Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
It's Tuesday on earth, babies are trapped under the rubble, people are having beautiful abortion experiences together, and we're going on dates and baklava runs.
The other day I asked a friend how she’s doing.
She responded, “Better than you, I think!”
Which, you know, fair enough.
I assume she said this because I’ve been getting on Instagram and Twitter every day and just posting my emotional little ass off, sharing poetry and art and analysis and prayers and rallies and phonebanks and impassioned please to contact our reps. Photos of the protests I’m attending with my family. The olive trees. The memories. The families. The futures. The babies, the babies, the babies. It’s most of what I’m posting, and I’m posting a lot.
I’m posting a lot for a few reasons:
I need to look back at this time with the knowledge that I did everything I could, even if it was cringey or I overshot it. I don’t know if it’s possible to overshoot, here, but my calculations re: overshooting are often different from my friends, whether we’re talking tequila or texting. (Though I would remind you gently and lovingly that if you see every single thing I post, that means you’re on Instagram just as much and as frequently as I am. Passively consuming is still spending your time there).
Despite the pretension and snark we’ve long internalized and weaponized around ~infographics~ and social media, Palestinians and anti-Zionist activists have said that sharing the images and words and information coming out of occupied Palestine is the single most important thing we can do, other than directly applying pressure to those in power. Even if you have few followers or a private account, your engagement with a post or story or article or video will
Every single time, without exception, that I have been moved beyond despair and paralysis into meaningful action, it has been by another person inviting me to do so or showing me how they’re doing so. Telling me how they’re feeling while they’re doing it. Connecting dots for themselves. Drawing little drawings about it. Whatever. So if my 45,000 Instagram stories lead to 1 person doing 1 thing, I can’t let shame or embarrassment or fear of conflict (or doing my actual work) get in the way of that right now.
Instagram is a huge part of how I’ve met the people in my communities who are: organizing while parenting young children, writing and creating work that fills my days with beauty and inspiration, being kind and funny and reading the same things I am (or the things I’m not, but need to be reading). Also the people who are hot, and want to make time for debauchery and dancing and grieving alike.
There is no amount of “self-care” nor mind-altering substance that can make the images of those 39 premature newborns, taken from their incubators after Israel cut off fuel to all of Gaza’s hospitals, from my mind.
The messages and collaborations and invitations and bids for connection I’m receiving through this stupid little screen are helping.
I need people more than ever.
This weekend, I went over to some beautiful abortion friends’ home, and stopped at an Iraqi takeout spot in their neighborhood to buy some baklava to bring with me. I’ve been going to people’s homes empty-handed way too often these days, in an effort to be more financially responsible and for lack of fresh flowers to pick as the frost blankets our gardens.
As I waited to check out, my insulin pump buzzed angrily at my hip: I’d forgotten to refill it or to find a new injection spot. I had no insulin. I couldn’t share baklava with my friends, or the cornbread they were baking for us at that moment; I couldn’t eat anything at all, I until I had access to my own refrigerator, and could fit a new little disposable needle to the tip of the insulin pen.
Qutaiba, who owns the place, made happy conversation. His mother handed me a hot falafel ball, fresh out of the deep fryer, wrapped in a napkin. What was I going to do? Reader, I ate it. My blood sugar spiked. I felt vaguely sick all night, and needed a huge shot of insulin when I got home hours later, but happy in the warm embraces of my friends, even as our pain and exhaustion made the gravity in the room stronger. Curled on their couch, petting their silk-soft black-and-white kitten, we talked about dates and sex and work and abortion and the doula community and Palestine. My head and chest ached as my blood sugar rose. I almost threw up. I was still glad I ate the falafel, deliberately overshooting my body’s limits.
I was glad I overshot it. I almost always am, in the end.
The things we can do will never be enough, in the face of genocide and apartheid and war and nation-states and corporations; we must keep doing all of them.
Am I really doing so badly, considering? I don’t know.
I’m meeting people for drinks. I’m bringing baklava when I come to your house. I’m meeting up to go for walks together, my dog weaving in front of us and between our legs and off the trail, my insulin pump buzzing intermittently for one reason or another. I’m writing little birthday cards and condolence cards and love notes to people. I’m talking to people for hours, through tears, through laughter and gossip, through long silences and quiet darkness we’re inhabiting together. I’m trying to rest. I’m trying to express my joy and pleasure whenever I feel it, and look for it when I don’t.
I’m staying present with my growing baby (I know what you’re thinking but look at me, look at my eyes, listen to me: he is a Baby), unbearable as it to feel his warm soft weight in my arms and to see behind my eyes that father holding pieces of his children in two plastic bags, to know there are babies under the rubble dying slowly and alone, to remember those 39 babies in Al-Shifa. To think of those 1 million other babies we’re helping Israel to kill and maim and traumatize. I’m thinking about the babies all the time, and the people birthing and loving them
. I need my baby more than ever.
I need people more than ever.
I’m reading Zeba Blay and Mahmoud Darwish and Naomi Shihab Nye and so many others, and going to all the rallies I can (my two-year-old has started referring to them as “parties,” and I’m also going out late (for the mother of said two-year-old, who has a medical condition called No One In My House Sleeps), and drinking cocktails I can’t afford with champagne floaters and inhaling the clove smoke of friends and holding the babies I can and petting every cat I find.
I’m grieving and raging all the time and I’m Posting a Lot and I’m crying often and most nights I’m not really sleeping and I’m calling/emailing/faxing my stupid little reps and maybe I’m not doing too badly, though perhaps I’m doing worse than you are, at this particular moment.
How are you doing?