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Our dance is about chaos and anarchy. It is the antithesis of control. It’s about relinquishing power over one’s body, bestowing autonomy on every bone, ligament, nerve, and muscle fiber. On every skin and fat cell. Every organ.
We were a family with secrets, things that lurked in the corners of our lives, unseen, unspoken, but felt in the texture of arguments, the extra length of a pause, the focus of a stare.
It was disorienting in the beginning, because I didn’t know how to be in such openness. I found myself breathing deeply and deliberately in the mornings, inhaling the immensity of that silence.
“We are not all blessed to receive a good education and inherit what it takes to live with some dignity. To exist on your own land, in the bosom of your family and your history. To know where you belong in the world and what you’re fighting for. To have some goddamn value.”
that Western images of professional women don’t have to apply to us; that concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured.
No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.
People would gather soon. Some were already walking through the olive groves to avoid soldiers stationed on the road. They came for solidarity, curiosity, to bear witness, and because they would want people to show up when their time came.
This was where I belonged, but so much of me was still scattered elsewhere.
“For the ones we love, nothing is ever trouble, and everything is never enough.”
To be committed is to be in danger.
Positive: Congratulations! You’re pregnant. I sat on the toilet thinking that the pregnancy-test makers should stick to the facts without assuming they know what is or isn’t cause for congratulations. Fucking patriarchy.
