The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 4

RECON : FIGURE

A Way Message ::.
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Hello! Thank you for your email! I am frustrated and irritated to use precious typing skills to tell you that sending an email to me does not entitle you to a response.

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I know that you believe it does. This is racist. I mean, “cultural."

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Pretend that you have put a letter into a mailbox in 1973. Also pretend that you are not indoctrinated into white supremacy. Remember that drive-thrus are an invention of modernity.
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Picture that I am on the Other End, alchemizing time as I hum around the modem that sits on top of a straw shoebox. Imagine that modem unplugged; as there is no wifi on the Other End. We gather internet from hotspots because we live everyday, Right Now, in transitory space: maybe we will stay and maybe we will fall through the cracks. (Also, Fios has Happened here and we’ve refused to succumb.)

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Add color:
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fresh flowers weekly on an altar covered in lace. Add rooting in the backyard of a friend, where there is dancing and disposing of old herbs in the dirt.

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Imagine that what is urgent and what is important are two separate things.*Imagine that justice is a continual process of doing and undoing.** See that weaving and unraveling, weaving and unraveling are the future workings that 0001111’s have already been doing for us and it is time that we humans catch up.
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Remember that Breonna Taylor’s murderers are “free”, if “freedom" means that they walk about with the memory of her sleeping face under their shoes. Remember that Nina Pop’s name has not been spoken on any campaign trail. Remember that my shortcut to the “why” of it remains to be Sally Hemings who has no monument and no grave (she does have Daveed Diggs playing her “owner” in Hamilton and making her a punchline, now available on Disney+). Remember I am not speaking anymore about deaths that are not Good Deaths. I love and live in the cracks. The spaces where the spiral contracts. The infinite opening that opens my breath.
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So can we revolutionize email? What is it we really need to say? In every medium?
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Grass.
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The Hudson River in different locations. See how wide it gets just a little further north of Harlem. Past the Bronx. Drive. Foot out the window if the highway’s not too crowded. Speed. Sing.
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It’s 1973, and you’re in your bellbottoms: mid-blue denim and too tight. The same color as the mailbox you stand in front of now. The Eagle’s beak pierces you mid-shin as you lean over, grab the rusting handle, swing open the mouth and drop in your letter; fresh-pressed daises between every page. The perfume you sprayed over it wafts for the last time as you let go with the hope that you may get a letter back in a little bit of time. Though we are still at war, and you know that could slow things down.
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​*This sentence is paraphrased from my darling #internetcousin, Evelyn from the Internets. If you have never seen her videos, I highly recommend tubing them. Her reviews of the original LaCroix flavors get me every time.
​**For more on this, see me and Éamon Boylan in my saved ig story labeled, “👁”.

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All of the work here is brought to you by the gifts of our Ancestors; seen and unseen, known and unknown. May we remember our rising, may we light the shadows. May we all together thrive.