There’s a pit in me, that opens sometimes.

I sent a Snap to my friend in Texas, telling her about the wreck of me. About being triggered by the flippant announcement of the death—sorry, the murder— of a Black professor’s son by police. Announced and disregarded by OSU. Disregarded by the black man we were there to see receive an award. The one who wrote a book about the underground railroad and kept making jokes for the old white audience to consume instead of their guilt. Telling her what it’s like to be triggered under blue black lights, surrounded by whiteness. Hemmed in by laughter.

How it felt like being trapped in an episode of the fucking Twilight Zone.

She sent me a Snap a week later. A man had taken pictures of her in a thrift store dressing room. Camera poking over the wall, visible in the mirror. It was like something from a horror movie. He’d been completely naked. The store kicked him out but didn’t file a police report. She’d been too shaken to take back whatever images he stole. She said that the people she’d come with had continued to shop, only pausing to lament the invasion. She’d had to ask that they take her home.

There’s a pit in me that opens sometimes, and I wonder if it’s because the world is bad all over.

It’s been open this time for months, eating pieces of me, stripping flesh from my memories. I try to fill it with theory texts, pedagogy lessons, poetry (less and less), books and pot and friends and Super Mario Brothers Wii.

It doesn’t work.

Tell me, how do you describe the sound a haunting makes when it creaks inside of you? How do you fill a cavern that has already swallowed the bulk of your sadness, that clanks with the ghost of your own ancestral chains, and the hurt of all the selves you’ve ever been?

Asking for a friend.