I’m writing to you from the year 2018. Every day I wake up with the distinct feeling that the world is ending. I have gotten into the shitty habit of scrolling on my phone as soon as I wake up, allowing ads to fill my consciousness. After binge watching the new Illuminati scheme of Netflix for an hour or two, I muster the strength to rise and dress. I stare up into the sky from the driver’s seat of my car, on the same freeway that I am on everyday. Roll a J, stretch my lower back, think about all the people I Could Be One Day. I see fires in the distance, black smoke billowing into the air like parachutes being sucked up into space. I wonder where the fire is coming from, but fires are so frequent these days in southern California that they’re nearly unremarkable. There are no longer winters, just a few days of rain here and there; my plants drink deeply when it rains, happy to receive from a place up above from above aside from my blue IKEA bucket. A veces it is terribly cold at night, followed by an unrelenting, blazing hot day. This creates the blurred effect of a seemingly endless season, the seemingly endless tolling of days, and the distinct awareness of climate change.
Entre dos mundos, yo sueño.
I’ve been reading Octavia Butler, which has only worked to solidify my suspicions qué el mundo se está acabando. Her prophetic prose reaches my mind, sending shivers through each of my toes from the ground below me. One of the protagonists, Lauren has hyper-empathy syndrome, and can feel the pain of others. This for me serves as a metaphor for the humility and deep entwinement of the collective self. The ocean-floor-deep empathy that you must carry, the containment of ego.
The political problems we face today are as ancient as time, greed and the advent of settler colonialism. Instead of living under the Obama-smile-era of neoliberalism and the expansion of civil rights, I now live under direct fascism by a white supremacist who used to be a TV celebrity. This, too has deepened my knowing that the world is ending, that capitalism is bloated and ready to burst. We have seen moments of eruption, organizing, fervency and urgency, but they like all fires eventually fade, waiting to be re-ignited. How much more can we take? Some of my students the other day had the a-ha moment of recognizing how deeply entrenched we are in colonialism and asked: is there any way Native people where ever get their land back? I try to console my students with examples of the Haitian revolution, the endless push for decolonization, the struggle of my ancestors in El Salvador, Syrian and Palestinian mujeres fighting for their kin; in some ways, I am also trying to also assure myself that dismantling this shit is even possible anymore. Assata taught me that they don’t call it “The Struggle” for nothing.
We all work hard. For those of us in the rat race, we log our hours and try to pretend like capitalism gives us the room to have a balanced, wholesome life. I don’t see a future for me in this country. Most of the new jobs created in the U.S. are temporary. I think the same shopping malls have been built and rebuilt thousands of times over. There’s always development and construction in city centers, but none of it means anything. Places are now built solely on the premise that people will come and take pictures of them. Capital is increasingly concentrated in urban zones that are predicated on displacement and gentrification. The cycle is both inevitable and inescapable.
Plugged-in. Every day. The screen dominates all that I do. My life and livelihood revolve around the portal I write to you from. It has become my vessel for expression, escape and discovery. It has been my source of livelihood, career and reality.
Entre dos mundos, yo sigo.
Me duele el alma,
Like anyone who struggles for self determination and joy, maintaining a sense of hope and rootedness prove tasks I struggle with every minute.
There are days I don’t see the point in rising,
but I do so anyways, in my own persistent, stubborn and flawed way.
