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

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.

Even after a lifetime of hearing the voice of Aretha Franklin, to hear it again is to hear it anew. There’s a bright spark of joyful pain to see it coming directly from her body, which is no longer tethered to this fragile and faulty earth.

If people could leave the world in the way they gave to the world, I wish for a path to heaven lined with Black people clapping their hands. I wish Don Cornelius at the center, all by himself, showing out with all the moves we knew he was stashing the whole time.

A people cannot only see themselves suffering, lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome. Cornelius had a vision for Black people that was about movement on their own time, for their own purpose, and not in response to what a country might do for, or to, them.

some would say we’ve all got a little magic inside & it just takes the wrong mix of people and imagination to bring it out & this one goes out to both the magic performance itself & the audience, waiting with held breath & not realizing they’re in on the ground floor of the trick.

When your mark is your own, defined by rules of your own making, you build the boat wide enough for your people and whatever you need to survive. You save yourself first.

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.

It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.