• I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.
• I always thought we were a feminist couple. But all his feminism left him once it was no use for being with me anymore.
• If you were looking for some dark optimism
  From a walk among the tower blocks, in the gloaming
  What would you miss?
• Moments that felt like this could actually be my body, this is the opposite of pain, this is a sign, I am possible.
• I write stories crouched in the bathroom, sustained by soft supermarket bagels.
• Home, sometimes, is what tries to unmake us.
• I never knew how to be a father to you because I never had a father neither.
• Reliving this memory, I find myself once again at a precipice.
• Only the gray, at once nuisance and halo.
• I want to talk about the long gash of sunlight that falls through a partially closed bedroom door as you wait in the dark, hour after hour, for a baby to sleep.
• I don’t want to reproduce everything that made me able to reproduce.
• Many studies and writings have described the profoundly lonely lives of ageing Black gay men, who may be successful in acquiring mainstream capitalistic markers of success, yet die very lonely and largely unloved lives.
• It was impossible to accept the idea that whatever world we knew was coming to a halt.
• When I came into the room, he started to explain how it had happened, and I told him that it didn’t matter.
• Their sweet breath gives my life sense. They calm me though I am feeling so desperate.
• I worked, but illegally; I didn’t have a kitchen, so I ate mostly street food; I cleaned, but not enough to prevent myself from getting fleas (true story).
• Individual solutions to collective problems are difficult and dangerous.
• I can picture my future toddler barefoot and happy, snaggletoothed, showing off grubs and snails to any adults that happened to be around.
• The exhaustive sameness of running hundreds of kilometers in one place surrendered to me a clarity in which I could think.
• Losing one possible life is not the same thing as losing one’s life.
• I did not feel–or want to feel–sad or devastated. I felt enraged.
• In this era of not “catching feelings”, one is perpetually required to be on guard, and to not feel, because loving someone is somewhat one of the worst things one can do for the heart.
• My life structurally does not make any sense.
• We kept unwrapping things. Stillness was simulated.
• I was stunned at the force of her feelings, and the sense of abandonment and entrapment she felt.
• “Precarious” is probably the best word to describe my life, although it could be argued that it is an inherently negative way to do so.
• I dissociated from the moment. I was watching a girl in distress.
• I wondered whether or not it was possible to have to suffer one more life-changing cataclysm.
• Better to submit to nothingness than attempt to put down roots in anything.
• do you love this country DO U LOVE
  yourself?
• I never returned to my position as an organizer.
• Wanting something, wanting nothing
  Wanting to leave, wanting to be held tighter.
• The aftershocks continued. They seemed to become less frequent, but it was hard to know exactly as our tired bodies lost the ability to register them.
• When I relented she chided me, “Gentle with your body.”
• We drive to save money
  and miss his death by a night.
• How hard must it be to feel like a real person when someone else has decided that you have nothing worth losing, that you can afford to have your life completely uprooted and untethered?
• I know home, I have created it with my people with colours in between them.
• In the yellow evening I want to hope
  Passing through the square with the bunting
• I go to class hungry. I go to bed hungry. I leave the table hungry. I write hungry. I read hungry.
• This is a stitching; a knitting together of things that have been torn.
• why not join the cross-cultural, supra-temporal dancing collective of death with great lipstick and a chalked shadow—
• I wonder if I would recognize hope even if it waved to me.
• It is a statement that has stuck with me for years. “In Jo’burg, you can find someone to sleep with in five minutes, but you will never find someone to talk to”.
• It was cold, but not too cold, but cold enough where breathing the chilled air was harsh on my lungs… still marred by the smoke of 2 Marlboros.
• What does it mean to be a genderqueer parent? You are still figuring yourself out, your whole life is a big comma splice.
• outside the airplane’s fuselage i feel no cold, only the exhilarating loneliness of having a secret.
• How do we face up to what’s killing us when it seems to be the very tools that provide us with a living?
• My social existence is unsteady. My capacity for understanding and participation depends on the whims of the weather, my sleep cycle, food, medications, and more.
• And yes to children, and yes I’m speaking from my womb yes I know I don’t have one I’m imagining it yes yes I mean it I’m for real so are my desires aren’t they? yes.
• My bioprecarity does not turn off when I need it to, or when I find love or fulfillment, or when it stops serving the plot. I am stuck like this.
• This new cohort of chronically ill people are organizing. They are supporting each other. They are facing precarity bluntly and together.
• For some of us, our bodies feel like ill-fitting, ill-suited outfits we can’t strip off, garish costumes mocking our every attempt at asserting an alternative.
• I want to describe a right hand encrusted in meconium. I want to tell you how it feels when a midwife tells you you’re too loud.
• My pain is familiar, but in a shadow companion kind of way. I keep it at a distance.
• I have another disappointment to share. I let her know I could not keep our dinner date.
• I also feel considerable guilt for the fact that my partner must pick up so much of the slack in terms of domestic labor because I am simply too exhausted.
• If there is an exit from patriarchy, it is not all at once. It is as slow as life.
• When my single father was arrested, I found myself homeless for several months, drifting between the couches of different friends as I worked to hold down my part-time job at a thrift store.
• Precarity can be an isolating endeavor, though we must keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be.
• Not that it did not have an impact, but maybe it was not essentially me. Maybe essence can be found in the ways we exist, the ways we change.
• Home is how we exist as we like.
• I know damn well that allegories are problematic, but I still construct them…
• Will the proliferation of small utopias provide new models for social behavior that center cooperation and the pursuit of justice for all, instead of competition, self-interestedness, and resource scarcity?
• In worlds where keeping one’s head down is often key to survival, speaking up was more often a practice that many of us actively avoided.
• Another world is possible and there are colleagues lighting the way toward it.
• Once I started standing up for myself and saying it out loud, things were not just my problem anymore. It felt better not to take it and deal with it alone.
• I wonder what it might mean to see our transness as an invitation to explore what gender and body might feel most like home.
• And why are you so very ashamed anyway, of what you have delegated to us, who you cannot name—
• You are not going to win, but you are not going to make it easy on them.