the sun was going to fall

notes from texas

I wake up and have been waiting for almost two days to hear if my friends are out of jail. I am reluctant to look at my phone except to find out, because there’s so much on there filling me with doom. It is nothing like being in community, being enveloped in hope. I don’t quite know why I’m in a moment of losing hope when lots of people seem to be gaining it. The powerful student movements, spreading like wildfire, are extraordinary. Yet maybe it’s because I am back in Texas being reminded how bad the prison system in the South truly is and how much worse this criminalization could get. Maybe it’s the loss of my anti-Zionist Jewish community in New York or that I’m on my phone and alone too much these days. Avenues for solidarity, social infrastructure, and mental health are interconnected.

All day yesterday we waited for them to get out. A woman from the Sheriff’s Office lied to me on the phone when I called to ask if people were getting their medications — I heard later from one person who had been released that the guards withheld inhalers. Under such conditions, jail support could only bring me so much festive joy. It was the biggest showing I’ve ever seen at jail support: a lot of people, huge tables of food and supplies. People danced, played Ninja, prayed, and visited. Every half hour, we all chanted the time so that they could hear inside. I had never seen that before and couldn’t bring myself to join in, I was stunned and devastated. “Tuesday, 10pm, Tuesday, 10pm, Tuesday, 10pm!” I thought of all the people in cells who do not have crowds gathered outside chanting the day and time for them, helping them keep a sense of time, a cohesion of reality. My friend who did get out last night told me she had no idea what time it had been throughout the night before. I guess she was one who couldn’t hear them.

This morning, I check my phone and read that the rest of my friends are out, after 36 hours. It is a small blessing. I know they are trying to scare us and I don’t want to let them win but I am scared. I know we have power and our actions matter and our political power is real but it doesn’t feel like it. Or the cost is too high. I don’t want more of my friends in the hands of the state in separate cells, the lights turned on, being questioned, the details of their health kept from us. These friends didn’t plan to get arrested, they were at the UT encampment for a teach-in. State troopers, city police, and campus police surrounded them and they locked arms and tried to protect each other. They held space for hours and then were brutalized. Like clockwork, we keep witnessing true evil. I keep crying a little but I barely can, nothing comes out.

Now I’ve caught up on updates from New York. I am furious at the world we’ve been given. I hate them for how they’re treating these fucking kids. They are brave so I have to be. This is making warriors of our spirits. Rachel Corrie wrote, “We are all kids curious about other kids.” I’m another kid protective of other kids. I know I’m not the only one with fears, with doubts. I wrote a note the other day: “We inherit responsibilities that are more than we can bear.” I think of the footage from last night of kids being raided and grabbed in Hind’s Hall at Columbia. The kids in Gaza. And the West Bank. And in the diaspora, waiting from US cities and campuses and in the arms of their mothers and fathers to hear if their families are among the dead.

I don’t know how we win. I think there are people who know, but I feel lost and struggling to focus on our victories when there are so, so few. We are up against unprecedented technology, surveillance, and violent counterprotestors. As I write, I receive a mass text and send an email letter template asking Congress not to further criminalize student protestors. It will probably do nothing to sway them because it’s not where the money is. Then the email form won’t go through. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. (These are words I handwrote privately, and now that I am sharing this publicly, I must adjust them: That’s not true. It feels true, but it’s not.)

In my journals, I am often caught between writing for myself, expressing every little concern, and writing for a potential future observer. A potential observer far in the future, years or decades. This imaginary observer makes me want to be both more vulnerable and more bold with my language. To insist that what I do matters, that the actions we take matter, and also show how much pain we are all in. When I write down, in ink, Hind’s Hall — an active choice over Hamilton Hall — I think: now her name is in ink one more time. Now they cannot deny her, at least to me. It would be an honor were I to add to the archive of her memory. They are trying to write Hind out of history and I fear the detail of her name in paint, waved in honor over the building’s side, is already being omitted from the journals of record. I want to remember her. I want all of you to remember her.

I don’t know how to go on writing, valuing something like my own little words. It can feel trivial and meaningless in light of what’s happening there, and what’s happening here now, in my case, Austin. There is a way the city becomes invaded with this toxic air after such events, as if tear gas is floating up from 22nd Street, where two days ago my friends were dragged, maced, and attacked with flash bangs. I remember in the summer of 2020 how after the most dangerous days of my life, sitting in a car with my friends for a long time, all of us breathing hard, I would feel disbelieving that this was the same city that it had been hours earlier, that the battle seemed to have ceased and the car seemed safe, that we were safe, for now. Not quite disbelief, because I knew this was our city, and we would go on fighting, yet I would stare at the streets and the buildings we knew and loved and the pecan leaves hanging low in the heat, and the surreality of the day, as the light grew lower and inched toward dusk, would spread over everything, making it feel impossible that this place was real, that these things had happened. And after that, we were meant to go back to our homes and rest and keep on. In our house I’d hear helicopters above us all night and hope the militias didn’t come down our block and I would feel like the world was starting to end, like the sun was going to fall. How lucky I was to have a good home to come back to at all, rather than a tent or a cage, where the sun had already fallen. I think of Adrienne Maree Brown’s interview in On Being, in which she says, drawing on Octavia Butler, “We are in a time of new suns. We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart.”

This morning I look out from Richie’s room — where I’m staying in North Campus — and across the backyards I notice a sunroom on the second floor of one of the houses. I wonder how I’ve never noticed it before: such a nice room. Looking at it, six big windows across the walls, a soft, tan color around the exterior, one of Austin’s old houses, I recognize how strange it is. How strange it would be to sit in there at the end of such a day, a day of feeling the state come down on you. And I remember how, when I lived with my friends in this neighborhood, we’d sit in equally lovely rooms or on porches in the quiet of disaster, after the protests, after the fire, after finding out we’d be in lockdown for 18 months, and the beauty of things drained away and became more like survival, and we were each with one another and we laughed a lot at stupid things so it was okay, but our house became less than the sum of its parts, or maybe more, because the walls held us and kept us peaceful.

This is just a note to ask: What are sunrooms for, now? How does one lounge in glorious light when the air coming in the windows is becoming more and more toxic? What are the old suns and the new suns we must face? Even the ever-changing breeze and the deep green swaying leaves on the pecans and oaks of Central Texas have been growing less beautiful to me in this light, unless I sit, and really wait with their beauty. I’ve wondered if people who love Gaza are doing the same with the sea. I keep seeing posts about how beautiful a place it is, how beloved. Men posting pictures of the beach and saying glory be, the beaches of Gaza are the most beautiful in the world. The sea or the trees can never really cease their beauty, I just have to access it. Once I pray or cry or bring my friends a bit of food, I will be more able.