Rain-Sown Wheat

This is a collaborative piece I wrote with Kirin Khan. You can read the full essay at Tarpaulin Sky

Content notes: suicide, addiction. Please take care when reading this piece.

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“We started this essay wanting to write about our own relationships with ritual, trauma, addiction, recovery, and art. We planned to pull ten tarot cards total, finding the current between us. We wrote about what was happening in the moment we pulled the cards, as well as the traumatic surfacing that occurred. During the process, Kirin’s younger brother, Abdul-Qayyum, died by suicide. The terrible synchronicity of this death as Kirin herself reflects back on her own attempts communicates the uncomfortable truth: mental illness is real, lethal if untreated, and often runs in the family. It raises questions – the whys and what-ifs, of course, but also, what  is the line that separates him from her, and how did that line determine different outcomes? We record this by leaving the work unfinished and unresolved. The absence is a space for grief.”