by Anais Peterson
Thursday (3.12)
It really does feel like the end — I am sitting on my [broken] trampoline, eating Chinese food and soaking up the sunshine in a quiet, emptying Oakland looking up at the house I love, overgrown with brown and green ivy, our black cat peeks
out of our front window and the breeze gently dances in through the screen of our front door. Sunlight is falling from the sky, catching on my eyelashes and the remnants of last summer’s purple flowers scattered across our backyard, and
glinting off the open window of the third floor bathroom. I am wearing black shorts and fraying grey sandals, when I close my eyes it could be may. When I open them I watch white clouds lazily drift across thesky, never obscuring the sun.
We walk home in empty Oakland — small crowds on the sidewalks are drifting between the pizza shops and cars (no one is standing six feet apart) and tonight, dusk is calm. The sky is lavender and grey and the sun slips out of the sky
unnoticed. I wonder when this all will end. We go to the tea shop. I order a passion fruit tea, you pay, the tea shop is empty — usually I order brown sugar milk tea but nothing about this is out of the ordinary.
The walk home is dark — a green mountain energy representative is standing on the corner of Sennott and Oakland avenue. She stops us, chipper and joyful and almost out of place in the quiet. I lie to her about my electric bill, my housemates handle electric, somethings never change.
There is a stillness settling down around us, laughing together on the porch I do not find it unsettling. I watch housing carts being pushed down the middle of the street; boxes of hastily folded clothes and desk supplies and lamps and big house plants loaded into the back of a pickup truck before the dark blue vehicle pulls away, half closed boxes flapping in the air. You ask me things I do not want to think about and I stare at the street light, a consistent and hollow orange glow, refusing to flicker.
Friday (3.13)
We eat breakfast on the porch — me with two slices of peanut butter toast and a periwinkle mug full of coffee and you with a bag of five oranges. The oranges are over a week old by now but you finish all five and wipe your sticky fingers off on the porch chair cushions. I spent the morning writing instagram stories about mutual aid so by now it is 11 am and sunlight is warming the front half of our porch. It’s not so bad when the wind stays still but when it rustles the ivy I feel goosebumps under my sweatpants. I play kishi bashi softly from my laptop and I beam at you from atop a big crate we rescued last night from the dumpster. We bask in the sunshine in luxurious defiance of reality. Our laughter bounces and echoes in empty parking spaces as we pool all our friend’s printing money and decide what books to print from anarchistlibrary.com using the university’s printers. You request Emma Goldman and a short manifesto on peace, I print Yuri Kochiyama’s memoir and a zine about herbal medicine for myself, and an Audre Lorde collection for a friend.
We leave the house together — I am on my way to the printers and you on your way to work. We don’t say it but this may be the last time I see you this month, next month, indefinitely. You aren’t good at texting so I know when we say goodbye it will be awhile until we speak again. I don’t cry at the bus stop, our words whisked away by traffic. You pull me into a hug before I leave, my face buried in your dirty tan coat I feel the full terror of the word pandemic for the first time.
I look back once as I walk away.
2 weeks later, Monday (3.27)
I am thinking about revolutionary potential in all of this uncertainty, knowing that what I am building is something I can not yet imagine but regardless, something beautiful. If we do this right nothing will be the same and in some strange way I feel hopeful that I will see bits and pieces of the world I am building towards after this all ends even though just two Thursdays ago I was sitting in my backyard bathing in the afternoon sunshine crying, because I felt like we’d never win and all of life would pass by, wasted in an endless battle for better worlds and it’s all so impossible and for once, impossible seemed daunting rather than an endless space to create.
I am thinking about what it means to be productive and I am wondering how this time is a gift. Something about all of that Thursday felt as though I was living in the impossible, living in a bubble that I knew was going to pop but right then I was stretching out a moment of in betweens and there was time to do everything, every moment. I left my house to buy Chinese food and watched the sunset from my front porch and hugged my housemate at the port authority stop. I was stealing joy in defiance of what was to come of now.
So now, I am holding an abundance mindset as white women horde toilet paper, as the mothers claim publicly owned vacant houses for their babies in California, as families I have never met offer their extra rotisserie chicken to anyone without dinner on facebook, as prisoners walk free from cages, as we start to demand everything in moments where we being offered the scraps of what is being used to bail out the banks.
So, now I am holding an abundance mindset as I care for myself — this is not a time to be “productive.” Sometimes, when I am building from a place of rage, refusing to slow down my body will develop a sore throat, itching at the back of my mouth until I climb into bed early with a mug of tea and fall asleep at 9pm watching the great British bakeoff. This could be a thousand moments of climbing into bed early with my mug of tea. There is an abundance of time to give to what matters, to listen to my body. Who do you want to become during a global pandemic? / / Who do you want to unbecome? My days are filling up with zoom calls to build long term, anti-capitalist, mutual aid structures. This is not a time to be “productive.” Physical distancing and social solidarity.
All this to say, I’ve not yet touched my sadness. There was a day I cried because there is so much to be furious about and for the first time it really is no one’s fault. Yes, this is a political crisis and yes, this is the breakdown of latest age global
capitalism and yes, sometimes I worry about my dad coughing in public when he gets groceries at giant eagle and yes, this is a country teetering on the edge of fascism.
6.10
The last time I saw my favorite professor I told her I was no longer brave. She didn’t argue with me but held up a poem I wrote when I still believed in liberation.
“This is all to say there are better things coming.”
Anaïs Peterson (they/them) is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh where they received a double major in English writing and urban studies. An Aries who majored in poetry, their work is now a mix of lyric essays and prose poems writing around the topic of freedom in its many forms and often returning to dwell on sunflowers. You can follow them on Twitter @anais_pgh. On Instagram @anais_pgh.
