Blue Soom Part I - Cosmic Bloom
BlueSoom is a fictional prose series that explores care through disconnection, inspired by the ways plants disconnect from themselves in the transformation of flower to fruit. It is an exploration into an ethics of pruning, of learning when and how much to hold on to and let go.
We often understand care through connection. Within decolonial thought, care is also often framed as a form of resistance. BlueSoom asks what happens when we look at the labour of flowering and fruiting not as individual resistance (in spite of the environment), but as an act of collective care to pursue beauty and produce fruit not only for one's own becoming, but for collective nourishment.
Do we sever or detangle without disconnecting as we let go of past selves, places, and people?
There is a hyperawareness that I have for introducing danger to a situation. Myself oftentimes, being the introducer and the introduction.
Call it a reputation under question.
Call it a big sister’s precautions.
Call it a visitor, not a villager.
Call it a free spirit, with promise not to being free, but infinitely bound to spirit.
At the very least, these are some of the things I’ve heard myself described as, from the hearts I’ve let myself get close enough to listen to… to look at my reflection through.
Most don’t call it at all. At least not in words. But their avoidance gets louder the harder they try to ignore.
My mother calls it “Jus like yuh father” and speaks no more.
She in. She out.
Heaving. Feeling. Breathing without believing, sucking the air from every corner of the room, until she finds a paper shopping bag to pour a little less of herself into.
Doctors call it hyperventilating, but I cannot understand how on earth there could be such a thing as overbreathing. I suppose it is logical to respond to the illusion of not enough with a limit, a marker, a manifested number on a bank statement. But as far as I’ve seen, limits do help people become disciplined, but sometimes at the risk of being disconnected.
Overbreathing, overworking, overspending, held up to her face, the weight of the world collapses into the wall of the bag bottle-necked at her mouth, into the vacuum she creates between us. She continues, gasping again for more, for the house she thought it was her duty to inflate. Several retaining walls later, it kept us apart and the house standing.
Some, male rats, us, two supernova girls , coalescing into one big black hole. She says she can't catch her breath but I wonder how to let mine loose. Some of us don't know how to wait to exhale and some of us are left waiting. Waiting to attract what we radiate, turning blue-black in the face before we relocate. I’m replanted now, but she’s rooting for me with every breath she takes, thoughtfully unaware of the buds dying before they bloom, but what use is flowers that don't bear fruit?
With hands still too small to do its own pruning, I put these nimble fingers to use weaving. Like a knotted umbilical tube tethered to the mothership, tensioned to disconnect, but not enough to sever, I resist the banality of blooming, of buying just because, of becoming just anything for the sake of being somebody… to be in my body.
Forty four miles down a famine road, bountiful but without a single belly full, nourished but malnutritioned… Subscribe for Part II
