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Dear ones,
Last week I had a draft for you of all the things that had transpired since I last wrote: our anarchist retreat, a book talk at a quaint little college in Ohio, a full week of classes that dug into some of our headiest material yet (I spent two paragraphs explaining “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” before deciding the newsletter was maybe not the place for it), and a juicy update from the Authotheory course I’m teaching at the local writing center (it’s been so generative!). But I didn’t have time to end it, nor to gather my usual trove of links, so it’s in the pile of forever-drafts. If I was to update you on what’s happened since, it would also be a full list: our toilet split somehow nearly in half and we had to spend our entire weekend dealing with replacing it (without landlord assistance, financial or otherwise), my car started leaking gas, P was back to doctor’s appointments after his short break from them, we’re hosting some of P’s family this week, and I was back to teaching and giving another RBF talk. When things are this busy, I find it hard to manage much more than summaries of the goings-on. I am grateful for so much of this, but I do miss the space that a quieter schedule allows.
What I can muster by way of reflection is this: even when the fall is warmer than it ought to be (which it is in my part of the US), it still hurls me into intense nostalgia. It’s been just shy of two years since I have been in this apartment, and the fact that it’s literally falling apart feels like it is trying to remark on this anniversary. The apartment has always been haunted, by a ghost that preceded me, and the ones I brought; it was, for at least a full year, a mourning space. But the breaking open of my heart made way for new things, and I wonder, in the glow of the recent harvest moon, if the ghost is trying to remind us of the crack in everything; I wonder if it is trying to remind us, more importantly, of the light.
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