“If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.”
– Audre Lorde
I don’t need to explain the levels of despair we’ve all been experiencing. I don’t need to describe the images we’ve all seen. And I certainly will not give voice to the political circus that pretends to placate a people who have long lost faith in their airs of democratic superiority.
Every morning I turn on the news with a hope so frail it threatens to disappear through the crack in my living room window. Every morning, there’s no change.
But this week, as Al Jazeera streamed live on my phone, my living room window shattered. I heard the cracks as they expanded across the frame, the glass shifting on itself until one shard slipped out of its puzzle and the whole pane fell apart.
Sometimes, when we reach despair, there’s a breakthrough moment that grants us relief. We’ve done everything in our power so that we’re able to let go, crack, shatter, and release the pressure.
And the little hope I have clung to during this process, instead of letting it slip out between the shards of glass, I shifted my thoughts from what could be lost to the space that has been created for what can now enter.
The past eight months have broken us, but I know we are still here because of the radical love that holds us together. We will never be the same again, but not because something has been taken from us, rather, because we are creating new routes of solidarity, new tactics of resistance, and new bonds of love that will carry us forward.
