our precarious joy

feeling is dangerous because
it requires us to dwell in anguish,
rather than anesthetize it
(as if it never happened).

so many fear joy because they fear losing it.

they hate us because we live here — in this precarious joy —
and we have found preciousness, still.

it is far easier to desensitize ourselves to the world.
but what about the romance of living?
the tundra of grief, of striving, of becoming like
every breath is an invitation to another way of being?

what about the dignity of being?
i won’t settle for anything less.

i would rather weep than pretend.
i would rather be hated than be digestible.
i would rather be mirthful than meander around like
happiness is some rare ray of light piercing through my window.

it’s not that we are extra,
it’s that we are feeling
and you are not
(or rather, you refuse).

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On the Other Side of Shame (Body Hair is Beautiful)

on the other side of shame, BODY HAIR IS BEAUTIFUL.
on the other side of shame, i am here — hairy, feminine, powerful!

because my white classmates used to call me a monkey
because when my sister’s arm hair grew she was called a man
because the indian aunties used to chide each other for not plucking
because i was taught that something there to help me was somehow unhygienic?
(as if there is nothing more unhygienic than racism + transmisogyny)

because i used to secretly shave my arms, my legs, my chest, my groin, my pits, my everything
because i burned and itched all over, became so skilled at concealing the cuts
because i never took my shirt off in public until i was 20 years old
because they called me a beast
(because i believed them)

because my mother’s biggest fear of aging was that she would no longer be able to remove her facial hair
because when i told her i was trans she said no one would believe me because i was “so hairy”
because when i came out my community told me i should “at least shave” to be taken seriously
because women and men yell at me on the street telling me to “shave if i’m gonna dress like that”

because indian people harass me the most for it
because they say the same things to me that were said to them
(because i know these intimate cuts,
how deep they sting)

because every day online i have people tell me that i am disgusting and deserve to die
because the women, they don’t want to look like me
because the men, they don’t want to look like me
because it doesn’t matter —
because i’d rather be me than beautiful
because i’d rather be me than their beautiful
because i’d rather be my own beautiful

2020 Resolutions

1. return to the basics: the lungs, they are for breathing. the heart, it is for forgiving.
2. remain porous through the pain. a broken heart is an invitation: there is space here, inside.
3. your life is your greatest romance. so, speak roses. make every conversation a ceremony.
4. amidst diffused despair, harvest hope. cultivate idealism. wear them like heirlooms.
5. become indelible. linger in everything you touch.
6. permanence is unambitious. nothing is fixed. things don’t die, they go somewhere else.
7. “natural” & “reality” are political aesthetics. birth new worlds. every pattern can be unwoven.
8. language is bewitching, but do not mistake talking about the thing as doing the thing.
9. comparison is creativity’s curse. genius is the ability to orbit elsewhere, imagine otherwise.
10. even trash is teeming with life. surrender to your insignificance & find your magic there. 
11. empathy is a daily baptism, but do not confuse bartering your dignity as compromise.

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thank you for instilling in me the audacity to say hello

The other day at dinner we all went around and introduced ourselves to one another. Most of the times introductions feel forced and perfunctory, a chore that we oblige, but ultimately feel obstructed by. Necessary like traffic signals or grammar or electricity bills, yes, but ultimately – tedious.

But this evening something special transpired. Maybe it was the candlelight, but I think it was more of the company – the drinks made irrelevant by our own, mutual intoxication. A group of gestures, eye creases, and back knots who – at least for a few hours – became one body.

We allowed ourselves to ooze out of the template of what we are supposed to say about ourselves. And in that way – we weren’t ourselves, we were so much more than them.

So often what is proper keeps us from what is profound. Every time the threads of a dress come undone when I crawl into it I remember there is poetry in our excess. The way language tries to envelope us, but never quite does the trick.

We talked about our life purposes, the journeys we had to get here, the things that mattered most to us. The table was a fishing rod, was an invitation, was us flopping around, gills wide open. We talked about the world we want – which meant that necessarily we talked about our pain. How we were broken up with, not just by a person, but by a planet. Our wreckage and the world we dug up underneath it.

There are few things more that I love than hearing people talk about something that they are passionate about. Unabashedly. Without restraint. Our puriticanical culture makes us so nervous about pleasure, doesn’t it? It feels positively reckless to indulge that part of yourself – a gnawing fear that your self will mold into the dreadful –ish. But there was no selfish here, there were just fish making sense of their scales.

Mostly: it’s the way eyes glimmer when they speak that gets to me. Our fixation on tears makes us lose sight of the face’s former tenant: a pupil like an egg yolk, gooey and insatiable.

Sometimes I close my own eyes and I feel like I am there, too. Sometimes feeling feels more real than anything I have ever known.

Which goes to say: we were utterly unreasonable. And the introductions, they took almost the whole time. But it didn’t matter because we just fell into each other. And we knew that no matter how we shape-shifted we would always make eyes. Literally construct them right then and there. Become that night for each other again. Somehow.

I think this is the opposite of loneliness. And I know that this is the world that I want. No – the one that I need. To keep going. To have the audacity to say “hello.”

One more time.
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there will be elegance in my ending

the days that i am most heart broken i wear the boldest colors.
at a fundamental level it’s about dignity.
you will not see me go down without a fight!

i might be sinking — but my fall will be stylized, choreographed, + well manicured.
there will be elegance in my ending.

a commitment to glamor is how i continue even when the future seems tenuous + brittle + naive.

maybe it is naive, but that evening i moisturized my face with tears + i put on my heels + i played pretend until i believed my own performance.
in a world that dispossesses me of so much, give me that!

and this is not about artifice. there is nothing more real than finding beauty in the places that have been abandoned by the patriarchal machinations which extract our genius + disregard us when done.

like a fruit rind.
but we decompose + come back. always. somehow.

when i am gutted at the end of the world, i put on my lipstick + remind myself: even trash is a renewable resource — teeming with life.

beautiful, grotesque, visceral, life.

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we remain incorrigible

the body is not a fleshy prison for the spirit.
we transcend the arbitrary boundaries drawn around our skin.
we are so much more than the physical.

our bodies are just mere suggestions, not ordained truths.

truth is polyamorous. time is, too,
we are connected to the past, the future, the present,
the people we are, the people we love, the world that surrounds us, is us.
invisibility is not an objective state, it is a lack of ambition.

just because you don’t see us as us doesn’t mean we are not real.
reality surpasses vision.
our imagination is malnourished by a world that limits our potential to our ability to work + not our ability to love,
one that relegates dreaming to our sleeping.

what if we were to dream while awake?
the hyper individuation of the west crumbles beneath our feet + in our lungs.
we desire past the confines of the now.
we reject their reason, and instead we are honest — painfully so — in our feelings.

that behind every fact is a carousel of feelings.
behind every law is a panic attack.
behind every judge, and every doctor, and every politician is a broken heart.

we yearn desperately for an otherwise.
we begin that otherwise by surrendering to the complexity of ourselves + everyone around us.
we use science to appreciate our potential, not restrict it.
biology proliferates not imprisons.

the natural disposition of the world is infinity.
we are oriented towards multifaceted universes that exist beyond comprehension.
we resist being known, we insist on being experienced regardless of reason.

there are as many ways to exist as there are existences.

everything lives: the stone beneath our feet, the clouds above us. nothing dies — it just transforms. it goes elsewhere.

we are the descendants of elsewhere. star dust, skin cells, stray dreams.

we spill outside of the containers they filter us through.
we remain incorrigible, impure, and delightfully contaminated.
porous + welcoming of all the transitions, the refugees, the becomings, the future, the now.

~~~~~~~~
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art by @lilboyblueish

story of contradiction

4/22/19

this is the story of contradiction. i know that change is necessary, but i fear it nonetheless. sometimes i am afraid of making new friends because i think about them dying one day. sometimes i am afraid of saying goodbye on the phone because i am terrified it might be the last time. so i just hang up. so i just disappear. sometimes i leave so i don’t have to get hurt. or rather: sometimes i hurt myself first so other people can’t hurt me. i think about hospital beds, funerals, grief. is loving worth the grief? i am afraid of falling in love because i am afraid of the loneliness on the other side — how alone becomes freshly lonely in the aftermath of it all, the way a crumpled sheet takes a new character when you are gone. i fear the things i know — or rather, i fear the things that i expect. i am expectantly shocked. i pretend things will last forever (even though i know they will fall apart). i pretend that we will live forever (even though i know we will die). i pretend that my body & my mind are distinct (even though i know they are not). i know that knowledge is failing me, but i keep trying to know. for so much of my life i thought the goal was about fighting, but now i think it’s more about feeling. maybe feeling is fighting? pain feels closer to truth than anything i have ever known. or rather: feeling feels closer to truth than anything i have ever known. i know that the people i am & the people i love are dying. but i also feel like we are living while dying. watch me live while dying. watch us live while dying. what do you feel knowing that we are dying? i want to run outside & ask everyone what their plan is for the end of the world but instead i am writing you this letter. here to say i know, and that’s precisely the problem. i know, it hurts. or rather knowing hurts. knowing hurts. 📸@christianhutterphoto

because we are alive, we remind them that they are not

originally published 2/22/19

the day after being called a tranny in this outfit i had a photo shoot. i saw this dress, still stained with the tint of their laughter, discarded on my living room floor like a fruit rind…or an ex. it reeked of both fear & sweat, pungent, unforgiving. perhaps it was a whim (or death drive) but somehow i decided to bring it with me. touching it: i felt their loneliness. their shame. there is a magic to navigating the world in this body: i see things other people don’t see: exit signs, gestures, denial. i listen to the biographies of objects: stop signs & metro cards. there are libraries in every nook & cranny in this city, tomes in every look. in minutes i can establish the energy in a room & whether i need to leave it. this is how i have survived: by sensitizing myself to everyone & everything. when i walk outside i have to decipher the invisible tongues of thousands. is this stare curious or lethal? is this invitation genuine or genocidal? in split seconds i traverse universes. so when the camera invited me in: i surrendered to the ritual & found myself smiling on the other side. reclamation is turning destruction into joy. joyous in my pain: i find it impossible to hate the people who hate me. i love them & worry about them, their gum recession, their dysmorphia, the ways they have mistaken misery as masculinity. disgust comes when the boundaries of life & death are unsettled. it is directed to us not because we symbolize death, but because we symbolize life. they have marked us for death — but in their squalor, we find glamour. we proliferate it! we birth it! we reproduce it! it overflows from us: gorgeous & grotesque, seeps out of our pores into the garments into the words onto the streets so that there is always a trace of us there, lingering. the reason they want to kill us is because when we are alive we remind them that they are dead. but i, i have learned how to make communion with everything: you, a dress, this body hair cursive written all over my skin: a love letter to me, a love letter to you: “hi my name is alok. i am alive. are you?”

portrait by bronson farr

strangers are potential friends

I believe that I can fall in love with everyone in the world. I believe I need other people to figure out myself. I believe that other people are just as complex and contradictory as me. I believe everyone has a fundamental dignity and worth simply for being. I believe Western individualism is killing us. I believe that we shouldn’t have to be in romantic love to be cared for. I believe that care is more important than critique. I believe friendship is sacred. I believe that I am afraid of dying alone. I believe loneliness is a form of international emergency. I believe that we are more connected than ever but have never felt more alone. I believe we sometimes use irony because we are afraid of intimacy. I believe in interdependence. I believe the way that we have been taught is to use, and not to need. I believe needy people are honest people. I believe feeling is one of the most dangerous things I have ever done. I believe sadness is a form of consciousness. I believe we should be able to cry in public. I believe depression is not my fault. I believe we were meant for something more kind and just than this. I believe kindness can be a form of justice. I believe I am heartbroken not by one person, but by the world. I believe that strangers are potential friends. I believe that strangers are potential friends.

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2019 Resolutions

1) ambition beyond recognition. defy easily consumable narratives, be gnarly & ruthlessly indigestible.
2) boundaries are not borders. protect your energy from those who live for you but would never die for you.
3) perfection is loneliness. purity is not the goal, it never was.
4) conformity is not community: be yourself even when it hurts. especially when it hurts.
5) your greatest gifts are your biggest flaws and your biggest flaws are your greatest gifts. this is a contradiction: so are you.
6) be as fluent in the language of injury as complicity: embrace simultaneity in everyone & everything.
7) there are as many ways to be as there are people in this world. infinity is not chaos, it just is.
8 ) remove everything in your path that keeps you from making art.
9) forgive but do not forget. empathize but do not enable. care, but do not mistake fixing other people as fixing yourself.
10) don’t confuse the way you have come to live with the only way to live. remain open to the universe inviting you to shift.
11) run into the flames. never forget: we have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set us free.

they love their power more than they love us

they say that they love us but they only care when we are thriving.
they say that they love us, but they do not care we are dying.
they say that they love us, but they only celebrate us on stages, ignore us off of them.

to be brown & gender non-conforming & queer & femme is to be reduced to a metaphor, a symbol, a meme for the collective empowerment.
is to only matter for entertainment value.
is to be laughed at & beaten & disappeared.
is to not be allowed to talk about it.

they say that they love us but they only love us when we are triumphant.
but what happens when we no longer can?
what happens when we reserve our energy for ourselves?

they said that they loved us but then they called us bitchy, selfish, narcissistic. they said they loved us but then they called us ungrateful, predators, freaks.

we want them to love us so we forget that when they tried to hug us their hands ended up around our necks instead.

we want them to love us so we pretend that we are strong.

to be us is to be unreciprocated. is to give & give & give and have them run & run & run and have them take & take & take all of our magic and have them forget & forget & forget your name.

they say that they love us but they love their power more than they love us.

& so we find our own: we, the unreciprocated.
we: the people we have been taught to hate.
but are remembering how to love.

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