drowning, breaking, we must, don’t you think?
this image is a response to the beginning, back to what my mom said "It almost feels like you are a ghost- your body is here but your mind isn’t"
Brooklyn, New York 21/09/2025
I wrote this as an answer to how Nelson's words made me feel :
Born to realize
tears were never enough.
You learn to find comfort when things are not alright,
when desire itself longs to be your safe place.
She laughs at Death, taunts Debauchery.
I dared the devil once.
A dare became a game,
a game became a sin.
A sin —
six years old.
Noble ambitions!
And still, it is life — even if damnation is eternal.
Here lies the shame, the reproach:
Satan whispering that the fire is vile,
that my anger is foolish.
But I burn only to resurrect;
there is no other way.
I tried.
Melting is no escape.
The waves would catch me anyway.
I think and think.
All sorrows can be born
if you place them inside a story.
When life is most like a dream,
I swallow anyone’s tears —
because why else was I put on this earth, for if not
Nor
To love entirely takes courage.
