Kites (#002)

The skies and walls and futures we scale with hope.

A brain injury means I cannot always write, so instead I sit in a nest of blankets and speak my journal entry into my phone.

I am caught in the whisper intimacy of this. Tangled in the idea.

When there is only one small way to reach you,
look how I hold onto it with two careful hands.

There’s a hope and desperation to it that reminds me of a letter in a bottle.
There’s an earnest ache to it that reminds me of a prison kite.¹

The whole of the Internet weighs about 2 ounces.² About the size of a medium egg. A single page is many, many times smaller than that--

a bottle in the ocean tasked with float, a folded piece of paper told to climb through walls, a prayer in an absolute sky-canopy of prayers.

I think we all know that most messages never reach who they belong to, never do what they are charged to do.

But every day in prison, I watched as someone would find a note, and hide it like their body was built for hold.

The mission of the kite became their mission, and they always volunteered to get it a little bit closer to wherever it was going.³

Once on a beach, I saw a man take a letter out of a washed up bottle, read it, and put it back. He swam out as far as it was reasonable and flung the bottle back into the ocean.⁴

“It didn’t belong to me,”
he said with a shrug, but that didn’t explain why he made himself part of its continued journey.

There’s something about us humans:

we root for the

r e a c h i n g.

We see a sign or a message and, for a split second, we think it could belong to us.

I like how we throw our words up into the sky, knowing that, if every journal and prayer in all existence could be measured in a handful of eggs—

our single individual thought would not even be big enough to name.

But we would know it anywhere.
We would search for it, and its echo, and its shadow, and its gentle shell— everywhere.

Whatever comes of the future, we all agree on this:
it’s important that the world keep a hopeful reach.

So we teach it how to do so, over and over again.

We say,
are you watching, Universe?
Are you watching us try?

Do you see how we receive and give with the same motion? How we hope in perpetual machine?

Universe,
this is how it all works.

This is why.

1. Kites are written notes passed around in prison or sent to people on the outside. There are debates about why these letters are called "kites" -- some think it is because they were originally written on Kite cigarette rolling papers, other think it is because when exchanging notes between cells, people attach string to them, to pull them back if they don't reach their destination. (via FreedomReads)

2. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8865093/Internet-weighs-the-same-as-a-strawberry.html

3. My newest mission is getting many zine kites into prisons and archived. You can read more about the project at Kites Library: An Incarceration Zine Archive.

4. A brief history of messages in bottles.