Good morning! It’s a beautiful, cold Sunday here in the Village.
Honestly, there’s a lot swirling around my head today. It’s hard to organize it all.
I think I’ll just jump right into the weekend recs and come back stronger next week:
1/ What I Took or Did Not Take to the Potluck
A beautiful essay on AIDS and its lasting presence.
“The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent,” Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings. “And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.”
And so I’ve forgotten. Lately, I find myself almost desperate to remember.
Later on
The particular malevolence of AIDS includes a genius for burrowing into survivors; an ability to plant fear and grief into the bodies and psyches of those of us who lived. I learned to carry it, accommodate and enable it, like some excoriating family secret that only I could feel the pain of.