by Gyasi Hall
“Speculation isn’t just a function of the future (prediction) or the past (reconstruction) but of the present (curation). Everything is always happening all at once. By writing about it you are actively choosing what to focus on.”
Me and the homie are sitting on the couch watching a video called Try Not To Be Satisfied and God knows we ain’t fail that yet despite the fact that every test this land can give us shows us its fangs and drools and rips entire neighborhoods to shreds
but we ain’t fail yet and over by the door there is a stain oozing out from under the ramp and the stain is an entire country and it ain’t been dry for weeks the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the waters will come to take your children away along with everything you’ve built for them it ain’t matter how hard you hold on
the mold is summoning its divine fungus and establishing colonies and chanting to the gods of this lowered ceiling but maybe none of that matters now cause someone’s building a perfect vase by hand on Alex’s laptop screen and maybe that’s all we ask for; the chance to build perfectly or be perfectly built
and Alex’s girlfriend comes in and sits down and starts talking about her day and she is all laughs and smiles pulled straight from his chest and this is the happiest I’ve seen him since we first met in this dorm lounge 30 feet off the ground surrounded by playing cards and a thick night sky and enough grief between the two of us to take us away
the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the only perfect thing the water’s ever built was the crater I carved myself out of and last night I had a dream where I was kissed by someone I haven’t seen in a long time and then we just kept kissing
and the man I drove across town on an empty tank of gas to eat ice cream with once said Once you know what it is to be lonely it’s hard to unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always and this man is not Alex or my father or anyone I’ve lived with This man is a poet that I did not know three years ago and who now knows me well enough to eat ice cream with me and I am still alive and blessed
and watching Alex kiss his girlfriend with the kind of Joy we once reserved for parts of ourselves we thought we would never see again and the stain is still expanding and sopping and threatening rot and suddenly three men come in with tools and belts and all kinds of answers and one of them looks at the stain and its constant evolution of mold and says Holy Hell and the second guy squints at me and asks if we’ve met before and we haven’t so I say no I don’t think so and he says huh you must have that kind of face and I have been called many things by strangers but never familiar and the third guy leaves
and back in the day a dude named Paul wrote a letter to a dude name Timothy and said decry false teachers and help the widows and give yourself wholly to them so that everyone may see your progress
and maybe he was talking about leading a church or maybe he was talking about the Holy Ghost being the only force worth surrendering to or maybe he was talking about the way a perfect river of honey kisses a plate and disappears back into itself as it lays flat but regardless me and Alex are 7 minutes into this video and we still ain’t fail yet the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the water makes a soldier out of all who survive it or maybe not maybe the flood is just a flood and the rain is just the rain and maybe the only war is war
but before I can make up my mind the third guy comes back in with a machine and a hose and starts gathering the stain’s stagnant offering and throwing it into the kind of tornado you can pick up and take with you and I’ve always preferred calling it the Holy Ghost because nothing divine is never haunted and Alex’s laptop is now over on my side of the couch and his girlfriend is sitting on his lap and their eyes are closed and they are holding each other with the kind of tenderness that makes you realize you are lonely but you were not always and it isn’t awkward in any sense of that word or any other and the second guy is talking to the first guy even though no one can hear anything over the tornado’s violent conquering of that which the stain defiled for so long it learned to call it home the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the water makes a fist around every atom of sanctuary and dares the universe to make it let go
but the tornado is winning even if it has to cross the lake several times and Alex and his girlfriend look like they are trying to build a cocoon out of complete stillness and the lack of space between them and 8 minutes into the video petals of white sugar bloom on a cupcake and it is perfect and maybe grief is a kind of flower maybe everything is a rainbow maybe sadness isn’t always just sadness and Paul wrote Timothy all those letters because he was an apostle born out of due time a homie late to the party but still not satisfied and he missed his friend they nailed him to the kind of tree you can pick up and take with you and they made him cross an entire country just to get to the hill he was destined to die on and they killed him while his mother watched and wept
and my mom weeps sometimes my mom crosses entire countries just to see that I am still alive and blessed and there are hill’s I still haven’t even seen but then again I’ve never saved anything except my dinner for the next morning so maybe that makes us even and even when he was being killed he gave himself wholly to them so they might see his progress and he screamed forgive them father they know not what they do and I don’t know what I do or how I’m still doing it I just woke up one day watching a country disintegrate while two people build a silent monument to the only force worth surrendering to
the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the water only uses the word ‘Love’ when it is absolutely necessary and maybe Grace is never something you can internalize but the stain is now a damp echo scarring the carpet and the video is over and asking if we want to watch it again and Alex asks me if I want to join them for lunch and I say sure
This was actually one of the first essays I ever wrote; at the time I still considered myself to be primarily a poet, and so had just begun to ask myself questions about genre and truth and the expression of truth, had just begun tracking what it all meant and how it all felt. I began to become more confident about playing with time and space and what’s considered important: vacuuming carpet stains AND God AND loneliness AND weird ASMR videos. Speculation isn’t just a function of the future (prediction) or the past (reconstruction) but of the present (curation). Everything is always happening all at once. By writing about it you are actively choosing what to focus on. What informs those choices? What if everything weighs the same? How many moments can I stack onto this moment and have it still be one moment, a vertical tower instead of a horizontal spread? How big can I make it? How small? What happens if I sit in these questions instead of immediately trying to answer them?
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Gyasi Hall is a Writer of Stuff™ from Columbus, Ohio. Their essay “Alas, Poor Fhoul” was the runner up for the Black Warrior Review 2020 Nonficiton Contest, and their debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in spring 2019. They are the lead nonfiction editor for The BreakBread Literacy Project, and they currently reside in Iowa City where they are pursuing their MFA in creative nonfiction.