07. Hypermegablackcube and relief
(all I want for Christmas is the rona jab)
Time can be so weird and expansive, it can turn into pigment. Like Stuart Semple’s pinkest pink, it can make us look at pasts unlived and then uncherished through present’s rose-tinted glasses. It can highlight and dazzle the goods, the bads, the uglies; mirror parallel lines and alternative stories into silver, iridescent possibilities; or, like a spilt bottle of the blackest black, swallow our hardest works of living into absolute nothingness.
Does anyone else feel like anything we ever did, lived and anyone we ever knew and met before the pandemic didn't happen? Like there is nothing left and our careers, relationships, identities, have fizzled away and we're only left with what we have now (not much)? Like in the Cube movies or in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: no story or background beforehand. We just turned up inside this device and all we know is we have to get out or be consumed.
I have felt like this a lot of the time. Just looking at the timeline and the people still going on and doing things, while feeling in a dissassociated state, unbelonging, unexisting; and then, almost by accidental odd reminders,looking into my past deeds, looks, lives and “achievements”, being like: “WHO-IS SHE? WHO IS SHE?” in the purest Nikki Grahame confessionary style within the walls of my psyche.
It might have to do with the time change and less hours of sunlight in the northern hemisphere. The outside is literally dark, so that kind of takes over. I have a SAD lamp, but it’s a bit too blue and artificial for my liking. I’m a natural-light flower, being from a land where you can dry your laundry outside in one afternoon. I still need to remember and own my history, actions, become aware of how far I’ve gone and how further I can get.
Things seem to be getting a bit brighter, tho. If not at least less dark. You know by know that 46 won’t be the same person who is 45. Not gonna lie, I feel a huge relief and weight off my chest. Yeah, white heteropatriarcal capitalist supremacy is still in the house/land/world, but people are more likely to stay alive, spoonful and safe to take care of each other, call things out when they see them, build something better.
I feel relief for my relatives in Houston, for my lovely cousin and his family in Florida, for my QTIPOC pals across the USA, for Mexico, the climate, the world.
I don’t know, I feel a bit of hope that this is the beginning of the end of what Victor Trujillo calls "International Populism". Failed American coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, this... hopefully, other far-right fascist leaders fall next. You know who they are. And if you don’t, why are you here?
Also, just this morning, it was announced that Pfizer has developed a COVID-19 vaccine said to be 90% effective. They aim to have 25 million available by the end of the year. Seriously cannot wait for the jab to get poked into my body, and the bodies of the rest of the world we can still save. A remedy for those who are still struggling with the virus would be amazing too.
Oh, I almost forgot: I must have written, developed and illustrated a poetry book in a fever dream or something, but I have a few copies left. Make me sell out and have to order more.
In light and darkness,
Cynthia Rodríguez Juárez