For each like I get I will answer a question from Bhanu Kapil’s list in Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

1. I often find I have stepped into streams of histories to which I can lay no claim, but still find myself swept along. To do contemporary work is always to be situated as such. We must say: I am part of something, even if it is not inside me. I love this water rushing over me.

2. My grandfather once cooked steaks in the Midwest. This was after he got out of Gila River, after the army ushered the Japanese Americans inland, off the coast. He would put all the steaks on at the same time. The largest he served as rare. The smallest were served well done.

3. I miss sitting close to people. Friendship, sometimes, has meant to me this: a sitting next to. Alongside. With. Beside. When was the last time I used such words? The circumstances of your life cause specific decays in your mouth. Specific ways of learning how to speak again.

4. I miss silences more than conversations. Being silent with your computer screen is not the same. I want to stare off into space with you. And get lost in thought. I want to look at the ducks and laugh at their sounds. I want to watch the sun go down while we say nothing again.

5. I wrote the answer truthfully but it was too much for me to share with you. The short of it is: I am a butterfly shaped like a cloud.

6. My mother complains about white people every time I see her. An endless catalogue of weaponized ignorances. A structure of domination played out in the micro. Who is responsible for intersectional workplace abuses? I don’t blame white people, but I do.

7. The day the fires consumed the sun, all we could see was smoke, and darkness, and a deep red glow. My body crawled back into itself. I was scared to go out. When we pointed our cameras to the sky, the algorithm reassured us the sky was blue. I still have a picture of the lie.

8. The silences I shroud myself in appear as a veil but weigh an eternal stone. I roll the stone through the door, with the ghost I invite into my apartment. She is also the one who rides on my shoulders, everywhere. Hello, darling, I’m home, she says. I know, I know, I say.

8. I want to believe in the wholeness of my body but keep breaking it into tiny pieces, asking each part to be better. As if there were a way to be more beautiful in parts. As if beauty were not the fact of knowing myself to be beautiful. As if my body were a puzzle to be solved.

10. It will be a Tuesday. I will dance to my computer, and read the news that the last prison in California will be closing. The last police department, disbanded. I will open my door, and the exiled will come rushing back to our shores. The border walls will fall. I will sing.

11. I leave these lessons I have given you, and my hope that you learn many more. I leave these letters I have written, and your knowing I believe in you. I leave the webs I have woven, the communities I have brought together. I want always for this work to continue without me.

12. You are brilliant and versatile. The love you give to others, the gift of your words, your simple ways of speaking. This is what the world needs: you, with us, doing this work of dreaming. Every word toward a world beyond prisons. Beyond borders. Keep going. We need you here.

Phew that was an EXPERIENCE thank you for liking and reading