This week I was in Washington, DC for work. One of the nights, as the sky went from blue to white to orange to indigo and my hands went from warm to cold to not there at all kind of numb, I went on a walk with a friend and coworker. She’s the kind of friend where it can be quiet or it can be loud, but mostly we laugh.
Like many urban centers, DC has become home of the birds. Not the flying feathered kind, the electric scooter kind. They’re parked on sidewalks at random as though lightning came down through the sky and struck the rider mid-city block. As my friend and I looped from our hotel to the Washington Monument, past the World War II Memorial, up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, we passed, oh I don’t know, maybe 57 or 58 American flags and talked about how bad the flag makes our bodies feel and maybe 22 or 23 electric scooters.
You’re probably familiar with the sound of a bird scooter that’s been taken from its home. It’s a long, neverending, straight to the back of the head kind of beep.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
I grabbed my abdomen. Everything seemed fine.
Wait, what?
Yeah, that’s right. The scooter beeped and I grabbed my abdomen.
My body reacted before my brain could connect the dots. The pitch of the scooter’s beep was exactly the pitch and volume of the beep my insulin pump makes when it fails. Sound triggering movement, instinct, all happening faster than mental processing could keep up.
Wearing medical devices means learning not only a new body and the way that it moves and feels, but also a new language with what it can tell us.
The short beep means the insulin has finished administering. The long, unending beep means the pump has failed. The abrupt, three-in-a-row honk-like beeps mean my blood sugar is approaching dangerously low levels.
Before my diabetes diagnosis, the long beep meant one thing. Now with new context, new information, the long beep means another.
The scooter and the insulin pump. Singing the same long beep.
I kept checking my blood sugar levels to make sure I wasn’t missing a change. A sign. To make sure it was actually the scooter and not the dumb little pod that keeps my insides ticking along. I want to keep ticking along.
As we took the stairs back down the Lincoln at a bit of a faster clip (later, giant Lincoln), my phone buzzed. It was another message from someone in a far away state wondering if my loved ones were okay, if I were okay. This week, the community I call home was impacted by a mass shooting. “I’m not there, my people are okay physically. My people are hurting.”
My people are hurting. There are only so many we can layer on our little calloused souls. So many seconds of footage of people running as fast as they can with their loved ones dragging behind them to outrun the gun. From people ducking, hiding, playing dead. From numbers of injured and killed ticking ticking ticking up. I want to stop the ticking.
I wasn’t there. I wasn’t at the parade and I wasn’t a mile away in my home and I wasn’t in the city and I wasn’t in the state. I was over here in DC.
At the moment the shooting happened, I was in a building with legislators and their staffers. Our elected officials. And a 32 physicians who provide abortion care and gender affirming care for trans and nonbinary young people and adults. My phone started popping off, my partner. My friends. My family. Everyone checking on everyone. Everyone holding out our little chicken wings and trying to collect all our chicks underneath. Protect. Keep warm. Keep alive.
At the moment the shooting happened, I could not be shot at. The building I was in has security similar to TSA at the airport. I stripped down and took off my coat. Sent my bags through the x-ray machine. Walked through a metal detector. Was patted and wanded down by an officer.
Because of course. Of course the statistically more white, more male, more old, more cisgender, more heterosexual makeup of the elected officials in this building would do whatever they needed to do to keep their bodies out of harms way. Because of course. Of course they’d rather throw away drafted legislation aimed to keep guns out of people’s hands. Of course they’d rather find bullets in our bodies, and not theirs.
Gun violence is entirely preventable. It is not a necessary evil. It is not a problem with humanity or mental health or instability or poverty or drugs or anything else. Gun violence is a gun problem.
Guns aren’t used to protect bodies; they’re used to destroy them.
The sun finally set. My friend and I rounded the last corner before our hotel.
It’s weird to be in a body trying to eat itself. Tick, tick, tick.
It’s weird to be in a society trying to eat each other. Tick, tick, tick.
I did it. I finally read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I read it while walking on the streets of DC and while soaking in a big tub and on planes and at restaurants. Blue, blue grief. Blue, blue life. The color of a heartbreak that ached for ages. The color of a memory that changed and was left with nothing blue at all.
After that, I read Gabi Abrão's Notes on Shapeshifting. (Gabi is also over here on Substack, check out
) . I read it in a hotel bed too big and too soft for my body and on a flight next to a man who worked for the Department of Agriculture and had a military haircut and played with his cross necklace the whole flight. He was also flying home to KC from DC after a week or work and also felt the strange middle grief we holding of “something happened at home while we were away, and now we’re coming home to change.”The two books are about the same in size in the hand and both read, in a way, as a list. One, a list to pass grief-time, the other, a collection of lists to live deeply embodied in inevitable life-change.
Reading them back to back was like walking slowly out of the depths of a dank cave of sadness into a soft golden hour daylight. 10/10 recommend this journey.
Hope you’re also just listening to Beyonce’s new country songs on repeat, again, and again, and again, and again.