Prison abolitionists often speak of violence as a social problem, born of systemic factors, like poverty and disenfranchisement. They argue that our response to it also reflects a social deficit: Our reliance on locking away harm-doers is the flip side of our failure to consider the context for their actions, and the conditions that would enable them to change their behavior and make amends—factors we must confront if we’re ever to move toward a world without prisons. In a forth­coming conversation on abolition in the Radical History Review, the organizer and law professor Dean Spade argues that “the existing criminal punishment system . . . wants us to be as passive as possible and not solve our own problems with each other.” This, he said, is why envisioning a prison-free world is “hard for a lot of people who are new to the analysis . . . It’s a tall order to actually know our neighbors, to care about each other, to get better at having hard conversations.” Though I don’t necessarily consider myself “new” to the analysis—I first began reading the work of abolitionists almost a decade ago—I recognize myself at least partially in Spade’s description. After the crash, I wanted to believe another world was possible, but I still found it hard to envision, concretely, what a just response to R.’s actions might look like—or what I might want from him to help me heal.

A year and a half after my crash, I started speaking to the people who had built and participated in Circles for Safe Streets, the new restorative justice program for traffic violence in New York City, to learn about its efforts to address serious crashes without resorting to incarceration. Meanwhile, I went looking for the man who hit me. I wanted to know why he did what he did, so I might more easily understand his actions in a social context, rather than as one person’s irreparable cruelty. I wanted to ask him why he drove away.

We lost my dad last year: the denouement in a courageously fought cancer battle that spanned more than two decades. I was 24 when he died—not as young as I could have been, but not old enough to negate a dull, almost-always-there sense of missing something. He was unpretentious, unfashionable, unfailingly reliable. He was corny and funny and sentimental. He was a rare combination of impossibly hard-working and deeply empathetic: a respiratory therapist for many years, he was an asthmatic who helped people breathe. We won’t ever be able to say for certain whether his lifelong lung issues, and lengthy scrimmage with the carcinomas, were caused by his exposure to harmful pollutants alone. But we’d be foolish to say that the environment he was raised in had no bearing on his wellbeing—or that of his dad, or brother, or niece and nephew, or those other 33.3 per cent of Bronx residents who die prematurely, a rate substantially higher than in New York City (26.2 per cent) or New York State (23.4 per cent).

Beyond being a daughter, I’m now a practising urban planner, and was trained by mentors with a keen eye on the link between public space and public health. Thanks to a slew of writers, scholars and activists—like Robert D Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie (1990), Julie Sze, author of Noxious New York (2006) and Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space (2008), particularly Chapter 4, ‘Choking Cities’—it’s well documented that environmental issues have unequal human impacts. Certain populations, based on their location, demographic makeup, level of resources available and underlying political context, feel the effects of industrial pollution more than others. This often has to do with the fact that histories of social and economic disenfranchisement become mapped on to urban space through planning practices like redlining and zoning. Along with the South Bronx, neighbourhoods like Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Manhattan’s West Harlem today have higher geographic concentrations of polluting infrastructure, such as major highways, power plants, incinerators and waste transfer stations, than their wealthier counterparts do—predisposing some of the city’s poorest and most diverse communities to the worst health outcomes. Knowing this, on a professional and a personal level, has compounded the magnitude of my grief with the exasperation of having seen something coming for a long time.

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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 26, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,149 words)

Let me tell you a ghost story.

My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble read simply, COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever. In the corner, a small heart with the street name, 21st, superimposed on it. Another, in blue marble, had the faces of three middle-aged Black men, and read For the ones we lost, the two first. A third, in black, was hung vertically; on it, written in cursive: For the stolen ❤️s of COVID, for the ❤️s stolen by COVID of Two First, Amen. 

I walked by these memorials several times a day; I didn’t always need to, but I realized at some point I was altering my path to see them. They haunted me, in the sense that we often mean that word. “Haunted” as in a haunting melody, a haunting story—a thing that you cannot stop thinking about, that follows you like a ghost through your waking hours. Haunting like Hamlet’s father, reminding you what’s left undone, haunting like a vague blur, a noise or a whispered word, reminding you that the borders between us are porous, sometimes nonexistent. I saw the faces Dremeled into the marble—who were they? What stories did they leave behind?

By that point, I’d been thinking about ghosts, more or less nonstop, for months. In February of that year, I had been contacted by a magazine editor preparing a big summer issue on movies about New York City; would I, she inquired, be interested in writing about Ghost and Ghostbusters? I jumped at the assignment and the opportunity to write once more about this city I love and what haunts it. So I started writing about these two films. I wrote about them as the news each day got stranger and stranger, I wrote about them as a friend predicted “summer is going to be canceled,” I wrote about them as the city emptied out. I wrote about them after the magazine shelved its summer movie issue, I wrote about them after the editor stopped returning my emails. I kept writing; I wrote about them in cafés that were almost entirely empty, and I wrote about them at home when I realized it was no longer safe to write in cafés.

The usual idea behind a ghost is that they’re someone you shouldn’t normally see, someone who, due to some cosmic accident or injustice left unaddressed, has become visible again. The same, I understood, came to be true of pandemics: they are invisible until they suddenly become visible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been more or less forgotten by history, a mere footnote to World War I, until we had our own pandemic and suddenly we couldn’t stop seeing the Spanish Flu everywhere. And watching these movies about ghosts as a new and terrifying reality loomed, I realized there were things there all along that I’d never noticed, that had, all at once, become all I could see.

So much lurks in the shadows of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film, Ghost. At first, there is only Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat. The film’s title, after all, is singular. It’s hard not to root for him: he’s likable, successful, and has just started a promising ceramics internship before he’s tragically murdered by a hitman hired by his scheming business partner Carl Bruner. Once it’s clear his girlfriend (Demi Moore’s Molly) is also in danger, he enlists Whoopi Goldberg’s huckster psychic, Oda Mae Brown, to help save her from murderous  Carl. 

Sam sees himself as uniquely important. At first, he’s the only one Oda Mae can see, but after he unlocks her “gift,” she’s beset by ghosts, all trying to reach loved ones. (At one point she barks at him, “Did you tell every spook in the world you met about me? I got spooks from Jersey coming in here.”) But Sam can’t see beyond his own problems, even in death, and forces her to shoo these other souls (almost all of whom are Black or Latino) so she can focus on his problems. 

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In those early, terrible days, it became harder and harder not to see what Oda Mae saw, or forget these other ghosts as simply extras in Sam’s story. Who were they? What were their stories? We never truly know. The only other ghost whose story we get is Vincent Schiavelli’s subway ghost, who tells Sam, “Yeah someone pushed me. . . . What, you don’t believe me? You think I fell? You think I jumped? Well fuck you! It wasn’t my time! I wasn’t supposed to go! I’m not supposed to be here!” Beyond that, though, all we’re left with is the tantalizing idea of a city of ghosts, none of whom will get a chance to tell their stories.

In addition to the spirits that make brief cameos in Ghost are still others, even more obscured but no less vital. Sam Wheat, after all, is not the first to haunt 104 Prince Street, the loft he and Molly share at the beginning of the movie. In the film’s opening credits, a camera pans through the dusty, as-yet-undiscovered attic space: soft light catches dust in the air as we see dress forms and covered furniture, draped with sheets to suggest ghosts waiting to be found. Who might they be?

By 1990, the year the film was released, it was clear who these spectral traces belonged to—even if moviegoing audiences did not want to name them outright. A block from Sam and Molly’s fabulous loft is the former home of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. During the AIDS pandemic of the ’80s, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman worked tirelessly to rescue and safeguard LGBTQ art—including, likely, the same detritus that Molly and Sam toss out to make way for her own sculpture. Indeed, clearing SoHo of its longtime gay population lurks in the background of Ghost like a ghost haunting Manhattan. As Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation, “The process of replacement was so mechanical I could literally sit on my stoop and watch it unfurl. . . .Many died in their apartments. It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement and I knew that it meant that another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped into the gutter.” You can watch Ghost now and feel this presence, even if it’s never named as such—how did Sam and Molly luck into such a cavernous loft in SoHo, its previous owner apparently vanishing, leaving a lifetime of possessions still lingering in the attic?

In 1990, though, no one wanted to think about this, especially not in an Oscar-winning major motion picture. If these ghosts are referenced at all, it’s as a joke. In an early scene, Sam and Carl do a routine in a crowded elevator: Carl begins coughing (visibly not covering his mouth), and complains to Sam about some mysterious but highly contagious illness that’s affected his penis. AIDS isn’t named outright, but it’s clear from the horrified looks of the others in the elevator what they’re afraid of catching—all to the delight of Sam and Carl as they exit the elevator and laugh their way down the hall.

It’s just a joke, but it became hard to unsee, particularly as I thought more and more about uncovered coughs, about social distancing, about the proximity to illness, about the dead left behind who would go uncounted and un-remembered.

Lucy Sante notes in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York that the “ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes.” Rather, “New York’s ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.” To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there. Ghost is a story about haunting that’s haunted by a pandemic just out of sight—and to watch it as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded was to be reminded that cities have always been made and unmade by their plagues and epidemics, and it will always fall to the spirits to tell the whole story.

Ghost stories always used to work like this: the ghost lingered because something was left undone, or because the living forgot something or someone that should not have been forgotten. Ghost is atypical in this regard; it follows the same track as A Christmas Carol, Lewis Allen’s 1944 classic The Uninvited, and the 1980 George C. Scott vehicle The Changeling. These stories have their moments of terror, but they’re ultimately comforting stories about making the past whole. A justice is rectified, a wrong avenged, a restless spirit comforted at last. The ghost story ensures that even if one doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion in life, there may yet be narrative resolution waiting after death.

This works well for a single ghost, but what about a city? How to make each and every one of these stories whole? What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone? There is so much left undone when it comes to the dead. They bustle and jostle, they howl and they carouse and they interrupt and demand your attention. They never sleep, the dead. How to imagine the work of Oda Mae, beset with spooks, each with their own unfinished narrative, needing a slow and careful expiation to make the past whole so they can rest? 

One death is a tragedy, but as the bodies pile up, the ghosts and their stories become a problem to be dealt with en masse rather than one at a time. Ghost is rare as a New York City movie about a haunting that doesn’t stress exorcism, since usually ghosts are evicted against their will, like so many poor, queer, black, and brown tenants, their presence erased and their homes disinfected. It’s perhaps why the city’s most famous ghost story focuses not on ghosts like Sam but on the janitors sent to clean them out: 1984’s Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters is the perfect fairytale of New York: a libertarian fantasy from the Reagan ’80s where the main villain is an EPA official and the all-powerful mayor has to turn to ordinary working Joes to save the city. (And after the bumbling government official shuts down the containment grid and unleashes these imprisoned spirits back into the air above Manhattan, you’re reminded that this, too, is a story about an airborne plague threatening to wipe out the city.) Their iconic coveralls are meant to remind us that the dead of New York are nothing more than pests to be exterminated. The fledgling start-up gets its start ridding the upscale Sedgewick Hotel of its iconic green ghost (later named “Slimer”), and much of their clientele appears to be the affluent, as they cleanse Central Park West condos. The moral of Ivan Reitman’s blockbuster is that the best thing for the city is to let unregulated small businesses wreak havoc and extort payments, mafia-style. (Who are the Ghostbusters, but a protection racket? After all, when the Sedgewick Hotel manager balks at the exorbitant fee, Bill Murray’s Venkman offers to release the ghost back in the now-destroyed ballroom.)

As befitting pests and vermin, hardly any of the ghosts in the Ghostbusters franchise get a backstory; they are nameless squatters and vagrants, marginal figures to be vacuumed up and put in deep storage. Who, for example, was this green gluttonous ghost in their previous life? Presumably someone with a soul, with a family, with a place in New York’s history? Like Patrick Swayze, someone capable of feeling love and longing even in the afterlife, someone with regrets and rage and confusion—someone who deserved an end more dignified than being trapped in a box by three fools. It feels absurd to try to empathize with this gross green thing, but why not? Ghosts were people, too. 

Our two options, it seems: the individual drama or the infestation. The solitary tragedy, the individual whose life we rescue from oblivion. Or: the mass to be removed, as quickly as possible. Ever since February 2020, as I’ve revisited these two movies a dozen times, I’ve asked myself in a hundred different ways: is there any way to write about death that is not as a single tragedy or as a mass cleanup operation? I care about ghost stories because I believe in them another possibility for storytelling, for understanding the past, and for processing grief. The ghost, perhaps, need not be exterminated or expiated. The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.

Sam Wheat’s ghost is the kind Hollywood prefers: translucent and a little gauzy, but with a definite shape, features, and personality. They’re easy to visualize and demonstrate, and this form allows a star like Swayze to continue to be on-screen without being disfigured in some way. But as paranormal investigators (along with anyone else who’s ever reported an experience with the supernatural) will tell you, such a manifestation is exceedingly rare in the world of ghost hunting. What people describe instead again and again are invariably sounds, words, maybe a blur of color. Presence without shape. The ghost is disembodied: it does not have discrete form. It is not singular. 

In Ghost and Ghostbusters, the city and its multitudes are just the backdrop from which the narrow few protagonists emerge. But the reason I’m drawn to ghost stories is precisely because by its very nature the ghost blurs the edges of the individual. It flickers. It is and is not any kind of identity. It is and is not the subject of its own story. There’s possibility there.

To say I neither believe in ghosts nor fully embrace skepticism is also to say that I no longer believe that each of us is a discrete entity unto ourselves. The boundaries that separate you and I are porous, our lives not entirely our own. There is a line in John Berger’s 1972 novel G. that’s used as an epigraph in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, and again in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Berger’s G., the Casanova-esque protagonist is in the Alps as a friend attempts to pilot the first solo flight over the mountain range, but G is hardly paying attention, instead attempting to seduce a housecleaner. In Berger’s description of the seduction comes this line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.”

I found the line first in Ondaatje’s novel, then traced it back to Berger, only to see it reappear in Roy’s when I read it after it won the 1997 Booker Prize. All three novels move between characters as they traverse past and present, reminding you that you can never tell the story of a single life without also telling the stories of all the lives that intersect. 

But ever since late winter 2020, whenever I read a story of a single individual in a novel or an essay or a news report, all I can think about are the ghosts at the margins, those begging  to speak. Every story of a single person is already embedded in a larger story, one where the writer has decided—consciously or not—to reveal or hide those other layers. It’s still the case, of course, that writers will attempt to tell a single story as though it is the only one. But having lived in this pandemic, I now see how impossible it is to read a single story as though it were the only one. Our duty these days is to enter the world of story aware of the ghosts in the background, to always be seeking their stories as well, coaxing them out.

More and more, to write solely about oneself these days has begun to feel to me like Sam Wheat bypassing the other ghosts in Oda Mae’s waiting room. A “post” pandemic means going back to our old ways when we could imagine ourselves as discrete individuals. But we are never going back; our lives are too interlaced now. Surely, by now, there are other ways to tell stories, other ways to acknowledge the other souls in the room alongside you and me, writer and reader, ghost and medium?

I went back, day after day, to the block where the trees were strung with memorials. The white one, which reads COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever, called to me, demanding to be witnessed again and again. A sentiment so simple, and yet it ached with pain and longing and a story that I did not know, could not know. The first time I saw it, I broke in two. I stood there on the sidewalk and started to cry, crying for all that loss, all the grief from the entire year spilling out of me. In ways I still can’t put into words, it changed me, changed how I saw the city, changed how I saw those years. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of those signs, and the stories—unknown to me—behind them. This is what I mean by haunted. This is what I mean by a ghost story.

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And then, in early 2023, I was walking home one night and discovered to my horror that the white sign had been split in half, its two marble halves dangling from the wire that bound it to the tree. It was hard to imagine such an act—to imagine vandals so unthinking, so malicious, that they would destroy such a thing. Perhaps to console myself, I imagined it was some sort of horrible accident, that someone had backed up against it, or perhaps a fight where someone had been thrown against the tree. These objects were sacred. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing on purpose.

The blue one came down not long after. I don’t know if it was also broken, or if its creator feared for its safety. The vertical one remained; it would be months before I would learn why. 

How will we ever be the same again? To treat a death in isolation, to treat a story as though it is the only one—these are choices. They are forms of active denial, active forgetting, active erasure. You cannot tell a narrative of those years—of these years—as a single story, as a personal narrative of an individual. Our lives have always been intertwined, but “how to live?” is no longer a question that one can answer solely for oneself.

As the world tries to move on from a pandemic that has left us all scarred and traumatized, you can expect more ghost stories, because they’re one of the few available modes we have for dealing with the unresolved. Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one’s eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready. But beware the sleight of hand that would use a ghost to tell a single story, a homogenized or sanitized version, a discrete narrative. 

It was sometime in the summer of 2023 that I saw the fourth sign—not on a tree, but on the stoop of a brownstone on the same block. A larger slab, but the same carved sentiment: For the ❤️s stolen by COVID-19 of the Two-First. Leaning on the steps, nearly obscured by a garden in full bloom. Suddenly, it felt like I had the key to it all. An address, perhaps the artist behind the signs I’d come to know so well. On a late summer day, I happened by while the building’s occupants were out front, gathering herbs from their garden to give to a neighbor who was standing on the street with a granny cart. I asked them—their names were Emily and Andy—if they were the ones who’d made the signs that were hung from the trees.

“No,” Emily told me. But they knew who made them. Amber had lived in one of the apartment buildings on the block but had since moved to California. The mosque on the corner, they explained, was undergoing a renovation when the pandemic halted construction. That was where the marble tiles had come from: discarded building materials. Amber had taken a few of them and carved the memorials, and then hung them on the trees. 

“This block alone lost 13 people to COVID that first summer,” Andy told me. “And all while people on the television were saying it was made up.” One woman, he said, pointing to a house near the end of the block, survived both World Trade Center attacks, and then died of COVID, her first year into retirement.

He kept on gathering parsley while his neighbor waited patiently, happy to talk but focused on this act of generosity. Emily was picking spinach for a friend; she offered to let me have some as well, anytime I wanted to pick the leaves I was welcome. Our conversation was punctuated by the matter at hand: “Do you want some mint as well?” he asked the woman on the street, who nodded. Emily explained that the sign on their own stoop was not Amber’s work; Emily had made it herself, inspired, a way of keeping the story going, a way of keeping the ghosts alive.

I felt sheepish interrupting them at their work, this act of care for the living that is just as vital as the care we offer the dead, so I left shortly thereafter. But at the end of our conversation, Andy explained to me how the memorials had broken. It hadn’t been vandals as I’d feared, or even an accident. When they’d been hung around the tree limbs, Amber had bound them tightly with wire. But it had been over two years—the trees had grown, slowly, steadily, stretching the thick wire until something had to give, and the marble broke in half. The one hung vertically stayed only because the wire was looser and there was less tension on the brittle marble. What I’d thought was carelessness, or desecration, had been instead the stubborn reality of life going on, even at the expense of our memorials to the past. When I went back to the trees the next day, I saw how thoroughly the limbs had grown around the wire, still there—a vestigial remnant now bound inextricably to this living, growing thing. There may come a time when no one knows the story of that wire, how it got there, what it once held. But it will remain there nonetheless, a presence without a shape.

A slender thread—thin and sharp as a steel wire—connects each of us to these lives we lost, people we don’t know, will never know, but who stay with us every day. It connects you to the ghosts all around us, the ones that remind you that you are not singular, that you are not just the protagonist in your own story, that your own story is a part of a million other stories. That’s what makes a city a city—it’s that slender thread that holds us, the living and the dead, holding us even after we break.

The slender thread that reminds us that never again will a single story be read as though it were the only one.

Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.

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Sofia had only been part of Cats of Meow York for a few weeks before she found her first dead cat—a mother who grew sicker and sicker after her kittens were all adopted out. In the months since, she said, several more cats have died, including a pair of black kittens. 

“I called Farhana and I asked her if she could come down and check up on them,” Sofia recalled of those kittens, shortly before they passed. “She said that she had a Zoom meeting, and she would come right after. Hours passed by and she never came.” Since then, she said she’s seen the way the cats are disposed of by Haq and other Cats of Meow York members—in black plastic trash bags, dumped with the rest of the garbage at the foot of Haq’s front porch stairs.

Bethenny told me she thought being a part of Cats of Meow York was a great career opportunity when she joined the team. Now, she told me that she worries her experience will “stain” her life forever. Bethenny also said that Haq was often difficult to reach, and that Haq often sent her children, ages 11 and 14, downstairs to administer medicine to the cats in her stead, which raised alarm bells. 

Both Sofia and Bethenny were concerned about the cleanliness of the basement. “There’s no ventilation at all,” Sofia said. “It’s a biohazard. The cats—and even us—are getting sick.” She told me she regularly hears complaints from volunteers who spend extended periods of time in the holding space. When we spoke, she had a red, circular welt on her, which she suspected was ringworm. Bethenny, who has asthma, said she routinely had to use her inhaler after clearing out overflowing litter boxes. The first few weeks she worked at the rescue, she said she had migraines, her throat was sore, and her voice was so scratchy and strained she could barely speak. “It always felt like it was an allergy attack with an asthma attack on top of it,” she shttps://hellgatenyc.com/nyc-feral-cats-tnr-drama?src=longreadsaid.

To me, back then, that brownstone stood for everything I wanted: solidity and urbanity, possibility and permanence. I could see it, stand inside it, even sleep there. But it wasn’t mine, and I had no idea who or where or what I was.

For so long I was so sure that the right boy and the right brownstone would give me the right life, just as my parents believed that success required leaving the city and living in houses, even if—even after— those houses cost everything they had.

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Aimée Lutkin | Longreads | November 2019 | 15 minutes (3,262 words)

“Hello?” my grandmother’s cigarette-seasoned voice would always answer the phone immediately. I pictured her sitting directly beside it in her motel room, waiting to see which of her three daughters or four grandchildren was checking on her.

“Hi, grandma! Just calling to see if you and Papa are OK in the storm,” I’d say cheerfully, assuming they were basically fine, as they always were. They had evacuated their house, a flimsy four-room hut built atop cement blocks, that was set inconveniently close to the Narrow Bay, right on Mastic Beach in Long Island. All that stood between their home and a body of water that could consume it was a dirt road and a rustling wall of reeds that created a marshy barrier and the illusion of distance. That illusion was regularly washed away by storm flooding, sending them skipping backward like sandpipers.

“Well, we’re all settled in here,” she’d answer, sounding pleased to have evacuated for the night to an artless motel next to a barren parking lot. “Your father is watching the news. Looks like we’ll be back tomorrow!”

“Oh, that’s good,” I’d say, ignoring that she had confused me for my mother as she often did after passing her 80th birthday.

“Yeah, not too bad, not too bad,” she’d say, though there were a few times that did get bad. The year their cars were washed away and they were trapped in their house, years where the power went out. But they always bounced back and during the next storm I’d call to check in again, repeating the same familiar pattern.

For years, visiting my grandparents involved a two- to three-hour train ride on the LIRR from New York City; I went by myself once every summer or spring, and I visited with my mom and aunt and uncle who lived in Montauk every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Montauk is on the eastern tip of Long Island, so Mastic was where we met in the middle until my mother refused to go back. Then I’d go by myself for one winter holiday, alone on the cold, empty train, traveling back and forth on the same day. A six-hour train ride was preferable to spending the night in the drafty house, making conversation around my mother’s absence.

Most of my memories of dinners in Mastic were of the escalating tension between my mother and her father. At some point, Papa had been banned from direct criticism, so he substituted the word “Democrats” for her name. One of his favorite pointed sayings was “An open mind is like a sewer — all the garbage falls in.”

On the trip home, no matter how enraged she had become, my mother would say he hadn’t always been like this. He’d been a teacher. A philosopher. He used to build things and volunteer and not watch Fox News. 

Before my mother’s boycott began, managing the volatile atmosphere was my job; the open hostility in the air bothered me, but it was easier to handle with a generation of distance between us. I learned quickly that one of the safest conversational topics was always the view.

“Look how beautiful it is,” I would say, and the group would repeatedly comply, turning to stare out the wide picture window over the dilapidated second-story porch. Any time of day was lovely, in any weather, but a clear sunset would flood the room with a warm apricot glow. The water caught and refracted the end of the day, allowing its goodbye to sweetly linger. My grandmother’s table, too big for the space, trapping us against the walls, would become a map of the world. Every person with their face tilted out toward the sun was trapped in amber light, frozen momentarily by warmth instead of cold. 

***

I spent most of Superstorm Sandy drunk. At some point the internet went out. My roommates — who were also drunk — and I sat around our living room checking our phones again and again. I lay on my back watching the bare trees whipping outside my window. To us, hurricane preparedness meant having enough wine in our apartment. We’d been responsible. Born and raised in New York City, I’d weathered many hurricane seasons and had found that the danger warnings were always over the top, at least for the five boroughs. 

Lack of internet in our Brooklyn neighborhood gave us some hint of the extremity of the situation, but it still took a little while before we understood that this hurricane was different. Reports of destruction filtered in as we sobered up and got back online. The lights were out in Manhattan, Red Hook was underwater, the Rockaways were a disaster zone, and Breezy Point was on fire. 

In the following weeks, I volunteered, making sandwiches in a church basement, sorting clothes and other donations, traveling out to the Rockaways to help people find what they needed at an auditorium that had been transformed into a relief center. I went with a group of volunteers to knock on doors in apartments that still had no heat or power, finding people who hadn’t left or who had nowhere to go. I met a woman who was running out of insulin, which we didn’t have, and another whose antibiotics for a MRSA infection had been ruined in her water-damaged car. A father and daughter were boiling a kettle on their gas stove to keep their apartment warm, which another volunteer warned was dangerous. They nodded politely. Most of the people we met appeared very calm in the dark hallway, as though they were certain that things would soon snap back into normalcy. Walking down below their complex, seeing how the boardwalk had been pulled into twisted spikes by the waves, how sand spilled everywhere, gobbling up the streets, it seemed impossible that anything would be normal again.    

Since Sandy, new condos have gone up in many of the hardest hit areas, even those still in flood zones. Writer Sarah Miller has investigated for Popula the cognitive dissonance required to move real estate into Miami Beach, purchases that essentially boil down to buying a house for 50 years, tops. Real estate development has mutated to work in tandem with climate change: Destruction levels an area, driving out residents; developers move in, their projects subsidized by government relief efforts. Gentrification accelerates and the people who left can’t afford to come back — yet, this all happens in an area that remains threatened by further climate destruction. The very wealthy can afford to buy the last 50 years of river views, as the people who once lived there search for a place that is not only affordable, but also doesn’t teeter constantly on the edge of ruin. The land shrinks.

***

After Sandy hit, it took a while to get in touch with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle, who said they’d briefly been cut off entirely by rising waters around the Montauk peninsula, which knocked out phone service. My grandparents’ home had flooded, but they’d made it to their usual motel. They returned when the water receded. At first it seemed to me that that was that. Another storm survived. 

The seasonal challenges of my extended family’s geographic location hadn’t been something I thought about much, just as I hadn’t worried too much about a hurricane even though I grew up on an island. New York contains many mythologies and most of them are connected to the city’s relentless ability to continue, no matter what. This is basically the definition of hubris — the confidence that because you survived something the last thousand times, you will survive it the next thousand. 

My grandparents were also both born in New York; my grandmother was an only child. Her mother and father worked as a cook and a chauffeur, respectively, and rented an apartment close to St. John the Divine, in Morningside Heights. In her childhood photos, she looks like a little doll, solitary and posed in patent leather shoes. She grew to be almost six feet tall and gorgeous. She once showed me a photo of herself looking dashing in a headscarf, seated high on a fence.

“Look at me,” she cough-laughed. “I knew what I was doing there.”

My grandfather was one of many children of an Irish immigrant mother and an Italian mobster, whose name he wasn’t allowed to speak. I’ve never seen a picture of him before his days as a soldier in WWII, stationed in France after surviving D-Day. His family lived on the Lower East Side, then Williamsburg. He would sometimes tell stories about collecting lost bits of coal that fell from the delivery truck and hollering up at his mom to drain the bathtub full of gin when the cops walked down the street. These were colorful tales meant to make growing up poor sound much more fun than it ever actually was, but he enjoyed telling them. Once when he came to visit my mom and me at our East Village apartment, he spent the day pointing at rooftops, saying he used to jump from one to the other as a kid.

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My grandparents met at a funeral. They were cousins of each other’s cousins.

New York City starts to feel very small if you’ve lived there all your life, so by the time they were married with children they’d moved further out, then further out again when the kids were gone. They’d wanted a small, manageable place by the beach for their retirement. They drove past the house in Mastic and a man was standing outside. They asked him if he’d like to sell it, and he miraculously said yes. 

I’ve been told the house washed away once, during a storm in the 1920s, then got hauled back to the same spot and put up on those cement pylons. The story was suspect, but to me it said something about what used to pass for hurricane preparedness.

***

A few weeks before Christmas 2012, less than two months after Sandy, my grandfather fell down the stairs. The staircase leading up to the livable floor of the house was curved and uneven, twisting in at two points. I’m not sure how far down he went, but he broke his hip on the journey and was taken to the hospital, then a rehab center.

My grandmother eventually went to stay with her eldest daughter in Maryland. She was behaving erratically. She didn’t notice that her swollen legs were leaking clear fluid until my aunt pointed it out. She sounded strange when we talked.

“I think I’m about to die,” she told me on the phone. This was something she’d been implying for years, giving away her most cherished wicker-frame mirrors and seashell-covered jewelry boxes until her shelves emptied, explaining she “didn’t need them anymore.” But that was the first time she’d said it so explicitly. She didn’t sound scared. She delivered the news like she was discussing the weather — a little bored, a little distracted. It was the voice of someone going through a transition so huge they couldn’t possibly be bothered to talk about anything else. 

My grandfather was moved to an assisted living home that was difficult to get to from the city. My mother traveled there alone and discovered he’d been sleeping in a wheelchair because it was too hard for him to get in and out of bed. He’d immediately fallen into an intense enmity with his roommate, who had an electric Lazy Boy he wouldn’t let my grandfather nap in. She started to look for homes in Brooklyn, somewhere she could check in on him every day.

And then my grandmother did die.

*** 

After holiday dinners, the younger folks would usually go on a walk around the block before dessert. My grandmother accepted a very limited amount of help from us. We could clear the table, but she wouldn’t allow anyone into her rapid-fire cutlery shuffling over the small sink. Everything she did was set to a higher speed and we would only slow her down.

We walked to digest her butter-soup mashed potatoes and to release a little of the tension into the fresh, salty air. Before we left, my grandfather often called out to insist we bring his walking stick by the door, warning, “Take it with you to beat off the wild dogs. They run in packs out there!”

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I never saw a single dog without a fence penning it in, but I did once ask my aunt if we should bring the stick.

“If you see a dog, are you going to hit it?” she asked.

The answer was no, so we went silent and empty-handed down the rutted road, past the reeds to a small slope of empty shore. Water lapped the edge, which was covered in blue mussel shells and seaweed, plastic bottle caps, broken glass, the occasional dead fish, and a thin crust of ice, which became thinner every year, as the weather grew milder in winter. 

Past the ripples, Pattersquash Island created a dark line on the horizon. The island was originally part of the tribal land of the Unkechaug Nation, who live on the smallest reservation in New York state, set along the shore a 10-minute drive from my grandparents’ house. It covers less than a mile, which includes water. Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis has been compiling stories of indigenous Long Island for his project On This Site, and he writes that Pattersquash is historically considered a sacred site for vision quests. It appeared so still and desolate from a distance. 

During Sandy, more than 100 homes on the Poospatuck reservation were damaged. There has been some attention paid to the reservation’s recovery from missionaries and PR companies, but there has not been much media coverage of the incipient creep of rising sea levels, stealing yet more territory from Indigenous people year by year. Mastic and its residents have been living under the threat of both weather and gentrification for decades, resisting a transformation that almost no other beach town on the East End has managed to avoid. Stories about the area over the past 20 years are a whiplash of wonder and warnings.

In 2001, the New York Times touted Mastic as the island’s “Best Kept Secret,” citing its proximity to Fire Island and the relative affordability of real estate compared to the Hamptons. It was suggestively dubbed a “working class stronghold,” but several political and financial mishaps, including a series of racial housing discrimination suits, almost drove the area into bankruptcy, and they were obligated to rejoin the Town of Brookhaven after an attempt at self-governance that began in 2010. In 2018, Newsday heralded another Mastic renewal, pointing out that real estate was still comparatively cheap, and many of the decrepit buildings that had given the area a bad rep were being torn down by new management. 

Damage in the Hamptons after Sandy redirected vacationers to Montauk, transforming a quieter part of the island into a party hotspot that is barely navigable from June to September. My aunt and uncle, who work in the lighthouse and laying tile, were evicted from their home of more than 25 years after its owner died and a fashion photographer bought the property. They’ve been looking for somewhere to move they can afford. They’re thinking out of state.

Bad housing and “slumlords” have been a continuing point of contention in the area, as the New York Times also reported in 2008, seven years after recommending it as summer getaway. A number of sexual assaults brought attention to the high rate of registered sex offenders in the area, whether they were responsible for the attacks or not. In 2006, a man was arrested for planning to set fire to a building occupied by four tenants on the registry. While some of these units have been torn down via legal means, issues around infrastructure, especially inadequate sewage systems, seem to be holding greater change back. 

Visiting only briefly and driven from the train station to the edge of the world every time, I was largely unaware of these issues before Sandy, except for general observations about the number of beer emporiums we drove by to get to the bay. My grandfather built a homemade security system. It felt absurd to be deafened by sirens out on that otherwise quiet corner, and toward the end of their time there, the system was perpetually offline. The house was empty for a week before it was broken into. 

*** 

My grandfather died about nine months after my grandmother, while living in an assisted living home in Brooklyn. I’d like to say he was happy to be back in his old borough, but he most definitely was not. Every time I visited, he practically begged me to move back to Mastic with him, to live in that house, and take care of him there. It was both an outrageous and completely understandable request.

“We were happy there,” he told me one afternoon, tears in his eyes, though by then my mother was pretty convinced he hadn’t fallen down the stairs. She thought, based on the comments he’d let slip, that my grandmother had maybe pushed him during a fight, but that was just her theory. She guessed that the stress of the storm hastened my grandmother’s mental deterioration, maybe even that the new hurricane molds growing in their dirt-floor basement infiltrated her brain somehow, and my grandmother didn’t recognize the danger as their argument escalated. Not exactly a scientific diagnosis, and there’s no proof, but it was hard not to see some connection between Sandy and their deaths — how many storms had they survived before one rose too high and their whole survival system collapsed? All it took was for something they’d lived through over and over to hit a little harder, in a moment of vulnerability, a moment of unpreparedness.

I went by the house before it was sold to see if there was anything that should be retrieved. The people who broke in hadn’t found much of any value, but they appeared to have had a fun afternoon trashing the place. All the familiar knick-knacks and books and worn blankets had been strewn with abandon across the living room, then pissed on. It felt like the destruction from Sandy had been here since the night it happened and had only now become visible. I looked for the ashes of my grandmother’s favorite cat, but only managed to find my grandpa’s dog tags and a few old pictures in the debris and a piece of paper documenting my mother’s first communion. I took my grandmother’s tarnished silver spoons and a collection of vinyl records that had sat so long their grooves were almost flat. I played them later, trying to imagine her listening to them when she was young and felt much sadder than I did on the day of her death.

Then I walked out onto the old porch, stepping over holes, past a long beam that had once served as a ladder for a cat named Squeaky. I turned the corner around the dining room to look one last time at the view. The bay stretched out below as the blinding white light of the late afternoon sun swallowed the hard borders of the land. It seemed like the waves were rolling all the way to their door.

***

Aimée Lutkin is a freelance writer who has written for Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire, Popula, and others. She is currently working on her first book for Dial Press on the current societal trends around loneliness titled The Lonely Hunter; you can follow her on Twitter @alutkin.

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact checker: Sam Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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Joy Notoma | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,746 words)

I didn’t want a goodbye party. They always make me lonely because I can never connect with people as deeply as I want. I didn’t feel I needed one. I was happy with one-on-one time with friends during the last months before I left Brooklyn to move to Benin.

These were the days when the busyness we habitually shield ourselves with melted away. The excuses we usually find to not get together suddenly weren’t good enough; we attended to those last moments religiously, knowing that coffee dates and weekend hangs would soon dwindle to once-a-year affairs, and those even only if we were lucky. We had already seen enough life changes among us to know the fragility of our bonds — many of them were already mostly memories steeped in nostalgia for days bygone, coated with the sweetness of stories told and re-told, but brittle beneath the weight of our everyday realities. We could look at each other, our eyes shrouded in shame with the knowledge that we weren’t present for the other’s most recent tragedy, but nonetheless carrying the trust of friendship’s creed: I love you though I am not always there and if you really really really need me, I’ll do my damndest to hold you up however I can— present or not. Through this creed, we forgave each other’s absences through divorces, first years of motherhood, and even a suicide attempt. Somehow, that creed meant something even if in reality, we had not been there for each other when we were really really really needed. And then when it was decided that I was moving, all the hurts of previous absences were less important than the one that was pending.

But during my final days before I moved to West Africa, to a country that many of our friends will likely never visit, we stopped time to shore up the bonds, to declare love, and to lavishly heap that coveted resource, time, upon each other. There was no other way. We sat and laughed and celebrated and mourned the time we spent and did not spend together. I was sure that these moments with each of them were enough for me. I knew that a party would sully it.

A party would force our conversations into five-minute segments while we shifted every few seconds because we aren’t sure when, if, how we would be interrupted. A party would make it strange if eyes spontaneously filled with tears…because who can handle all that emotion when there are other people to manage and attend to? A party would make me conscious of anyone who had the need to grab and hold me tight because of my obsessive worry over anyone feeling left out. Please, I would pray for the duration of a party, let me be all things to all people.

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But then during my final week in New York, something began to change. I began to crave the uncanny thrill of a crossover episode — that rare intermingling when characters from the disparate corners of my life meet on neutral ground. Against my better judgement, I decided to have a party. I sent out non-committal sounding texts: “Are you free? Thinking of a little goodbye shindig.” The replies poured in. Everyone was free. A party was happening. And then in response to the anxiety of what I had done, I lost track of the texts and replies and began to forget who I invited and who I had left off the list. In the days approaching, I kept myself busy packing my apartment, getting rid of things, and contemplating the reality of my move.

***

My husband and I moved to Benin after two years of visiting for weeks and months at a time, dividing our time between Brooklyn and a small town where we can see cattle wandering the streets at any time of the day. We did not move for work. We moved to build a sustainable house with traditional building materials in a neighborhood where we are the only foreigners. I am black and he is white. Gone are the days of unexceptionally blending into the many interracial couples of central Brooklyn — my medium-length afro indistinguishable from the other natural-haired black women walking next to their cool-free-spirit woke white men, our conversations about race completely centered on the context of American racism. The conversations started early. I could speak to him not as a black person explaining race to a white person who has spent his life imagining that he has no stake in racism, but as equals; I rarely had to assume the position of educator while he sat in relative comfort learning about the plight of my people. He defied my skepticism about exactly to which degree he fetishized black women. With stacks of vinyl records by Miles Davis, The Four Tops, James Brown, and Sly and The Family Stone in a collection that looked like a museum of black American music, there was no way I would believe he did not in some way fetishize my culture; but I needed to be comfortable with the degree, I needed to be comfortable with his particular balance of appreciation and objectification. He proved himself sufficiently, and I married him two years after we met.

When we are together in Benin, it takes a while before people realize that I, too, am a foreigner (not Beninese) and that we are a couple, as so few white people and even fewer interracial couples live there. The fact that we do not live in the upscale neighborhoods of immigrants from France, Germany, and other European countries sets us even further apart. What are we doing there so far away from the white neighborhoods in the city? Why are we building a house? But these are the concerns of strangers. Within myself, I deal with the more complicated knowledge that I, a black woman married to a white man, have moved to a land rich with the history of slavery and colonization. I measure my moves with a precision I have never known before to make sure I always communicate that my husband is not to be treated as if he is superior just because he is white. I wonder in new ways what loving a white man among so many black people says about my love of myself and my respect for the truth of my history. I move and love him in faith that I can, with my life, create something new, but still some days, when I am tired of all the questions my life demands, I wonder if it is enough. We speak late into the night on the ways that our actions communicate our complicity in global white supremacy. This takes all of our energy, but there is no other way — these are the nuts and bolts of our improbable move.

Moves are like beliefs. They require leaps of imagination, swaths of optimism that stretch far into the future; and sometimes, girded by the staunch conviction that one is taking the best course of action, they require leaving people behind.

***

In my Jehovah’s Witness family, emotions are treated like inconveniences that get in the way of religious service. My mother, I know, is an emotional person, but she is adept, by virtue of religious devotion, at keeping emotions at bay. When a friend dies, instead of allowing the depth of grief, she squelches it by telling herself that death is sleep and that she will see her friend again when she is resurrected from the dead after God destroys the wicked nonbelievers. When she hugs me her soft, large arms do not wrap around my body; she gently drapes them over my shoulders and touches her cheek lightly to mine. If I listen close enough I hear her whisper: “I love you, my daughter.” And that is how I know that if she were to allow her voice to rise or to take me in her arms, that her tears would flow; and that she is afraid above all, more than any phantom fear of my not knowing that she loves me, that those tears will drown her.

When I visit her in South Carolina, I ask her to show me the graves of her parents and grandparents. I ask her where she would like to be buried, and she tells me that she wants to be cremated. I know I will honor her wishes and defend them, if they are ever resisted. Then she tells me that she wants her body burned to ash after death because she doesn’t want us, her children, to see her in a coffin because it will make us too sad to see her lifeless body in a box. I tell her without flinching that, burned or buried whole, we will grieve her regardless.

“Yes, but maybe not seeing me there like that will make it less hard.”

I say again that it will be hard regardless.

“Yes, but I don’t want you to grieve for too long,” she continues. “You know those people who are still sad for so long after the fact…” her voice trails off. She is afraid.

I tell her in as few words as possible that grief takes time, that it may come in waves for periods, which may be surprising. I know it’s best to leave it alone; there’s not much I can say to alleviate her fear or, rather, make her understand that this particular fear is not to be alleviated, only faced.

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I, too, am afraid, but there is no way to say that inside of her car that day as we drive through the grassy field of the graveyard making our way through the tire-made paths. If I weren’t afraid, I would have told her that five years ago, the last time I saw my siblings and our entire family together (except for my especially devout brother who still refused to see me), I wept in public a few days before the visit because I realized, through all of my excitement, that seeing them again would mean saying goodbye again. It had already been 11 years since I’d been invited to a family function and I didn’t know when the next time would come.

It was a special occasion. My aunt and uncle from Nigeria, the default matriarch and patriarch of my father’s side of the family, were coming to the U.S. for the first time and my parents wanted to make sure all of us were home in South Carolina to meet them. By this point, my husband and I had already been to Nigeria and stayed in their home multiple times, but my husband had never met any of my siblings, even though they all lived in the states. We’d already been together for four years, but he knew my aunt and uncle and their children in Nigeria better than he knew my parents and siblings. The strangeness of this could only be alleviated by genuine love, which through all circumstances, bizarre and banal, remains constant. By basking in the possibility of that constance, we could collectively ignore our strange family, conditioned by even stranger religious beliefs, and enjoy each other in a strange peace for 48 hours.

And then the goodbyes came. We did not know when we would see each other again or if we would. When my younger sister, the baby of the family, said goodbye, she wept into the top of my shoulder, all the same tears I’d shed in public a few days prior, miles away in Brooklyn. No one else cried.

Emotions in this particular religion are a bland, one-flavor wash; one only tastes them briefly before explaining them away with scripture. Gospel is the constant panacea; troubles are no match for my mother’s belief that “all tears and imperfection will be washed away” when God turns the whole world into a paradise, where she will live in eternity with her fellow faithful.

It is this suspicious regard of emotion that allows them to shun former members like me, who left the religion of their own volition, and those who, according to doctrine, have sinned unrepentantly. It is also this stifling of emotion that allows them to suddenly change their tune and speak to shunned people again when higher ups loosen the embargo on contact in response to negative press, as if the years of no contact and ostracism have not already wrought enough emotional havoc on the shunned. And it is this stifling of emotion that allows them to imagine that their changed rules can expunge the pain. When I visit my parents in South Carolina five years after my aunt and uncle from Nigeria visit, almost a year after we moved to Benin, it is this stifling of emotion that causes my father to hand me the phone when my brother — the one who chose not to come to the gathering with auntie and uncle, who has refused to see me for almost ten years — calls.

I take the phone from my father, wondering why he has handed it to me so cavalierly, as if we what we are doing is completely normal, the action of any cohesive family. I hear my brother’s voice, not sounding too different from that of the boy I grew up with and the young man I used to know. His voice is strained under the pretense: he tries to sound upbeat and cheery, as if our speaking is not unusual, as if his young son has not made it completely through early childhood without knowing my name or my face. This, too, is the stifling of emotion. It is this stifling of emotion that allows my father to call each of my siblings in succession, after my brother and I say goodbye, and hand the phone to me so that they may continue the charade of pretending that they have not shunned me for all of my adult life.

***

When I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was 19 years old, I spoke to each of my family members (parents and five siblings) to discuss my choice. They had already been made aware that I wasn’t attending the meetings, that I was, in religious parlance, spiritually weak. My spiritual weakness had been treated like a family problem to solve — they would show up to my dorm room two hours from my hometown on weekends to take me to meetings at the local Kingdom Hall. I was determined to be transparent about my doubts. I had carried them in shame my whole life, and I looked at the breaking away as the moment to finally come clean, to be liberated from the weight of my sinful thoughts just by speaking them aloud. So I posed my questions to anyone I could. I sat in meetings with elders, firing away my questions, and telling them why their justifications no longer made sense to me. I told my parents that I was “searching” to make it seem as if I would someday return to the fold and thereby soften the blow, but I knew I would never return. I knew I no longer believed. The spell of living and worshipping with a group that believes they are the only true religion (their words) and that they will one day be earth’s sole inhabitants after God destroys the non-believers and transforms the whole world into a paradise had been broken. Everything I had been taught suddenly revealed itself as a complete farce.

When I told my siblings and parents I was leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, what had once been a strong family bond with regular phone calls and family vacations, came to an abrupt end. Where I had once spoken to at least one of my siblings every week, there was now silence. My calls went unanswered. I wasn’t invited to family functions. It has been 15 years since I left the group. I can count the number of times since then that I have seen or spoken to my siblings, all five of them, on one hand. In these years, I have learned to grieve people who are still alive.

This is why I fear goodbye parties. I’ve said too many premature goodbyes in short succession. It’s much more manageable for me to say goodbyes individually, where I can maintain perspective. When I am with one friend, it is easy for me to understand that this goodbye may not be final. It is fathomable that we will text, call, and even possibly visit. But when it is a room full of my most beloveds, I am reminded of the pain of wholesale absence. I can look at the mass of their smiling faces and imagine them vanishing all at once. In the face of such terror, one cannot experience the full breadth of emotion; the tides would be too strong. But I am my mother’s daughter, so I must resist the temptation to keep everyone at arm’s length, and stare at my fear that if I hold them too close they will weaken me, weaken my resolve to be strong and make this move which seems quixotic but which is more real than any belief I’ve ever held.

***

On the day of the goodbye party, cold air ripped through my body. I was so scattered that I left my apartment on the coldest day of October without a coat. With my mental energy devoured by moving, I forgot exactly who said they were coming. Who had said yes, who had said no, who I had neglected to invite…all of it eluded me. Embarrassingly, almost every guest who walked through the door of the restaurant surprised me, and I was constantly lighting up like I’d been chosen from the audience of “The Price is Right.” I stood by the bar nervously shifting my weight from side to side, picking my nails, feeling lonely among my favorite people.

Moving comes with the most alienating of paradoxes. The connections to places, objects, and people consume you while you let them go. You are surrounded by friends and love, yet the storm of emotions isolates you. It’s hard for anyone to understand how, despite the privilege that moving represents, you are hurting; that though you are moving, you confront paralysis everyday. Still, everyone knows something about moving. It is peculiar, but not foreign.

***

We left Benin after a five-month visit, returning briefly to Brooklyn for the last stretch before our official move. On the flight back to New York, I sat next to a five-year-old boy who was traveling completely alone. His seat was, in fact, across the aisle from mine but when the flight attendants realized I had an empty seat next to me, they decided I looked maternal enough to move the boy into the empty seat next to me. We became travel partners. At first, he didn’t answer any of the questions that I asked in French. Then I tried in English and recognition flashed across his face.

“I’m going to America to meet my daddy,” he said in a Nigerian accent, without excitement. I smiled broadly, our first barrier overcome. It was a multi-stop flight and he likely boarded in Lagos. (It will always be one of the great cultural thefts of colonialism that people in neighboring countries often have no common language. Imagine if you lived in a country the size of New York and couldn’t speak to people who lived in New Jersey). He was terrified. It was his first flight and he didn’t know a soul.

My little friend swung his head into the aisle with curious bewilderment to take in every detail of activity on the plane. I helped him open his food, but he didn’t touch it until he saw me eat first. There was something about his fear that told me his trip was more permanent than temporary. He carried the sadness and distrust of a person newly wounded, maybe grieving a loss, certainly stunned by the magnitude of his journey.

We passed the hours doing pages in his activity book and completing a jigsaw puzzle with giant pieces, which was our biggest accomplishment. When we experienced turbulence he grabbed my hand and I squeezed back, saying “Whooaah!” with a silly surprised expression on my face to calm him. During the rough landing, I cradled the frame of his small body and counted the seconds in a sing-song voice while he buried his face in my lap. After we touched down, I tried not to let his eyes rupture my heart when he realized that we would not continue on together because we had different connecting flights. We hugged goodbye in the aisle.

I saw him later being escorted to his gate by flight attendants, his small body overtaken by the size of his backpack, which I knew contained only the activity book, the cardboard jigsaw puzzle, and some crayons — remnants of our little party for two. I couldn’t stop thinking of his utter aloneness — a small boy alone in an airport, the only people responsible for him airline employees. I realized later that because our time together was so brief, our time together had been a goodbye party of sorts. I could only hope that it helped him feel a bit less alone than his circumstances suggested.

***

Amid my loneliness at the goodbye party, something kept returning: moments when the frenetic shuffling of all the moving pieces slowed down and I felt total peace. In those moments, I accepted that I couldn’t fully devote time and attention to each guest with the depth that I’d have preferred, or that it wouldn’t have been appropriate to cry and beg my friends to come with me to Benin, even though it crossed my mind more than once. As the moments of acceptance multiplied, the malaise of moving slowly but surely loosened its grip. The party ended up being a great time.

For our final night in Brooklyn, I envisioned packing and plopping down on the couch to watch Netflix when we were too tired to move, but other plans were in store. First there came one knock on the door. Then, two. Then, three. Friends came. The night was full of storytelling, the honoring of risk, and blessings of more life to come. It was a party.

* * *

Joy Notoma is an essayist and journalist. Her work has appeared in CNN, Al Jazeera, the Huffington Post, and other publications. The Moving Chronicles is her biweekly missive about her adventures in moving to Benin.

Editor: Sari Botton

At Guernica, Amanda Feinman visits the Rosemont Bar in Brooklyn, New York, to learn about how the venue’s drag shows are expanding the art with boundless inclusivity and one rule: “No one should say, ‘This is how you should or shouldn’t look.’”

Drag has exploded in recent years, reaching larger audiences than ever before on social media and YouTube, and through RuPaul’s sprawling empire. The art form has often provided space for cisgender gay men to perform exaggerated femininity: this might be called “binary drag,” the older and more mainstream school, where prettiness and pageantry are prized and performers are expected to cross unambiguously over a perceived gender line. That stuff hasn’t disappeared. Cis men are still the majority of drag performers, and many queens still aim for drag that’s “fishy” (or female-passing) and polished. But here, in this dim sanctuary from the bitter Brooklyn cold, you sense a hunger for something more knotty. The drag is messy, activist, inclusive. Its performers identify all along the gender spectrum. It engages explicitly with contemporary politics, does not shy away from pain and ugliness, and is uninterested in restraint.

Crucially, a lot of drag at the Rosemont resists binary expectations. It’s a church of “genderfucking,” where high-femme makeup gets paired with flat, hairy chests. Bare breasts meet penile prosthetics. A cinched waist sits below an ample beard. Where some drag prizes clear-cut movement across gendered categories, this work worships the collapse of category altogether.

“There is no reason at all to subscribe to a binary in an art form that is meant to be subversive,” Jupiter Velvet tells me. She’s a trans femme queen based in Miami, but because of her deep Brooklyn ties (Brooklyn maven Merrie Cherry is her drag grandmother), she’s frequently in the Rosemont’s orbit. When I first saw her gliding across Bushwick, she had on a full face of impeccable makeup, a tight shirt whose round cut-outs revealed hairy nipples, and a trans pride flag draped over her shoulders, cascading down her body in baby blues and pinks. “No one should say, ‘This is how you should or shouldn’t look,’” she insists. “We don’t always need to be padded or shaved.”

For a school of drag to have liberated itself from binary rigidity is no small thing. The variety and fluidity here hint at larger trends within the art form, and have implications that reverberate beyond the drag world, too. Even with the careful distance that I—as a straight, cis woman—must maintain when I enter queer spaces, I feel animated by the revolutionary premise of this kind of drag. Because it embraces a radical softening of social category, it suggests something about how the world might be. How we all might live, even after we close our tabs at the end of the night, and stagger back to our muted routines.

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