Littoral

I've been thinking about home.

Not the theory of it. Not the political economy of housing or the sociology of belonging, though I know those too. I mean the thing that happens when the coffee is the right temperature and the snow outside is doing what snow does and nothing is required of me for the length of one cup.

I mean the weight of a book before I've opened it.

The world is on fire in the ways it's always been on fire and in new ways too. Gaza. Congo. The slow legislative dismantling of trans life. The far right finding new rooms to move into. I know how to hold this. I've been holding it. What I'm less practiced at is setting it down for twenty minutes without calling that abandonment.

But I've been noticing the small things that feel like home. Not home as destination or achievement. Home as what accumulates. The familiar smell of my own products in the bathroom. Cooking for myself after a long day as an act that's for me and nobody else. The moment before sleep when the day stops requiring anything.

For a Black queer person the argument that rest is resistance is not a self-help slogan. It's a structural observation. The world was not built to sustain me. Choosing to be sustained anyway is not a small thing.

I'm not good at writing this. My instinct is always toward the collective, the systemic, the argument that needs to be made. But I'm learning that home within myself is not a retreat from those things. It might be what makes them possible.

The quiet. The coffee. The snow. Still here.