VESSEL
My hope with this work is that it is about something different for everyone, but for me it is about Drea and the compounded grief of so many of our community gone.
As the two-year anniversary of her death approaches, I find myself with a complicated sense of peace. I look at time like a mirror, a portal, an abyss. I feel so far away from the moment when I kissed the forehead of her no longer occupied body, of our throats swelling with song to guide her spirit to the beyond, and even further from the moment when I realized what was happening - when she could no longer conceal what she was experiencing. Yet when I look into the contracted space of time it is as if she is still alive, like somehow the outcome was different.
Those months were grueling, crushing, heartbreaking - for Drea and the community that was trying to support her. The aftermath rippled across all our lives in ways we are still unearthing.
This winter I spent much of my time sewing. As the discarded threads began to congregate, I was transported back to that moment of realization – when I sat with her on my kitchen floor picking up threads one by one, showing her they were just threads and not something more. I see the place where she took her life every day at school when I walk from the parking lot to my studio. Most days this knowledge dwells buried in my subconscious- just another tree along the river, other days it burns like a forest fire.
The whole world thinks they get to decide what to do with a trans body – whether that takes the form of acts of cruelty, law, or projected ethos. After so much joy and so much suffering she chose to set herself free, a final act of bodily autonomy.
This project is one of the many ways I have tried to make sense of that time, to process the grief that has found a home in my bones as one after another I have loved in this world moves on to the next. Each time is infinitely harder yet somehow more bearable. For all the pain there is so much love.