Writing

Planets should never zoom towards you.

I don’t smoke, but I’m gasping for a cigarette. A moment of supreme grounding in my body, a slip of control over my own mortality, an excuse to stand outside and stare at nothing. The sweet scent of mastering fire and flaunting death. I recall long nights on patios in South London watching friends roll cigarettes for each other, a small act of care, of community, clusters of bodies sheltering the strands of tobacco from the cold wind, warm lights trembling in gloved hands.

I hunt in the dusty corners of the garage for a bottle of bubbles to stand outside and blow. It is not the same.

An Alarming Specificity | Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery

I’m thinking about bodies. Bodies with which the world is not prepared to contend. Bodies that systems of colonialism, of white hegemony, have determined to be outliers.

I’m thinking of pristine white outlines of bodies on bathrooms, men and women, women who inevitably wear A-line dresses (that is what it is to be a woman according to bathroom placards: to be white, to stand, to wear stiff dresses). Accessible bathrooms denoted by wheelchairs, as if to be a person whose body works atypically means you are instantly thrust into a chair.