a blue prairie type of grief

 As I write this, I’m sitting in a field in Rockport, MA, covered in Atlantic Ocean salt, and sitting on hours of footage from a quarantined dance film residency. I haven't moved in hours; shaking too intensely to type with any sort of efficiency, reeling because the March on Washington was 57 years ago, young activists are still disappearing, Chadwick Boseman is dead, and I am spending my time creating art in a place where I can pretend for 10 days that Covid-19 doesn’t exist. 

I’ve flown away into myself. My memory of the past 48 hours is spotty at best. The tide, coming in. The cuts and bruises, scarring. The ears, ringing. Body, gone away into something that is not mine, carrying me away from a universe that holds nothing but rose-colored grief. 

I don’t know how to write all the shattered pieces of myself into something legible. 

Fuck legibility. I will not let my grief be stolen from me, nor will I let my joy shrink to make room for it. I will learn how to hold it all, just as the ocean held me this morning. Naked and vulnerable, with no one to bear witness except the sunrise.