I need a good lover

lovemaking in times of facism

Dear ones,

I’ve been sick. Physically sick. It’s this kind of sick that occurs when we’re simply sick of the world. I haven’t been able to write much, but here is an excerpt of what came out (alongside tears… turns out, often when I get sick, it’s because i haven’t cried enough).

As I write this, the world is watching a five-year-old girl, Ward Jalal Al-Shaikh Khalil, escape flames at a Gaza City school following overnight Israeli air strikes. Ward and her family—her father, mother, and two siblings—had been sleeping in the Fahmi Al-Jargawi School, which had been turned into a shelter after their home was destroyed by Israel. As Ward stumbled through the flames, 35 Palestinians would be reported killed, including her mother and four of her siblings: Abd al-Rahman, 17; Muhammed, 14; Maria, 13; and Silwan, 11. As of June 2025, her father remains in the intensive care unit.

Like many of you, I watched—appalled, enraged, terrified—as Ward walked through the flames to save her life. I wondered if she knew, in that moment, that most of her family had already been killed. I searched for every detail about her because keeping her as just another anonymous silhouette in my mind felt like a betrayal. I hate numbers. I want to re-member names. My rage deepened as I watched her recount witnessing her siblings die beneath the rubble—watched her mother burn alive—as she ran through fire, alone, to survive.

I cried with her when she said she missed her sisters and wanted to be with them again, because home is where they all are, wherever they are.

Ward Jalal Al-Shaikh Khalil

And when she said: "I love Mama as big as the sky and the earth—and the stars”, my stomach dropped, and I remembered a poem titled Take Me to the Sky, written by 11-year-old Palestinian child Joudy Isleem. It was gifted to me during a Palestinian poetry night in Berlin last year—a night lit with candles and grief, with verses heavy with love and resistance. I remember holding that small paper in my hand like it was holy. Because it is.

TAKE ME TO THE SKY

Take me to the sky where the stars shine.

Take me to the stars that live in peace.

We can live together, we can be stars.

We don’t need a roof to live with love.

We only need the people in our hearts.

I am writing a book called “We Can’t Be Abolitionist & Conflict Avoidant” and I feel stupid about it. This book feels both foolish and urgent. The world doesn't need another book—we need to stop the Empire from killing the earth and all of us with it.

And yet, I carry Joudy's poem with me everywhere.

And yet, writings shared by friends, comrades, and strangers online have restored pieces of my soul I thought were lost forever.

And yet, I keep writing, because documenting and leaving evidence of what we're living through now feels like survival.

And yet, as I witness my powerlessness to stop my government from funding global violence with my tax money, I find myself becoming more radical in the ways I choose to love.

Every fragment of this life I touch—my friends, strangers, you, the earth—feels more precious than ever.

I stay up at night thinking of all the ways I could and should be doing more, until my body gives out, until I fall sick from the weight of it, until all I can do is lie there, stare at the ceiling, and scroll through the flood of images etched into my mind over the last 598 days:

A man's leg severed by missile fragments in the night. An elder carrying their loved one's remains in plastic bags, seeking a dignified burial. Mothers weeping over their babies—babies they carried for nine months and cherished for weeks. Children sharing hospital beds, writhing in pain.

I am sick of this world and our genocidal governments.

I am starving for our love. And I am so nourished by it, too.

During these two years, I’ve witnessed so many of us—all of us—organize in the best ways we know how. Organizing to stop our governments from killing our kin. Whether it’s walking the streets, writing letters, raising our kids, caring for our elders, creating mutual aid funds…

Greta Thunberg, Rima Hassan, Omar Faiad, Sergio Toribio, Baptiste André, Mark van Rennes, Suayb Ordu, Yasemin Acar, Thiago Avila, Reva Viard, Pascal Maurieras, and Yanis Mhamdi all embarked on the Madleen to break the siege on Gaza. The last two are still detained—illegally kidnapped by Israel in international waters.

The Sumud Convoy (Sumud means steadfastness), created by thousands of people from over 80 countries, is walking towards Gaza as I type these words.

We are all trying so hard. I know we haven’t succeeded yet—but damn, I am so proud of us. I am inspired by us. I am in awe of our dedication to collective liberation and the worlds of radical belonging our solidarity alone creates. Whatever you’re doing: I beg you, keep doing it.

I write this so you can remember: our relationships are the keys to our liberation.

That means, we can become each other’s cages, too.

I’ve seen—especially after October 2023—so many organizing spaces, movements, and political projects implode. Not because of poor strategy, but because of unhealed relational wounds. Resentment. Unaddressed trauma. Fear. I’ve seen how the weight of this moment can, in one second, tear apart an organizing space, dissolve an initiative, shatter a movement.

Why do we burn each other alive?

Why do we burn each other alive—even trying to break free from the same fire set by the Empire?

That’s what I’ll try to answer in my book, I guess.

In the meantime, I wanted to ask you two questions I have been asking to folks in my program Liberation Practice Field, a 1-year program where we practice the somatics of abolition and the erotics of liberation (next year cohort will open soon, so if you’re interested, feel free to leave your email here and you’ll be the first to know once it’s open for registration!)

• What are the skills you have that are really supportive of our collective liberation? (before you say nothing, I know you lying. Ask the people around you who love you! Skills like cooking, deescalating conflict, escalating conflict, knowing when to leave before it’s harmful, creating posters, are really welcome, trust me.)

• What are the skills you don’t have you’d like to learn that could support our collective liberation? As a doula, I would love to learn how to do abortions at home. I am also starting boxing because some people need to be punched in the throat so they stop talking for a minute.

I guess if you read me (thank you!), we can agree upon:

That we cannot organize for collective liberation without tending to the nervous systems of the people doing the organizing.
That trauma is not just a personal experience, but a political condition—shaped by borders, by war, by racism, by colonial theft.
That healing is not separate from resistance—it is a form of it.
That we need slowness, presence, and trust as much as we need strategy.
That our bodies hold ancestral grief and ancestral genius.
That touch, breath, song, ritual, and relationship are technologies of survival.
That we will not reproduce the harm we’re trying to dismantle in the name of urgency.
That we move at the pace of trust, and we rest because we are worthy, not because we are done.
That no liberation is possible without repair.
That this work is sacred, and witnessing it is just as much !

And, I am struggling, I am well, I am so sad, I am so angry, I feel so alive, I am so lucky to be alive. And I hope we can agree upon the fact that:

• We need good kissers

• We need good love makers (of all sorts, be creative, I don’t care)

• We need good, full body huggers

• We need to hear us laugh so loud people around start smiling (or be annoyed at least)

• We need a really good date. Maybe hundreds, thousands of them.

Cause honestly If I’m here without the love part, why am i even in it?

What was the reason?

It won’t make up for what they’ve done to Ward. It won’t make up for what they’ve done to you, what they’ve done to me, to us, to themselves. But it will keep us going for a little while, until it’s our time to die.

I hope this post made you cry, made you smile a lil, and most importantly, I hope my work makes you want to love more. It really is the best way to spend our time on this earth.

Ok, bye !