64 // Unmerry.

Dec 24, 2021

❤️‍🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club: Storytelling Edition is Wednesday, January 5. Register here.

Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.

Good morning y’all,

I am quarantining with my parents after having dinner with a (vaccinated! boosted!) cousin on Tuesday who subsequently tested positive for COVID.

No symptoms yet, and we ate together in a spacious kitchen with the doors open, and - yeah. Sticking close to home and getting tested on Sunday morning. Plans to hang out with other family members are now off the table, and in a way I’m *almost* grateful (you know what I mean) because it was feeling increasingly not wise to go be around, well, anyone.

So, I’m in it with the rest of you, and spending all the rainy downtime getting organized for January and taking naps and drinking coffee-coffee-decaf-chai, and having way too many sweets, and hoping that if we get sick it is manageable. I’m sending out all my good wishes for a safe and restful holiday. I’ll see you Tuesday for our last essay of 2021.

All my love always,

tuya xo
dani

📖Read: Caught this via Helena Fitzgerald’s Griefbacon and I’m going to write it out here because I so want you to read it (out loud!):

If You Get Sick

if you get sick
i will not tell you
you should have
eaten better
exercised more
taken herbs
worn a condom
stayed sober
been safer

i will not
try to figure out
at what precise moment
of your particular, human carelessness
you contracted the disease

i will not tell you it’s your fault
that you were selfish
or high risk
or reckless
with this body of yours,
vulnerable as mine and
just as capable
of betrayal

i will not say
well what did you expect
it was a matter of time
you get what you deserve
you asked for it
because if shame was medicine
we’d all be healed by now

i’ll think about how viruses
are proteins,
looking for hosts
and how we are animals,
alive and desperate
warm-blooded and whole,
and how we are humans,
exposed and terrified,
making up stories
of borders and boundaries,
as we live in
self-contained units
where nothing comes in
and nothing goes out

honey-
if you get sick
(when you get sick)
i will love you
i will ask you what you need
to feel better
and i will do my very best
to get you that
cup of ramen
extra blanket
hbo login
pack of spirits
grocery delivery

i will tell you that you’re not alone
send you memes
and whisper your name
in soft prayers of healing
by the hot pink candle
on my window sill

i’ll send my biggest rage and grief
to the state, the stars, the forces
that abandon us,
that make us go to work
and then pay for healthcare
and pay to survive

and i will keep loving these bodies
yours and mine
that are always our own and
always each others
porous and sublime,
that make way for touch
as they make way for sickness

👀Watch: Y’all know I love Barry Lopez and this short film in tribute on the one year anniversary of his passing is ambient and lovely and slow and moving and maybe also something you want to cozy up with.

🎧Listen: I know that I am late to every. single. party. BUT I just started listening to this and it makes me laugh and I realized how little I really laugh these days and maybe you need to laugh too.

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