11-18: salaam from an airplane in denver. i mass-deleted all of my tweets and retweets today. it took a while for them to properly disappear from my feed. i just checked again several hours later and all but one re-tweet is visible, featuring my favorite poet kamau brathwaite: "The hurricane does not roar in pentameter." (originally posted by @RuffneckRefugee in 2020) 11-18: i'm on a flight & the guy next to me is a graphic designer working on a brochure of some kind in adobe indesign. type treatments look good and he is better at incorporating unique color swatches than i am. but the teacher in me wants to talk him out of using the essentials workspace AND dark mode 😭 11-18: a thousand ways to say i'm sorry and you matter to me 11-17: 🪻 11-16: i spent the day retracing footsteps that were both more and less familiar than i expected. i've been reflecting on things that i'm having difficulty deciphering. i wear the confusion not on my sleeve but slathered atop my face like cheap sunblock that makes me look ashy and feel gray. gray as in blurry; gray as in nearly opaque with a dash of greasy liquid; gray as in huh; gray as in, wouldn't you like to know? it's my last day in philadelphia this month, and i was supposed to unpack more boxes and reorganize a few things in my apartment before flying home. actually, maybe i wasn't supposed to do all of that, because i didn't end up doing it and instead enjoyed my long walk about the city. right now i'm sitting between the discomfort of my observations and the fuzz that comes with being chronically fatigued. i know some things and don't know others, and yet my body acts on nothing. i know that my energy is shifting but i don't know what's on the other side of those shifts. i know that i am hard on myself in these moments (and many others) but i don't always know what the alternative is. i think of you often, too. 11-14: depleted from a health issue and praying that tomorrow is not the same. but today i learned something which is good i guess 11-12: 🥱 11-11: i can hear my dad reminding me to always choose myself 11-10: free and easy wandering, with my eyes wide open and my mouth mostly shut 11-8: 🦻 10-21: petite coffeemaker in a petite kitchen next to a petite kitchen sink and a very petite drying rack. my petite microwave is on its way along with a sponge holster that will go in my sink because it's petite and space is limited. normally i'd invest in a scrub daddy but one of those things would prolly take up half of my petite kitchen counterspace & we can't have that 🌻 10-19: sold three pieces of furniture that won't work in my petite philly apartment, bought my bookcases, strolled through rose and magnolia gardens, listed my tv for sale, and gave my mom a virtual tour of my apartment and neighborhood (not in that order). tomorrow = sprouts, container store, ikea, and maybe fedex print 10-19: alhamdulillah!!! 10-16: first acupuncture in philly this afternoon! 10-15: first hot bath in philly! 10-12: farewell rhode island!!!!! 10-11: in 2025 i will begin packing the day before my flights 10-8: 💗 https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Domestic-Cook-Book 10-6: lunch log --- misir wot mixed with steamed rice, rotisserie chicken breast with skin, 1 piece of ta3miyya (sudanese falafel), dark chocolate peanut butter cup, green tea. 10-1: love it when folks use they/them pronouns when referring to me; makes me feel alive. i'm moving slowly today and letting my mind spill out of my ears. i'm sad but okay. 9-28: my gratitude log --- supportive friends, inspiring family members, very good healthcare, mom's cooking, dependable car, my fragrance collection, inositol and glutathione, black intuition, dad's patience, mom's sharpness, cheese curds, sedona, the skip intro button on netflix, my lungs, having lived in chicago's south side, feeling love(d), minimizer bras, me. 9-22: alhamdulillah 💖 9-12: opting out of misery aka listen to black women the first time and every other time. 9-10: "what's fracking?" -- my sister 9-9: took a sick day today after not getting enough sleep and feeling unwell this morning. dad's memorial was on saturday and i learned so many things about him and the folks he and mom came up with. how important they are to the culture and how deeply they care for sudan despite being uprooted. makes me sad because sudan is rotting, largely due to the fact that our most important elders have been forced out of there. dad was a sagittarius who accomplished many things, as sagittarians often do, but he never felt fully recognized in america. before he passed away, he would often say that he misses utah, which is where we lived for most of my childhood. i didn't fully get why he missed that place; it's boring and conservative and weird. but it's also easy to set up a life there and the landscapes are otherworldly. the outdoors can be an escape from reality -- maybe the closest thing to paradise lol. white folks in utah are very different from other white americans, also, and i think my dad found comfort in how he was met in utah. folks liked talking to us about us -- our culture, our blackness, our language, our religious practice. they made my mom and dad feel special, which they were and are. it's strange, though, that utah did that for them. and america is strange too. 8-30: watching a documentary on ethiopian wolves 😍 8-25: ps i loved philly!!! 8-25: this isn't always a bad thing but i notice that many people tend to discuss sudan and congo at the same time even though the countries are suffering very different atrocities etc. other cases of genocidal violence and abuses of power appear to get more individual attention while maybe the black/african regions are often discussed as a group & lumped together. not sure what the answer is because i remember when sudan and darfur got a lot of focused & individual attention and while the efforts were impressive the whole thing turned out to be an overly performed and ill-informed campaign that didn't result in less violence in darfur. don't feel like elaborating but i will add that a few months ago i saw a tweet featuring a picture of ryan gosling wearing a shirt that said "darfur." i found the pic to be very cringe but the person who tweeted it included a caption that said something like "what happened?" -- i.e., why isn't this the energy right now? i donno if the ppl who post these things actually lived through that era or know about the organizations that were behind those campaigns. if they did, they might have another opinion of gosling, who is kind of a joke regardless. macklemore, on the other hand, receives his flowers 💐 8-21: still need to revisit and recollect the stuff i wrote about black women's emotions many years ago. i wrote those things at a time when i was young enough to continue expressing my emotions without fully understanding the consequences. now things are a little different but my intuition back then and today are in alignment. i'm a black woman, and my emotional output isn't welcomed or embraced in american society. my disappointment and concern translates to a monovocal anger that must be feared and therefore capped, seized, policed. my joy translates to delusion and audacity -- who do i think i am? i think my chronic fatigue comes from knowing that i can't express emotions without being mischaracterized, judged, or gaslit in some way or another. luckily on most days i don't care but that doesn't stop my body from welcoming the fatigue and perhaps diluting my emotional downpour as a result. maybe the fatigue is meant to protect me. 🎶 alhamdulillah , , , 🎶 excited to be in philadelphia this week. my sleep schedule is off right now and my hotel smells like marijuana which i personally find very annoying. i opened the windows and think/hope that has helped. i am finally dozing off <3 8-18: listening 💞 8-16: it's been a month and i'm still not sure what just happened, how it could have happened, why it had to happen to him. part of me wants to run off and do a million things that would make him proud, and another part of me wants to sleep in and divest from all things laborious. everyday is a little different but there are some consistencies and interesting observations. things that used to bother me don't really phase me at the moment. pain takes on a different meaning, and most challenges that i have witnessed or experienced are nowhere near as painful as seeing him fight for his life and not win. i don't know what else to say. i tend to do a lot of things on my own -- something i inherited from him. i told my therapist about that and she asked me to picture a group of friends helping me with something. i closed my eyes and imagined it and broke down. 8-14: 🤎 8-11: just noticed that my location references the sudanese province of kurdufan. my dad's family is based there and that's where he was born. i've only been to kurdufan once, when i was 16 maybe, but i think of it more than i think of khartoum and omdurman. kurdufan has a different vibe that i like to think i carry with me. less noise and less static, more room for thoughts to unwind and more beautiful sand on the streets. 🎶 my dad always kept things intact when family affairs turned stressful, often without us knowing. he was a very perceptive and quiet person who held us together and more specifically helped my mom process her complex emotions. not entirely sure how he managed. 🎶 i miss him everyday. 🎶 dad and i watched and listened to this in the hospital the week before he transitioned, and a couple days before, too: https://youtu.be/lsQ9cxM36ig