dear intended,

every day i wake up and it is the same--a massive convergence of disease and revelation. these days are for shedding old skin and growing anew. here i am anyways, your peripatetic bag lady hoarding collectibles of the written, recorded, and filmed variety. it is only a matter of time before my stash accrues value.

you and i recently talked on the phone about an archive curated to survive over the course of the next millennium. for one thousand years, the contents of the Arctic World Archive will lay inside a temperature-controlled, technologically advanced storage container buried under the Svalbard archipelago off Norway’s coast. neighboring the Arctic World Archive on the archipelago is the privately funded Global Seed Vault with a storage capacity of 4.5 million seed samples. catering to countries who wish to contribute data markers to the memory of the World, the Arctic World Archive is a for-profit business.

when i scroll through the Arctic World Archive’s website, its creator is listed simply as the private company, Piql. intentions of the archive are obfuscated by tech language. the implied audience is whomever's descendants remain in 3020 A.D. private ownership cultivating the future public’s memory. my mind wending its way through stories gathering debris on charred continents that shrink under bloated seas.

a frozen box buried under the ground, otherwise known as a grave.

the very fact of its existence is a portent for the future and a fresh scab upon our city. april, the month when city officials fashioned interim tombs out of refrigerated trucks. longer and more leaden than i could have ever imagined the first month of spring.

what taxidermied version of a global pandemic and uprising will the Arctic World Archive present to our weathered descendants?

and whose descendants, exactly, will pry open this archive?

humble plea to all those in the year 3020: do not preserve, nor unearth, the history of my people in and from a frozen box.

but let’s not distort our will to remember and be remembered. walter, on the subject of ‘messianic time,’ writes: “[a]s flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.” audre commits to my memory, “we must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead.”

upon the rubble pile of rambling voice notes and crumpled receipts, i build an altar to that which injects this rabbity thing inside my chest with innumerable, insatiable reasons to live

redolent fruiting bodies on the forest floor
S’s hot pink fingertips harvesting daikon
queers toasting to life, daily
the quiet sound of an orchid blooming
imperceptible to everyone’s ears
but yours (mine) and maybe the cats.

-- Julia Chang