Im sick of cops. Im sick of landlords Im sick of bosses Im sick of bullshit. Im sick of thieves Who steal With legal documents With borders, prisons, schools, and shitty food service jobs Who commodity our empPOWERment Into property-ownership and power-over Which is to say, Im sick of this. Im sick of profiteers who call the liquor commission Im sick of hot-shot developers Who will buy up the neighbor Who will Evict my friends Gut what I love And hang it out to dry in this second-wave gentrification (of which I am also guilty) Or Im sick of Emera and its stupid fucking oval As though your hydro-electric facility, natural gas pipelines, and gas-fired power plant Could actually name the grass As though that the only thing that “common” is capitalism Im sick of bosses who exploit us Im sick of bosses who profit by selling the idea that they are not actually bosses. (but co-ops imply co-operation, right?) Well, I will not co-operate. And I maybe complicit, but I will not be complacent. Because I have been feeling a fire growing. A small flame, that’s stoked, and spreads. And burns. And illuminates. There is a rage in my core That sits deep. Solidifies. Hardening my resolve. To fight. To struggle. To build to unbuild. Because I want to undo. Layer by layer, Piece by piece, I want to lay to waste the ashes of this civilization Trade my privilege in for liberation Turn pain into art. And destruction into creation. That most beautiful alchemy (of insurrection) So yes, I want to throw bricks By which I mean I want to lay bricks. And build a foundation on which we can stand. Not made of concrete but earth and cum and tears. Where we can sleep in the exhausted oozing after-fuck of our desires So I am looking for change. The subversive fringes underneath the packed centuries of filth The hope that seeps through the cracks, pushes through the cement in the pavement Like plantain Which heals And betrays hints Like a whisper That maybe Just maybe Something else is possible. So I want to release what they have suppressed. Honor pain, honor anger, honor survival And honor the collective wisdom of those who came before us And everything we still have yet to learn. I want to reclaim my body, my heart, my communities. I want to learn how to grow food. I want to learn how to build houses. To feed us. To shelter us. To nourish strength in our vulnerability To find spirituality in our connectivity. So that we can learn how to hold each other In ways that are actually fucking real I want to unlearn the ways capitalism has taught me to think of emotional relationships in terms of hierarchy, competition, and scarcity. So I want to learn how to trust you. So that I can learn how to love you. I want to learn how to stop using my white, male, able-bodied, middle-class, status-holding privilege As a weapon I want to challenge my desire for ownership, For selfish entitlement To prioritize my individual wants Over our collective needs Fuck that, I want to share. Because I want to believe that If I renounce all the empty promises Of capitalism, exploitation, and oppression Something MORE will come back to us Something more important Something more powerful Something yet inarticulate That I can Just Feel Because I want to have faith in something bigger than myself. Because our strength in always collective. Because our liberation lives in all of us. Because I don’t want this. I want So much More.

I sat next to you under the bridge. Our borrowed bikes lay abandoned against the concrete and the strange yellow overhead light illuminated the space. The light punctured the rain and bounced off the walls, making the graffiti look dramatic and eerie. Everything seemed tense and irreverent…. Like the guy spray painting across the road or the cars that drove by in the darkness, their engines echoed by the rock, making them louder and more invasive. All of this held us in a moment. Atlanta held us in a moment. The moment when we found the wheat-pasted newspaper clippings from the 1800s… obituaries from a mysterious double suicide. And then the grief wall: A strangers face plastered along the bridge, torn down, and tagged over, and pelted by the rain. It was your grief on the wall, open, raw, and available for others to mourn or desecrate. The emotion was present, like a sense, and I could feel it, pure and fresh as though a year had never passed. You ask me if you made a grief wall if I thought that strangers would tag over it too? I said that I didn’t know. I didn’t know a lot of things. But you said that people never know, never know what to say, and are so afraid of saying the wrong things that they say nothing at all. And you told me that the silence was worse. So I told you that I didn’t know what to say, just so that I could say something. And you cried. I held your hand, and you cried. I sat next to you on the concrete, while the rain soaked the bottoms of our pants, and we chain-smoked cigarettes, and I held your hand, and you cried. You told me about Stef and about Carly. You told me about the phone calls, about their funerals, about their mothers. You talked about grief and support and understanding suicide. You told me that you wished they were ghosts. You talked about how the grief doesn’t just go away and how people expect you to get over it and move on. But time can’t just heal all wounds and your grief felt as raw as it had a year ago. And how every time you saw someone, you wondered if it would be the last time, and how every time the phone rang, you wondered who died. You told me that people never talked to you about their deaths because they didn’t know what to say, or didn’t want to bring it up, or didn’t want to trigger you… but you told me that you were thinking about it all the time, a constant loop. And that all you needed was space to talk. So I listened. And you apologized for burdening me, but I didn’t know how to tell you that you’ve never been a burden to me. You told me that you understood why they killed themselves, that you understood that the first and second suicides were not coincidences. You told me that you knew how Stef’s death had triggered Carly’s death and that both of those deaths were triggering your own. And I thought about my own suicidal ideations and I wondered about the plausibility of death. I wondered about how you understood suicide, how you made sense of what seemed senseless… and how the irrational becomes rational. And you told me about how you almost killed yourself. You told me about how you almost killed yourself when I didn’t come meet you in April. When I told you that I had other things to do. When I didn’t understand the urgency of the situation. Because I didn’t understand that you were leaving your room for nearly the first time in nine months to thrust yourself into another continent, using everything you had left, looking for support and a way to keep yourself alive. I didn’t know what I had severed in that moment. You told me about the last text message that you had ever sent to Stef, the last contact that you had with her. You told her that you would see her when you got back from Perth. You said that you didn’t think that she intended to die and you wondered if it would have been different if you had been there, if you had heard her, if you had reached out. And the parallels felt too stark to reconcile. And I wondered what the differences were. I wondered what kept you there, next to me. You told me that you wondered how loud we have to scream for help. And I wondered why I hadn’t heard you. I remembered other moments with you. Like when you met me in the middle of the commons in the pouring rain. I remembered how you split a bottle of colt 45 with me, and we both hoped the fence and climbed the mud-pile. And danced and screamed and drank in our underwear. And it wasn’t until later, when we were lying in my bed, warm after a hot shower… our first shower together where we peeled off our layers to stand naked, vulnerable and connected, that you finally asked me what was wrong. Or, I remembered staying up late with you in a hotel room in Arizona and you told me that when you were little you said to your dad that your feet felt far away from you. And he told you that your feet were you. And you asked me if my feet felt far away, too? Well, my feet have always been far away. But you were the first person who brought them a little bit closer. You were the first person to make me believe myself, who taught me to believe my own understandings of this world so that I could exist. You were one of the first people who allowed me to connect to myself so that I could connect to others. In so many ways you have been home to me. So I could say that I have regrets and yes, that’s partially true. Because I do have regrets. There are so many moments I would have changed, so many words I would have said differently. But the whole truth is that you are still here. And in so many more ways, I feel lucky. I feel lucky that I didn’t lose you, like you lost Stef and you lost Carly. I feel lucky that I didn’t lose you like so many others have lost people they love. Like some people reading this probably have. And for those losses, I am deeply sorry. I know that I cannot understand your pain. Mostly I feel lucky for the opportunity to still have words to say. So I am learning how to talk and I am learning how to listen. I am learning how to forgive myself for not talking about it sooner and also learning how to talk about it now. I am learning how to talk about death, and about grief, and about pain. I learning how to allow space for the honesty of pain and not expect everything to be okay. And I am learning how to make space in my communities to talk about death, for myself and for others. I am learning how to heal, how to build healthy relationships, and how to create a culture of support. I am learning how to not abandon you. I am learning how to be brave enough to stay, even when it hurts and even when it scares the shit out of me because I do not want to be scared of you or me or what we have to face together in this world we live in. I am learning how to take care of myself and learning that sometimes that means taking care of each other. So I am learning how to connect, how to be honest, and how to be vulnerable. And it’s hard. But I am learning how to work on this shit. And like our post-apocalyptic survival skills, scribbled on notebooks and scrap paper, in coffee shops, behind dumpsters and while drinking beer beside the parking lot… I want to work on this shit with you. Because in the very most basic way, all I want is to be here with you.

I disassociated. At least, I think that I did. I didn't know what was happening until I was gone. It’s a hard sensation to describe unless you've ever experienced it, and it's very different from the dysphoria that I'm used to. Disassociation is not the familiar, pressing, discomfort, but rather a disconnection. A complete detachment, as though the body I inhabit is a stranger -- something close to, and yet separate from, myself. The internet tells me that disassociation is a survival mechanism: a bodily reaction to cope with trauma. But what is the trauma? The more that I think about trauma, the more that I think about bodies. And the more that I think about bodies, the more that I think about transformation. He beat me last night. It was hot and consensual. I wanted it. He placed my hands above my head and told me to lie there. And slowly, one by one, he pinched clothespins across my skin... Up my arms, down my sides, along my thighs. It was intimate. I felt his gaze, and the presence of its power. And I felt myself retract, slowly sink into submission, and settle into my skin. The pain tugged, pulled, and receded. The remarkable thing about being in a suspended state of pain is the simultaneous presence and removal... the way that bodies adapt. Or how S/M represents ecstasy through pain, and it is the tension that holds the transformation. And maybe it's perverted, but maybe I like it, and maybe I like being a pervert. I felt each clothespin release with a sharp jab of pain, a momentary sensation before the departure. And he ran his hands across my face, down my arms, over my chest, bringing all of the blood vessels to the surface, and told me that I was being a very good boy. Maybe I just like fucking with the power dynamics. Maybe it is because I am always resisting disempowerment, struggling against power held over me. Maybe it's because navigating this world means being told that I am sick, that my gender doesn't exist, and that my body is invalid. And maybe that's why we define ourselves by all the shit we hate. Maybe that's why queer, gender-fucked, faggot feels powerful to me. And maybe that's why it feels powerful to give up power -- to consent to power that actualizes rather than destroys me. And so he hit me. He pummeled into my chest. In the past four years, I've only let one other lover touch my chest in my prolonged manner. That time he massaged the pressure points from my binder, and I sobbed like a child in his arms. Last night he punched me, landed one blow after another into raw flesh. And when I thought that I couldn't take anymore, I did. I clenched. I whimpered. And I felt my body push, felt each trauma like crack open, felt cathartic release. And I realized that my body is fraught with scar lines. From being socialized female, from being at odds with my gender, from every time he fucked me and I cried and I didn't know why. My body is not a place that i easily inhabit. My relationship to it is long and complicated. I've learned to cope with it by ignoring it -- by getting drunk, by forgetting to eat, by hoping that my binder blisters my skin so my chest withers and bleeds. The distance means safety. So the trauma is the return to my body. And the disassociation is the response to being to forcefully returned. It is the only response that my body has learned. Experiencing pain on parts of my body that sustain trauma is transformative because it's allows me to connect to those parts of myself, so that I can embody them and heal them. It allows me to connect to pain in ways that are loving, tender, and healthy. It teaches me that desensitization does not mean strength, and that the hard exteriors of emotional and physical scars still contain damaged flesh. It shows me that in a world which says that my worth is determined by what I produce, that my body can also be powerful -- that my sexuality can produce power. And so pain becomes unlearning trauma, re-claiming bodies, and re-inhabiting power.