For the last little while I’ve been writing my music-day memories. I’m not doing that because those were my happiest times. In reality, right now is my happiest time. I’m excavating them because there’s a path I’m finding from there to here which makes sense to me as a whole. An emotional breadcrumb trail I want to follow before the wind comes and blows it all away. I’m finding it interesting to revisit those moments that held all sorts of special stresses and maneuverings that swing from humorous to not-so-much.

When I say I feel the most satisfied in this moment and have felt that way for many many months, that’s a product of my emotional self seeing slightly differently. Understanding how moments really are precious and certainly never perfect, but that mix makes the time even more satisfying. And I guess in essence, I’ve just decided to let my heart be happy. And yet I also recognize a baseline emotional foundation that’s poured with the concrete of enraging frustration and aching sadness. The mess of that has been layering for a long while, but the floor began to harden in earnest in November 2016. In that moment, I found navigating with likeminded outraged fellows was a moat over some of the cracks. And although George Floyd’s murder brought a solid uprising, the last two years have felt more solitary. I think that’s how many of us have been traveling through.

When I sound out my top-of-soul emotion, what comes to me is exhaustion. A sense that no matter how loud we are, how wide our arms wave, how big our signs, how fat our tears, how loud our cries, nothing changes. Lips move. Words fall out that splat and melt away. Do not float up, enter ears, or make a difference, but have instead come apart before they even reach altitude. They hold no heft. Word-casings—a phrase taken from Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House for words that have been overused until they become like “a shell without a bullet.” 

“Hope” has become to me a word-casing.

To realize that truly no one who could be of any use on the we’re-in-power level is brave enough to do a thing to stop everyday massacres in America—although they’re very concerned about making sure foetus’s are brought to term and into a world where they stand a high chance of being slaughtered, starved, or otherwise kept out of social mobility if they’re BIPOC (because that’s just a fact while those who can afford it–looking at you majority white folx–will find a way to receive what they need to make their own reproductive choice)—makes my heart beat so hard I need to stroll around and shake it out. This sense of impotence infuriates me in a particularly excruciating way. The white-supremacist killing of ten humans at the Topps supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that also left hundreds and beyond bereft. The derangement in Uvalde, Texas, erased 21 living souls and shattered the lives of countless beyond. And in those faces, none in the state’s legislature or the US GOP saw themselves or the faces of their own families. If they couldn’t rise to action for Newtown victims, who at the very least reflected back a sameness in skintone and social strata, then why in hell would they be moved to act now? (while that same male skintone is in fact the majority doing the killing.*)

So here we are, littered with word-casings. Empty shells lacking meaning. And in a very little while (next week, the one after?) there will be another of these mass killing events and there will be an enactment of “outrage” and nothing more.

What If the billions of victims still living found the strength, found a way, to reach out, and form a blanket with each other. The sad thing is that they wouldn’t need to reach very far to touch hands with another victim of gun violence. The map* below illustrates the numbers of gun violence deaths so far in 2022. If they did find a way, form a covering, I would help hold that blanket. Sew together the edges to smother the useless ones who bloviate and bluster while individual’s lives fall apart.

While I feel empty around a lot of words currently, this Amanda Gorman poem is filled with word bullets that I think pierce in a very impactful way.

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

• This fact taken from statista, which is rated high for factual reporting on MediaBiasFactCheck
• Map from Gun Violence Archive, which rates high for factual reporting, left of center per mediabiasfactcheck.