Human Contact

Brown dog with ears up peering out of shadowed doorway.

The skin of my hands; the skin of her back; the beat in my chest; the long pause. Her breath, shuddering.

There are so many things I found impossible to put into words last year. I massage a woman’s back with a feather-light touch as she labors, her body straining with contractions. On the television, the news anchor describes “riots” in Ferguson. This was in the fall – after Mike Brown’s death, before the non-indictment announcement. My stomach twists into knots, but my anger and grief are not useful here. I look over at the woman, still hooked up to too many machines and switch off the monitor.

We breathe together, then separately. At the height of her contractions, it is like no one else in the world is there. I love the feeling of a woman’s hand crushing mine as the rush moves through her; that’s when I can feel her energy engulfing mine, like two soap bubbles merging.

When I am out at a protest, several months later, I go alone. I want contact, but the energy of the protesters has some other quality to it – a buzz rather than a hum. I feel like I am bearing this weight inside that cannot be shared in language, so I march. Onto the pavement of darkened streets and over barricades and finally onto the West Side Highway where they turn off some of the streetlamps as we continue to move uptown. When I finally peel off, I see from afar that the group is shrouded in darkness, occasionally lit with an eerie purple from the mixed red and blue of the cop cars’ lights.

I feel useless. I babble to myself when I get home, and I cut off all my sentences midstream. To listen to me is unintelligible – metaphor, image, plot, concept, but no character. No contact. The skin of her back; the skin of my palms. I think about the philosophical things. I think about what would be useful to say. I want to write something that would heal my incapacitation, the deep sense of hopelessness I feel while watching the news. The beat in my chest; the long pause.

The baby arrives in the early morning, when we are all just about ready to take a nap. My co-doula and her husband have arrived, and we all take shifts, sleeping on hard wooden chairs. It’s when a new doctor arrives that we are all jolted to attention. She’s funny, and actually looks the mother straight in the eye, rather than keeping her gaze trained between her legs. It seems like in no time at all she’s fully dilated and a head covered in hair is spilling out into the doctor’s arms. I let go of the mother’s leg and the doctor places the baby on her chest.

I have to rock back and forth on my feet to stay awake when we are moved out of the labor and delivery ward; our bubble of shared energy has burst and I have started to feel how heavy my own limbs are. When I arrive home, I collapse into a deep sleep and do not write about it for months.

Everything has a gestation period. I’m seeing it in the actions we’re taking against anti-black racism, and I’m seeing it in my writing. I tend to agree with Lynda Barry: I write not to escape this world but to be able to live in it. And damn, did I want to do some escaping. Then I think about that woman’s shuddering breath, the one that called us to action and I remember. This is about making contact.

"Worried About Your ___?" (or, The Full Retreat)

A snippet of Lynda Barry's inspiring book What It Is.

If you're curious what the best way is to announce your already-obvious absence, I would recommend writing a journal-style blog post. Here's my take on it.

Working two jobs came to a head for me this month; when my body was in one place, my attention and energy were moving away from it at high speeds. I didn't stop going until I hit desert.

Every book and instructor on creative expression has encouraged me towards discipline in my craft. I've had the discipline, but I still didn't have the right conditions. If I wrote during this month, I wrote single sentences or piled up the same words on different sheets of paper. If I drew, I drew jagged lines on the margins of sticky notes at work. I made my non-work life very small. I got back into watching television. The search for water was on.

Desert animals conserve energy during the heat of the day and spend their nights in great activity. I spent Sundays in front of the stove or the oven, writing in my head, focusing. When you haven't got a lot to work with, sometimes you have to play tricks on yourself to make it through.

At 1am on Friday of last week, when it was all over, I crawled into bed and shut off the lights. If there's one thing that desert animals are good at, it's surviving. But with the work that I do for my day jobs, It's hard to give myself permission to rest and recuperate. There's a huge guilt in not giving your all for other people, and a selfish desire to be wanted. Then on Saturday I re-opened Lynda Barry's book What It Is.

The book has a bit of a history with me - I bought it in pre-college more than 6 years ago as part of a creative writing class that also had me making my first zine (gasp!), and it's one of those staples that I can no longer go without. The book isn't instructional. It doesn't give you exercises for writing or drawing or dancing or singing. Instead, it just asks some very good questions.

When I got to the page photographed above - a comic book panel of an older Lynda Barry (presumably) reflecting on her worries - I knew I had to have it with me everywhere. If I worked at the same desk every day, I would have photocopied and posted it on the wall. Instead I took a picture of it with my cell phone camera and wrote a version of my own:

"Worried about your work?"

"Oh, there's my work, the magazine, healthcare in the U.S., things I did in past relationships, unanswered emails, lost contacts, what a jerk I am, the suitcases cluttering up my house -- and I can't stop worrying about stepping in dog mess."

It made me laugh! Listing out my worries made them seem funny, and manageable. I kept turning the pages of the book and finding new things to smile about. I felt like I'd struck oasis.

It's a process, we all know, to build and re-build your creativity - you try different things, you fail, you rattle around with your worries until you find another set of things to try. Me, I'm looking for stillness. As we move out of my birthday month and into National Novel Writing Month, I'm carefully cultivating my energy, and looking for moments to laugh at myself. Join me, why don't you?

There Will be More than Enough Time to Explore

I've been treating this year as if it were my last (on earth, that is, not just my last in college).

Sometimes that's a positive - when it spurs me to try out for new things and make new connections and deflate the excess worry that builds in my chest when I feel overwhelmed. But the flipside is overdrive. I must write more, read more, get things done in advance so that I can fill my newly formed hours with even more crafts and more clubs and more outings. I'm not one for a slow-paced life, but when I can't fall asleep due to my anxious whirring thoughts, then something needs to shift. Check out the poem after the jump.

All I Want for Xmas...

As you may (or may not) know, I do not celebrate Christmas. Although I could celebrate it in a secular way, the holiday has never really held that much appeal for me. However, I do know that it is a day of great joy and festiveness for a lot of people, thus there's a general good vibe on that day that I like to take part in. I hence resort to other forms of celebrating life as we know it on that day - such as doing ridiculous things or otherwise soaking up the good energy.

This year, I made hummus and pita from scratch in our kitchen and ran out of chickpeas for the mixture just when my hands were good and covered in sticky dough. I was listening to Lupe Fiasco and - after pausing said brilliance - had to flee the apartment in a flour-covered hoodie and barrel down 6 blocks to buy another can of chickpeas and finish the ever-so-important hummus recipe. When the clock struck midnight, I was checking the dough in the refrigerator for the last time before morning and going to bed.

My Christmas present was my father waking me at 8am to say that he'd arrived at my apartment and we spent the morning again covering our hands in sticky dough and trying to figure out the best possible method of making our pita into something that resembled the Middle Eastern variety - because, being Bengali, any bread we try to fry instantly becomes a paratha.

In the end, we walked all over the city, particularly through the barren trees of Central Park and marveled at the quietness. In my apartment, on the streets, in the park... all was hushed. We ate ice cream in the cold. We spent time in whatever way we pleased.

It is in these moments that I feel that living in the moment really takes on meaning. Oftentimes we go about our day on autopilot, moving from one spot to the next with some sort of envisioned end result. But destination mentality distracts us from the small moments that make life a fun and exciting batch of choices. Every moment, we have the ability to look at our situation and recognize its sanctity. Though it may sound obscure when our mornings are filled with pressing meetings and our afternoons are bound by schedules and our nights are too short to catch even a wink of sleep, when the holidays roll around, it's all we think about. I have said it before in many different ways, but here again:

We must invest in ourselves the good energy that comes on holidays everyday. We must bring out joy in the small moments. And we must allow ourselves the capacity to feel all emotions, not just the easy ones, and move through them in our regular lives.

Enjoy your post-holiday relaxation, everyone!