Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

One fact I’d learn is that leaving always hurts—home isn’t a space, it’s a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn’t always comfortable—at least, not an NDN home. In fact, quite often, it’s uncomfortable. But it’s home because the bannock is still browning in the oven and your kokum is still making tea and eating Arrowroot biscuits. It’s home because it has to be—routine satiates these pangs. And, given time, it becomes mobile—you can take those rituals with you, uproot your home as if it were a flower. Yeah, maybe home is like a flower, a sunflower whose big bright head follows the sun; or maybe that’s too fancy a metaphor for NDNs? Maybe we’re more like dandelions, a weed that’s a pest in the yard but pretty to look at. Yeah, an NDN home is like a dandelion: pretty but disposable, and imbued with a million little seeds that dissolve into wishes for little white hands that pluck. My home is full of hope and ghosts.

I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs, it’s because they’re applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.

I never had to tell him, that was how I knew I loved him—I never had to tell him.

You have to perform in any situation, so you may as well pick your battles. Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer.

When I think of masculinity, I think of femininity. Everything’s finished in beauty.

There are times when you have to scare yourself to find yourself.

Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I’m in pain with you.”

A good name makes the perfect sex toy.

His eyes refocused on me. “I thought you’d be skinnier,” he said. I bit my lip and nodded, then grabbed my fifty and left. How fucked up, I thought. I may not have the best body but I do have a body—and it’s a body that deserves to be touched and loved and owned, annit?

I ordered pork confit, which I somehow knew how to pronounce, and Jordan ordered a bison tenderloin, along with a $75 bottle of wine. The menu said, “From the land” and I thought to myself, “Yeah right, honey.”

In the digital universe, a punctuated sentence is as powerful a slap as slamming down the landline.

My beautiful mother, the best person I knew in this world, was crumbling beneath my weight and I couldn’t help her—all I could do was hold onto her, lovingly, steadily.

It was then I decided that love sounded more like a full stop than a semi-colon, and I moved too much like water.

It’s overwhelming to think about all the stories that we’ve made, helped to tell, helped to create—our bodies are a library, and our stories are written like braille on the skin.

Jonny has taught me a lot of things but there are two that I want to share with you: one, a good story is always a healing ceremony, we recuperate, re-member, and rejuvenate those we storytell into the world; and two, if we animate our pain, it becomes something we can make love to.