life

We’d not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, nor gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we’d not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we’d been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.

I stare intensely at their hands as they shake mine. Their skin is wrinkled, transparent, and spotty. I think about how their hands were once baby hands. I think about babies gripping adults’ fingers. I think about how these people have probably had their own babies and held them with the same hands.

if you have ever seen anyone do anything that you thought looked fun, you are just as human as they are and you have every right to try it out too.

Everyone in this room has managed to grow old despite how easy it is to die. They all escaped their childhoods alive despite tuberculosis, polio, and whatever other horrible illnesses afflicted humanity when they were kids. They drove without seat belts, in cars full of cigarette smoke. They survived literal wars. Terrible things have probably

We were petulant and impatient, claiming to experience outsized agony, when expected to endure less romantic realities.

“If we become obsessed with the idea of death hiding and waiting for us in ambush, we are not making death more real but life less real.

When I see disabled BIPOC femmes asking for something considered a femme luxury, I see both a demand to live with full vibrancy and an acknowledgment that we may not live forever or for long and we want to maximize our time here.

She had no true interest in the afterlife, except that she was a person whose hunger for the world was greater than what the world provided.