I was sitting across from my father; he was telling me about the southern border and the mountains in October. The restaurant felt familiar; it was Easter Sunday.
I talked to him about liberation, and I’m not sure I knew what I meant. By the end of the meal, the word felt like a shell, emptied of all living things.
(I wanted to lick its walls, count its rings, reside in it.)
(I wanted to say: I fear the people who don’t believe in an end to this.)
Do you think this is the only realistic way to live: to sit and watch a genocide unfold? I want to know what counts as real to you—just the past and the now? Is that the real we have to linger in, helpless in our wordlessness for what is about to unfold? The glass of water spills, and I want to scream: reality is a process, it extends backwards, it rushes over you, and stretches to the horizon. You can catch its leading edges, hold onto the loose threads, and nudge it toward the mossy alcoves where we will sigh with relief and ask ourselves: where do we go from here?
The real has a future, and it is ours to shape. I can’t look at it straight just yet. Do you see? Across your screen and the words on it, across the window and the landscapes that engulf you—do you see what isn’t quite there yet to see?
Liberation could be as realistic as any other future. It is in the vagueness of a utopia that its possibilities lie. So no, I do not know what liberation truly means. You’ll have to leave me alone; you’ll have to accept that I have only some ideas—most of them blurry and sun-drenched. I have ideas, and that is enough. Knowing the future and willing it are two different things. We will shape blindly until we carve out greener hills. Utopia is knowing about a better day. (It is also making it possible.) Utopian hope lies between the two—a necessary link, an eel, a rope.
This reeks of hope. I know it is currently unfashionable—but I have seen hundreds of children die on my phone. At some point, we need to face the possibility of ridicule and envisage something better, something stranger than this. I have gotten used to the pillage, to the crumbling. Hope needs to be trained until it becomes reflex, until it becomes change. Hope is the ability to think about time also in the future—to find dreams embedded in history, nested in the present. To pluck them from their hiding places and see the reality of them.
I sit in the restaurant and see the task: the balancing act of imagining a radically different future, yet grounded in the possibilities of the now, created every second. Our present unfolding, our present ours, our future near! The future is both a tendency we can already foresee and a rupture we cannot expect. And we stand at this tipping point, hopeful because we must be.
The hopeful revolt is an expanding one, wider than scared outcries and shrinking worlds. We extend, reaching out two arms across the globe, finding ourselves interlacing fingers in a gentle place. We will claim: we have witnessed the horrors, and now we are as we are, holding hands like this, in a tightening embrace, organizing into a force that can only weave beauty at the core of it all. The world will be unrecognizable. It will no longer produce people like us. We will go extinct, hopefully the last of our kind! And so we have to desire our perishing; we have to destroy what we know and watch the burning with joy! And we will cheer at our own disappearance, thinking about what it enables, thinking about a greater birth. That is our task—the central one. That is hope. Do you understand? We must find the strength to think of a different world. We must be able to will ourselves to become otherwise. This is the project of hope, one against the hatred of what is now, against the fear of what will replace it, focused on what is to come—its leaping heart, its strange landscapes. What a relief, to know we don’t have to see what liberation looks like to know we want it! Utopias are a call to desire, not a map of what should be. There is a promise here to desire better, more consistently, in bigger strokes—and we will go to the forest where you used to watch birds, and it will be quiet.
This is not a manifesto. It is not loud enough, not impatient enough with itself. This is not quite an act, yet more of an act than a text. This is an invitation to dare, making an art of excess, of overflowing despair, of turning it into unspeakable beauty. It is a provocation. I am sitting at the restaurant’s table, and I am not hungry. Please, be powerful in your anger. I haven’t slept in months.
I am begging without shame: arm yourself—arm yourself with anger and its infant cry. I will use the word "liberation" knowing only its shape. My father said their horror will catch up to them. I finish my plate.