By Sofía Isabella Malo
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” – Che Guevara
When I was 18, I lost my best friend. They had also just turned 18 and had already used up more than half of their predicted life expectancy. No combination of words can describe why they’re gone, but to be gentle, I will say that the brutality of the State did nothing to assuage their hopelessness. Growing up black and trans, before love can reach you, the world tells you what you are. I’ll let you imagine what the world said to them.
Before their passing, one could describe me as… passionate. Audacious and unabashed. A summer storm kind of strong and always – always – smiling. I laughed loud and cried daily and loved incredibly hard. And when they died, so did I. I decided that the anguish I felt was the consequence of love so I could never do that again. Now, I wade through an all-consuming grief that I swear wants to drown me, that I swear hates me. I hate it right back.
The older I get, the more burdensome their memory feels. I want to forget. I want to forget how young they were and how long they had these plans. I want to forget all the things I couldn’t protect them from, all the ways I failed, thus all the ways I feel complicit. But mostly, how my love reached them too little too late, and because of that I could’ve never saved them. Somedays it feels good to forget, so good that forgetting has become a ritual. A spell cast to help me move through my life like a human being, not a shell of one. So please trust me when I say that I understand how grief is inconvenient. I am not innocent in the choice to be blissfully ignorant.
With that being said, over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about my best friend a lot in relation to the State. The State would have me believe that their death was nothing but an unfortunately common woe and that yes, normalizing mental health is so important and #transpride and black lives matter! I’ve realized that from the State, these are all empty platitudes ignoring the systemic failures of institutions that encouraged and neglected my dear friend into their choice. I wonder what their life would’ve looked like if they grew up with their government protecting them, rather than abjecting them.
When we opt to forget pain and suffering because it’s uncomfortable, we lose fuel to act. To hold institutions accountable, to fight, and to make change. This entire time I have been battling against their memory when I could’ve been making strides towards black and trans liberation. My first step is remembering them, a proud black and trans resistor, fearlessly funny and loyal, the sound of their laugh and cadence of voice. This is an act of resistance. Loving them despite the pain is an act of resistance. It hurts to remember them but, my god, it’s my duty.
This realization comes with the despair I feel every day as a witness to the genocide in Gaza. If you’ve been paying attention, you too also feel broken and hopeless, and maybe some days you wish you could walk through your life as a human again. It’s awfully hard to function when you wake up to the inhumanity of our country and their support of this genocide. Somedays, it feels better to forget, doesn’t it? There is only so much our brains and hearts can handle, right? Wouldn’t it be so nice to go back to before October 7th when many of us still had blind faith in our country, before becoming disillusioned by the brutality of the United States in its funding of genocide? The answer may be yes for many of us, but it doesn’t negate one fact – this overwhelming exhaustion of oppression is rooted in love.
Yes, that heavy and ugly grief in your chest blooms from love. And it is a blessing, a miracle, something to celebrate. In the face of a propaganda campaign coming from the Western world attempting to strip humanity from the Palestinian people, one that manipulates the masses into numbness, we rage, and we cry, and we feel. For us who grew up in the U.S. and were indoctrinated into nationalism, we love people from a region we’ve been taught is incapable of innocence. And yet, we woke up. We escaped. We feel everything and we love.
This love of humanity can breed an unruly sorrow when we continue to witness never-ending atrocities. This leads to a metaphorical throwing of hands in the air rooted in the feeling of powerlessness against these genocidal regimes. Feeling helpless is understandable but despair with no focus leads to the memorialization of living Palestinians and guarantees their deaths. We must not let this happen. We must reframe our collective grief into something strong and sustainable.
For me, protecting and supporting people’s right to protest is how I show my love. Buying dinner for my comrades in the fight against this genocide is how I show my love. Holding space for my heartbroken friends to rant, cry and be held, and to encourage them to keep going is how I show my love. Refusing to look away and always bringing up Palestine, even when the room gets weird and quiet, is how I show my love. And of course, to write and write and write again is how I show my love.
Loving is civic engagement and is a moral obligation to the martyrs and the living. So, reach out to your activist friends and listen, find a protest and chant, sit down and read. Even if you don’t believe or pray, make dua. Light a candle for the martyrs and promise them they will never be forgotten because their memory lives within you. Promise the family they left behind that you will continue to unconditionally fight for their freedom.
The pain we feel, our love, is our power. It can be our life force if we let it. Love is the reason I write to you today, love is the grief I’ve been feeling since my best friend died, love is how they will live within me for the rest of my life. This can be the same for you. Let your love fuel your fight for liberation of all oppressed people. When you feel that ache in your chest, when you want to look away, when you want to give up, remind yourself that loving humanity is an act of being human. Having love in your soul means housing grief and pain and rage there too. You have a force of nature living within you, so fight.
