To Berlin, anxiously
Heading out for a week-long conference at the American Academy in Berlin, at which several experts in gender and sexuality rights in Latin American contexts will be presenting, and BOOM. Roe v. Wade is overturned.
And I’m in an airport and I can’t tell if the quiet is really quiet or if I am just dampening everything around me. I have barely been able to look people in the eyes, which, to be fair is not something I’m prone to do, but as I look around Terminal 1, people are glued to their phones, which is probably not all that different from always, but today I imagine they are telling their friends back home that they were in the US the day abortion became illegal, again. Or maybe they are just glad to be going back to wherever they are from, Korea, Japan, France, Germany, Mexico, Italy.
Before I left, I thought about bringing my green bandana with me—marea verde presente—but I was already packed and on my way out, so I just let it be.
And it has me thinking that airports are all about choices. Usually simple ones, but you have to pick which security line to bet on, which direction is the nearest restroom, will the panini be mediocre or not terrible, Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks, this row of seats or that one, will that woman be talking that loud on her phone the whole time or not? I’m reminded of Claudia Rankine’s meditation on whiteness in airport lines, and I wonder if the structure of the airport is also such that because people are constantly being asked to make these minute choices, they are more prone to make decisions based on feeling (as opposed to reason). And feeling is more racist? IDK. Time is compressed and yet elastic here.
Like Roe, kind of. Making a choice. Making a decision. Different decisions to be sure. Or maybe, making life less livable for millions of women and gestating capable people. Making life a series of choices and then all of a sudden, removing the choice. Forcing your hand. You no longer have the choice. You only have: birth, birth, birth.
I’m anxious to leave but I don’t want to be here, for sure. But I’m also anxious about that feeling of not wanting to be here. Its one of those dangerous places for me. I don’t want to be here and so I shrink, erase, dissolve myself into the ether. But no, not now. On to a plane, on to a conference, on to talk about gender and sexuality and bodies—talking about bodies is my thing, and that is, in the end, what Roe is about. So, I have to talk talk talk about bodies and make sense of bodies more and more and more. Again, repeat. Again.
PS I just donated to Indigenous Women Rising, who provides abortion access to Indigenous folks in the New Mexico/Arizona area.
PPS A new Hermés scarf might cheer me up? LOLZZZZ To come face to face with a Kermit Oliver designed Chief Joseph-esque ledger drawing influenced, thousand dollar piece of cultural appropriation. SMDH.
