Most of my life it’s felt like my job to feel; to feel the cracks in my mother’s heart when she learned of my father’s affair. To feel protective over my family, instead of myself. To feel responsible for pain around me, but never my own. I remember that soccer game, & hearing my brother’s teammate, Sebastian, scream as he writhed in the grass. I was 8 & asked God to give his pain to me.
As I watch more bodies brutalized as they demand the flow of genocide stop, I remember the other bodies; the children whose breath was stolen in the clutches of their mothers. The tiny & grown bodies buried and forgotten in mass graves, their lives & futures stolen & hidden under stolen earth. As I write those last sentences, I finally stop asking myself the question, “Why I can’t stop crying?”
Since I was small, I always felt too much. As my access to the world and the boundless ache have grown, so has my capacity for hope. I’ve found more folks like me who also have the call to feel, so I’m not alone anymore. Their hearts are breaking with mine, and so we bring our bodies & voices together to call for another world.
If you’re noticing your heart tearing, mine is shredding with yours. I call it evidence that our spirits live, that we sorrow at the sight of children with their arms zipped behind their backs, massacred with dozens of thousands of martyrs. As we face the embodiment of empire, we can trust the ancestors who felt before us to guide our feet.
Just as South African apartheid fell, so too shall that of Israel. We’re remembering together we have power, & our hearts pull us toward the mycelium of students & the story of life that capital and colonizers will never understand. As I write, I’m holding my breath in hopes that the tides will finally turn. May the police state crumble, as settler colonialism dies. May we love land & life more than paper & comfort.
