Birthday

I turned 42 this week. It’s a good age for me. I’m old enough to know how to do things. I have a life. I’m also still curious and learning a lot. I’m able to do new things, but I don’t have to do everything.

42 is a good time to remind myself that balance is a practice. I forget how much life takes sometimes. How much energy it takes to feel the feelings in a moment of political fuckery (of course a moment that is not new, not a moment, not surprising), ongoing genocide, historical amnesia—is there such a thing as histo-hysterical revisionism?—and yet, also small moments of intimacy and possibility.

My friend Marcus Morris came over to take some pictures. Marcus is a beautiful and talented artist. He has done some really fantastic work around Black queer Appalachia, including a devastatingly beautiful series called “Elegance is Refusal: Journey to The Clearing”.

Marcus came over and took some pictures, we got to hang and gossip and I really appreciate the moment to reflect on how being in this moment, a moment that is iterative and intimate—is also such a rare thing. Marcus calls elegance refusal—a refusal of flattened identity tropes, a refusal of history, a refusal to be erased.

Refusal, is also such a crucial keyword, heuristic, theory, practice, for Indigenous people. I immediately think of Audra Simpson. Refusal is also a right to live life. To refuse to be interrogated. A refusal to answer the question. A refusal to be clear, to be legible.

I don’t know what I’m refusing, if I am at all, but I feel like intimacy is also a refusal to ignore the spark of connection, the joy of loving, the tenderness of possibility, the refusal to be eliminated.