Hello Reader – if you’re still looking through this WordPress, I want to say thank you, and that I wish you well.

Death has been abundant this past month. Deaths caused by the carnage of Empire, in the form of the warring Israel nationstate, backed by the older and newer imperial cores. My utmost solidarity goes to Palestinians doing their best to survive, and those finding ways to fight back despite the bleakest conditions. Whenever I catch up with old friends nowadays, I have mostly told them I am glad they are alive and living their lives. It does sound like a grim thing to say during peacetime (edit: though, is it really peacetime? For many of us, War has not fully come knocking yet. We are in a temporary reprieve), but I have learnt in the past year that people can come and go suddenly. I have been cherishing the faces I know a lot more now. It is a wondrous thing to first cross paths, and even more so to continue doing so.

May we continue to cross paths, and make the most of our time together.

•, a friend of mine, once told me that “Death is a condition of Life”. • has been through near-death experiences. They feel Death to be much closer having almost experienced it. How we will eventually expire and decay. How again we could go so suddenly. I only hope to still be with you, holding your hand, while we decay. If you go suddenly, I hope to celebrate the paths you crossed in song, in dance, in the carving of a rock, in skipping pebbles across the beach, in helping an insect to survive.

The converse is also true, I told •. “Life is a condition of Death”. It is the fact of Death that allows us to spring forth and defy it. To challenge it. To argue it. To cheat it. To remain alive and to survive is a full-frontal, gorgeous display of colors. It does not matter if Death will catch up to us, if it has failed to do so in the present. This is why each friendly face is powerful and significant – it is a face that is cheating Death by the simple fact that they are still alive and expressive. Anything is still possible in that present.

I am still ill, trying to heal, trying to process the damage that has been done to my body and psyche. I have craved constantly for Death given all the pain. But with every day that I continue living, I am beginning to appreciate more and more that I am surviving. I cannot make amends to those that I have hurt if I am dead. I cannot continue physically loving those that I love if I am dead. Let this be sobering.