And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays o

I give thanks, then, for the worlds beyond this world that Octavia Butler wrote. And for how, even in those worlds, there is a suffering like the suffering I understood. That even in space, or in futuristic landscapes, there are still codes to be switched. Still suffering that grows inside a person until it becomes armor. I give thanks for Octavia

For as long as there is a future, there will be Black people in it, hopefully surviving in even newer and better ways than we are now. Circles of light opening their wide arms to briefly take our bodies somewhere higher. It will appear spectacular to everyone who isn’t us.

Everyone putting on different masks for different worlds and calling it freedom.

I do love carrying the Good and Holy Name of a man who might have looked like any man. I can better explain all of the ways I have disappeared. I thought I was in love enough to stay, but then the sky opened up and I became a kaleidoscope of butterflies. I thought I might live a life in which I let no one down, but that was the other man who is not

The thing I find myself explaining most vigorously to people these days is that consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.

Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings, even when those settings are rooted in the past, like Star Wars. Octavia Butler wrote science fiction that included aliens with dreadlocks. Nalo Hopkinson writes of a dystopian future in which Black people are trying

My loves, I want to know if heaven is real only if you are promised to be in it. I do not fear death as much as I fear the uncertain dark. An eternity that doesn’t include a chance for me to make amends for all of the things that kept me from holding you close while you were breathing and telling you how much I didn’t understand about love. I know

If there is some kind of loophole in the rules of magic, it might be this: the one where a person is able to be invisible until they are desired. Where they are an echo of nonexistence until they can fulfill a need, or tell a story, or be a thread in the fabric of someone else’s grand design. The flawed magic of desiring a body more than an actual