Bird Bones: To Imagine a Future

A meditation on hope and fear by Emily Conway of A Thin Space

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Did everyone get a chance to read the new New Yorker article by

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Woman of Letters

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Orlando Silver

’s Incision Press has a submission call for its “Monsterfuck” trans and queer erotica anthology. Submission deadline is 15th July. Read all the details here.

“Think dark, dangerous, monstrous. Think ethereal, magic, wild. Think creatures, fairies, aliens, beasts, magical creatures of any kind. Most of all, make it queer! Make it very, very queer.”

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There was something so deeply familiar to me the first time I read

Emily Conway

’s essay “Bird Bones: To Imagine a Future”—and I think many other fellow Queers will agree. Ours can be a fraught and anxious existence, catastrophe and threats looming from every quarter, now more than ever. We are fragile—but we are strong and resilient too, like a feather, or a bird.

We are so happy to showcase this hopeful essay by a valued supporting member of Qstack. Enjoy!

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Birds Bones

To Imagine a Future

by

Emily Conway

of

A Thin Space

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We would never have labeled it “catastrophic thinking.” We believed we were being careful, double checking, making sure. We couldn’t see that the threat of violence and tragedy was as much a part of our anatomy as water. Why would we recognize it as anything other than ourselves? And for good reason: fathers and husbands went away, taking with them a gallon jug of water and the camping gear, then never returned; step-fathers liked it when you ran your fingers through their hair, then told you to hug them more because it would help; mothers cried and said they couldn’t leave the step-fathers because God wanted them to stay; car doors fell off if you didn’t hold them tight and lean in around corners; and the heat and lights didn’t come on unless you put wood in the stove and kerosene in the lamps.

As a young adult, when I called my mother unexpectedly, she’d answer with a breathless “What’s wrong?!” Later, she learned to temper her response to a controlled and falsely cheery, “Everything o.k.?” We spent our lives this way, breathless and falsely cheery, with our hands on a door that would fly open and dump us onto the road the moment we relaxed our grip.

The weather was hot for late September. My daughter and I stood in the busy vendors’ hall of the local artists’ fair, perusing a selection of cards and prints hand made on a letterpress in Lincoln, Nebraska. I noticed a map of Iowa that depicted the state’s watershed. I had an immediate desire to buy it for our new house there. The one we think we’ll purchase and move into this summer. The print’s eventual place in that future home felt important, an acknowledgement of the land and our new location in it. But, almost as quickly, a familiar caution appeared alongside desire, a tightening in the chest that warned me not to be careless with my heart. After all, we might not be able to move. My husband might not get his contract renewed. I might have to stay in Omaha and continue the trek to see him every few weeks. We might lose our home due to unemployment and have no place to live. Or, worse case scenario, the country’s political situation might become so inflammatory that we will be forced to leave the country. My heart beat madly; my nerve endings buzzed, as my body absorbed the impact of these potential circumstances. “What will you do with your purchase then?” my head demanded. The map would be a marker not of hope but of a hasty and badly made decision. One that would cause pain. I stood in the noisy hall and listened to this familiar, frantic voice make its case as if my life depended on it. Then I bought the print.

My family lacked the skills to see abandonment, unchecked impulse, victimhood, and poverty as our true threats and also deep wounds. Instead, we manufactured catastrophe to give us a sense of control. We imagined death over and over in order to avoid it because it terrified us. We didn’t know how to feel our fear so we deflected it, bent it like a lens does light, into imagined scenarios. But you don’t escape fear this way, you just wait until it bounces back, then you create another scenario and defer it again. The truth is catastrophes do happen, all the time, everywhere, on a scale from global to personal. The truth is everyone and everything will die.

The print sits on my dining room table wrapped in its protective plastic sleeve, waiting to be packed into a box. In my imagination, other objects collect alongside it: a small, unassuming house in a neighborhood close to downtown; a wood stove; a candle burning in an early morning kitchen; a bountiful overgrown garden; the absence of ambulance sirens. This dreamed future isn’t catastrophic; it’s livable. It’s a place I want to inhabit, so I hold it with care, a feather in my cupped hand. I don’t want it to blow away, but I don’t want to crush it either. A breeze ruffles the edges.

I’m going to die. I don’t know when. Between now and then, horrible things could happen to me; some difficult and painful things, no doubt, will. I can’t plan for them. I will never be able to imagine their exact unfolding. In the meantime, I watch the feather in my hand. It’s fragile, the leaving of a creature whose bones are filled with air.

Bio:

Emily Conway

is a writer, mom, gardener, and maker who publishes

A Thin Space

“If you feel and live deeply, this newsletter is your space. Think of it as a companion for your life journey. Here, I publish personal essays of awareness and intention that help readers feel seen and understood with an emphasis on healing and wholeness.”