The Brooklyn Rail

December 1, 2023

Dear Alice, Fatema, Gemma,

I promised to respond to your letters by considering your writing in its “broader academic/social/creative/feminist contexts.” By yesterday, I had a good set of notes and something like a draft. But today, my deadline, World AIDS Day, and exactly a year after we came together for the Brooklyn Rail conversation series, I find I can’t write about your texts but only from within and to them. Today I can only write from within and to bodies, yours, mine, others.

Last night, I attended a gala in support of the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research, the first time I had been to such a swish event. Shiny, glamorously dressed people grooved to the music. I wore a silk two-piece, a little dressed down perhaps but comfortable except for the heels I rarely wear. A woman born HIV-positive spoke of losing both her parents to AIDS-related causes. A former student approached me and told me how useful his art history degree had been for the luxury real estate he now sold.

At some point, light-headed, warming fast, and needing air I stumbled out of the ballroom. My partner told me to hang on as we looked for a chair. I tried to lean on a tall glass table but fell and blocked a procession of beautifully swathed bodies lining up for the gold carpet where we had earlier posed for pictures. My partner got me conscious enough to move away from the line, but I fell again to the floor. I remember thinking, probably as I came to, that nothing felt so good as the cold marble against my cheek. As I got up, my partner and a security guard moved me to a yellow velvet-upholstered chair near the bathroom.

Did you know that fainting can lead to incontinence? As the security guard took my details and called for an ambulance, I started to suspect that I had shit myself. My coherence convinced the guard to cancel the ambulance, and someone brought our coats. I stood up and saw the yellow stain I was leaving on the yellow velvet. I draped my thankfully long coat over my shoulders while I entered an elevator, my partner shielding me and my smell. We called a taxi instead of an Uber, for fear of soiling anything but vinyl seats, and I rolled down the window. My partner held my hand as we made the 15-minute drive home, where I peeled off my golden poop-smeared tights and skirt, placed them in a garbage bag, wiped golden poop off my legs with toilet paper, and got into the shower. I was glad I could do this myself. It’s not always and won’t always be so.

This morning, I wasn’t sure how to return to writing, so I rewatched our Brooklyn Rail conversation and reread your texts. I found I could only, as you, Alice and Gemma, write, feel toward an Afterword. Or perhaps feel across, toward you, Fatema, writing of the hesitant touch of care in the COVID-19 era. Returning home from a caesarian section fourteen years ago, I fell off a toilet, pants at half mast, and needed help getting up. We fall into care.

In your writing you conjure pieces, fragments, scraps, bits, and sheets of paper that resemble petals and leaves. You conjure a fluttering golden blanket with a pink lining, the outside and inside of a scar. These conjurings give tentative shape to the fugitive, ambivalent, but still healing gestures of care-in-relation that you describe.

I gather them to my body, my arms full of your care, and I let them fall to be picked up by others.

Love, Allison