Message in the sand

For the ones I love

My partner messaged me last night from Brooklyn, where they live half of the time.

“Prospect Park is on fire.”

I went online and, sure enough, images of an inferno against a tree line fell on my eyes like fists. And just like that, the tears that had not been accessible Wednesday morning when I awoke to the election results; or when, shortly after, haters descended upon a Substack post of love to my trans community, wishing death upon me in specific detail; or in the days since — suddenly, they broke like a dam.

Fires do that to me.

I came east from Washington state over four years ago, while the west coast was on fire. I remember summers of eerie light and shrouded sun, wearing masks before Covid was a word. I remember drought that peeled back the water in lakes like skin revealing a spinal cord, dry beds cracked through. I remember when Australia was burning in 2019, how I felt I might self-combust in flames of grief every single day, even though they were so far away from me.

Something about the natural world being scorched rips through me as quickly as the brushfire began in Prospect Park. “No injuries reported,” one news station said. But as always, they only meant humans. I know better.

My whole body shook with grief last night, rattling the blessed-but-temporary detachment I’d felt from deep emotion post-election. I knew it would happen. I leaned into it.

I lay in bed hours later, frozen, eyes wide open in the dark. My mind playing grainy images of possible scenarios to come. Never have I felt so afraid for the safety of so many, many of us, including myself.

I remember watching a movie as a child, less than ten years old, with adults from church and my parents crowded into our living room. It was an end times movie, where most Christians had been taken up to heaven and everyone else who was left behind was faced with two choices: embrace the antichrist and be safe, or choose Christ and face torture and death. My body still remembers the fear and dread that seized me when I saw this film, how I worried this would be my fate.

The irony is not lost on me that in the current world scenario, Christian nationalists are the antichrist imposing suffering on all who refuse to bow to their made-up god. Things have come full circle, distorted.

I lay in bed until I reached out to a dear friend who, thankfully, was still awake at that hour.

“I’m too scared to sleep,” I said in a quiet voice. And they listened, then they read to me from a book about plants until the fear started to loosen its grip enough to allow me to drift off.

This morning, it took me five hours to convince myself to get out of bed.

I drove to a nature preserve nearby, on the Hudson River, on land belonging to the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican community. People who had been forcibly removed from their homes and, roughly four hundred years later, had this little piece of sacred land returned to their care. I felt the long journey home of their spirits in the land as I walked. I felt the encroaching unease of walking alone in remote, red areas. Every person I pass spikes my heart rate - friend or foe, I don’t know.

I made it out to the beach, crouching in the leaves to watch a late-season garter snake slither through the forest. Tracking shadows on the ground to bald eagles overhead. Following the river’s rocky spine to an outpost, where I collected handfuls of aquatic snail shells and sat in the lap of a dead tree at the edge of the forest.

And then, I squatted down and traced a message in the sand, filled in with shells and framed with driftwood. I sprinkled berries from a nearby vine around the words, my hands dripping red.

I can’t pretend that I know how to face what is to come. How can any of us know? But I do know this, and I know it like the red staining my hands: We belong here.

We belong to each other. We belong to this Earth.

Some of us will have to go to safer places and some of us will stay, by choice or necessity. Some of us won’t survive this time in history. All of us will be changed. But love — this stubborn, fierce, tender, raw, courageous, active thing — will be a fire of its own kind, a good kind of fire, and we will keep it burning. When someone’s fire goes out, we will pull them close and offer our flame.

I left the message on the beach, my own little fire, an offering to the elements. A reminder to myself that everything is impermanent — good, bad, neutral — and today is all I truly know. I’ll meet tomorrow when it comes, red hands and full of fire.