Counting Touching
2025, the year of belonging.
for the task
is too heavy
for you; you
cannot do it alone.
Exodus 18:18
My two children are sleeping,
in various degrees of sleeping away illness,
while I hold onto my immune system and find emails that lead me to old email addresses locking me out of my own history.
They say emails can re-create a whole person and it’s true. I could be fully recreated through my emails. Does that mean I am a woman of letters?
Magdalena, woman of letters.
If only elegance came that easily.
(I am of my exchanges with others)
O— tucks her delicate cupped hands under her chin and her chin pushes against my left elbow as I read her yet another book of a stack of the Magic Tree House series. I practice accents. Sometimes I’m able to read without being in the story world at all—the formulaic plot and simple words are said out loud, but I’m in my own daydreams. I’m in my own imagery of “I’d like to go to there” like the protagonists, Jack and Annie do. They go on historically inaccurate missions to help the enchantress Morgan Le Fay, a librarian from Arthurian mythology. Sometimes I read it pretending O— and S— are Jack and Annie.
It’s the last week of school before the holidays and I have been home for four days tending to their maladies, also going on historical (o)missions in my writing archives.
Love Letter by Hua Xi
The heart-shaped leaves
run home from the trees. Their mothers
wait for them, never give up on them.Must all children give up on their mothers
some day?Life is wall-shaped.
Cars smash into it. That’s why
language is crash-shaped.The letter f faces east like a windblown fir,
and the letter O is an eye looking
up at you like a stone.…
With their flu-induced napping, the house is still in the midst of a working day.
There is work to be done sure.
There are also faces to touch.
Mothers to be.
27 pills to take in 24 hours.
Lunches to figure out.
Water to be purified.
No lead water for us, as the pipes used to say.
J/k.
We live in Montreal, of course we have hard lead water.
Is this how to end the year?
The year of counting touching.
I bought outdoor decorative lights for the first time and twisted them around the front porch, but they only fit on one side of the railing. At least they light up even when it’s a grey day. At least. How do other homes have outdoor lighting that looks like it belongs?
Somehow all my work this year has been about belonging. I wrote about:
how it took motherhood to make me feel like Montreal is my home.
how long it took me to belong as a Jew until I found a community of Jews who made space for me to see the world I’m becoming.
the importance of children belonging in activism.
how women’s early electronic literature was undergirded by a building and preservation of a collective life.
interactive digital media art belonging in our Canadian archives for a SSHRC post-doc project application.
For my palindrome birthday, I asked my close friends to send me photos of us to make into a collage of love and belonging.
I spent hours reading and talking about books for our Art Monsters book club — that is now going into it’s 3rd (?!) year.
I touched books and facial hair and road signs and bathroom mirrors and stones and shirts on dancing bodies and keffiyehs and chlorine hair and dried flowers and hospital chairs and French workbooks and challah dough and live wires and ginko berries,
sometimes I wore gloves.
I was touched by the December of this year being kind of like the December of 2006 and I’m still losing all my pieces and 4 o’clock in the morning music and breakbeats and droning vocals and oversized crewnecks and mothers and masks and the salt of the sea and endless doctors and how in writing I can be ageless and timely.
With words I’m not self-conscious. They are a sheath but also my vulva.
That is, opening to take you inside.
Anne Carson: what kind of sex must she have
Is she silent?
Like the breaks between her words
How does one translate the fragments of Sappho and then also love another person?
Mothers write about how they wake up early, before everyone else, to write.
I wake up before everyone else to masturbate.
I wake up to be electrocuted by my own hubris.
“It’s nebulous” my friend says, laughing.
Not my hubris, my life’s recounting.
I listened and bought more music than I have in years, like Neurotica, my favorite album of the year by my dear Drew, FaltyDL. I discovered the poet Hua Xi when I needed to. I used bank-borrowed money on everything and everyone but corporate subscription services. I spent a lot of money on time.
For 2026, go in heel.
coda:
(from my journal 16 October 2025)
I tried to post something about belonging on Instagram with a picture of my doikayt necklace alight on top of my breasts welcoming the sun, after I took a run, glistening with desire but then when I wrote the caption to post the photo, I kept wanting to edit it and add more and then I kept deleting and re-posting and eventually the writing got too long and I deleted it because it didn’t fit, and the whole text was about fitting, and belonging where you are — on that day, it was my entire body moving as the Earth moved, knowing that I am a tiny tiny speck, and I am a tiny speck on account of the hereness of everyone in my life. Social media makes no sense for softness anymore. Not a complaint, an observation — there used to be late night twitter, 4am twitter, but that was swallowed whole by terrible men with terrible gnashing teeth dressed up like wolves. I want to be with my friends, close, orienting each other towards
surrendering
to pleasure and toppling empires reading each other and Pëtr Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (1892).
