What I knew about being queer and Indigenous and in my twenties was desperation. It is we who experience aliveness as both inescapable and a shimmering impossibility. We improvise life outside the frame of futurity while also being ensnared by it. We don’t die. We proliferate life as if machines engineered to do so; that’s it. I would return to my hometown and go about the practice of not dying, I thought. My liveliness would be artful.
