The reason I’m alive is because I spent the first weeks of my life in an incubator. That life began two and a half months ahead of schedule, and I emerged in October at two pounds. (They say I fit in the palm of my father’s hand.) For all that my parents were worried sick, they never had to worry that that a genocidal government would obliterate the nation’s electrical system, cutting off electricity to incubators. I’ve been trying to put into words what it feels like to read about those preemies in Gaza. I can’t.
I saw a photo of the line of them, outside the hospital. Two of them died today. I think of how convinced the nurses were that I would die, but I was safe. We all were, those of us in the preemie ward, 1983. Palestinian doctors are doing everything they can to save those preemies in Gaza, but they’re without the technology that saved my life. I grew up knowing that if I had been born in an earlier decade, I would have died. These babies had what I had, at the basic level, and then it was savagely, aggressively taken away, supposedly as an act of defense.
An act that America made possible and continues to perpetuate. I don’t agree with a thing you say, but I love ya! wrote President Biden to Netanyahu on a past visit to Israel. I stare at those words and feel like the very concept of love deteriorates.
It seems impossible that life can go on when we know this is going on. Part of me thinks it shouldn’t. Another part of me, grieving those preemies, feels like I owe it to them to live. When I read of their deaths, every action I took afterwards was colored with the thought, This should be you. This should be you, safe at home. This should be you, with a future, grown up and thriving. This should be you, honing your ambitions. This should be you, alive.
Sitting on my couch, drinking jasmine tea, I bought an absurd number of flamboyant boots. Reason being: as a child, one deep wound of my girlhood was my inability to wear the shoes I wanted to because of the extra support my feet needed, because of my gait, because of the cerebral palsy that kept me apart from all appealing footwear. I felt shut out of beauty itself.
Docs work for me. And I’m sick of wearing the subdued black pair I’ve been living in that everybody else has. I bought them in a Barbie-on-acid pink, in silver-and-black snakeskin, in eye-popping turquoise, in black splattered with white botanical silhouettes, and in metallic iridescent silver, which one reviewer complained she’d returned because they sparkled too hard in the sun.
This should be you, I thought, figuring out what works for your body, adjusting to whatever you need to develop or discover in order to live the way you want to. This should be you, alive.
Then, remembering that my drawers are overflowing with practical leggings, I bought a wealth of statement-piece stockings, the kind that fortified me in different kinds of dark times, when I was young.
This should be you, I thought. Deciding what comfort means for you. Figuring out…anything. Alive.
I wonder if those babies would’ve grown up to be artists. If they’d have struggled with the question of how to create when the world is burning in every conceivable way. When I see their crying faces in my mind’s eye, I feel like my heart stops, but the reality is, it’s beating, and so I owe it to them to answer that question, to try.
I am nowhere near close, for the record. (This, of course, being the record.)
Since the start of my MFA program, I have written, alongside a handful of these essays, and some handwritten catharsis we need never discuss:
The first chapter of an aborted 1970’s bankrobber novel that has the makings of a solid short story
A nearly-solid short story about an ill-fated romance between a guy and a girl who propose to change the world by starting a crypto firm, possibly inspired by a young former billionaire who’s been in the news a lot lately and the girl who testified against him
Major revisions on the first chapter of my lesbian werewolf novel, Sugar Moon.
I’ve spent a lot of time in existential spins about whether any of this Matters. Then a deadline is suddenly tomorrow, and, having lost hours of my Thursday to said spin, I find myself with a fuckton of writing to do on Friday (the deadline for my workshop pages is Saturday morning). I write from 10am to 4pm, fiercely, like it matters. I write implementing all the feedback from my cohort who wanted to know what the lighting in this club is like, and how crowded is it, and can we get more physical description of this love interest, and what are she and the narrator doing while they’re talking, and how intoxicated is this love interest, the one who approached the narrator at a bar?
By the time I’ve answered all these questions to my own satisfaction-for-now, that world is real, and feels like it matters.
Then I find out that one of the preemie babies was born the day before the war, October 6. My birthday.
I can’t bear to read on and confirm whether or not this is one of the two who died.
In my teens and early 20’s, I had a defined role in my social circles as the one that all the brooding artists would call when they needed a dose of optimism, a shot of hope. They would talk to me about all the suffering in the world and how it made their own happiness impossible. I would reply with something like, “That’s the paradox of existence, that it holds so much horror and so much beauty,” or something.
That self was not prepared for this. Thankfully, I no longer live by such constrained roles.
I have people I can call. But no defined thing I want.
I can’t do anything for those babies. I grew up believing that when you really, really focus your energy on a specific person, they can feel it. I have no idea if that’s true. My childhood religion says that by thinking about those babies, I’m helping them in some way. That would have brought me tremendous relief in my teens. Now, it sounds solipsistic: how could my thoughts matter that much?
I don’t think I’ve ever struggled with paragraphs the way I have with the above. This moment defies language. Communication presumes a level of cohesion that does not exist in the context of this war, that can’t.
And yet, here I am, using words. I don’t know what else to do.