take a hike

“I think in Western literature, it’s common to other the supernatural. Even naming it the “supernatural” is a form of othering it, of establishing the boundaries of what reality is or should be. “Who gets to say what’s real,” and “for whom is it real?” are always questions that I’m asking. I’m fascinated by the idea of ghosts being a last resort. The living won’t fight for us, and the living have failed us in so many ways. But the dead, the dead won’t. This collective history that we draw upon won’t fail us, and it’s the one thing that won’t if you’re surrounded by failure and apocalypse and collapse. That’s something I remember the elders in my family telling me: don’t pray to some deity or some higher being, pray to your dead because they’re the only ones who will listen. We don’t have the ability to summon these kinds of deities in any way. But we have this shared history, this tapestry of voices and stories that we’re constantly weaving. That’s one thing that you can always have.”