Back of Book Scripts #9

A List of Scripts, of the Inspiring Sort.

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Happy Wednesday, Song of Harlem!

We greet the coming new moon on this Wednesday with our Capricorn friends & fam, we love you!!

• We are updating our site and should have it back up in a week's time. Please reach out to us directly if you'd like to purchase one of our body butters.
• This Saturday, LPR will host a 90s Jams party. Here's more info on that here. Come through tho!
• Next week, Ronald K. Brown will begin their annual residency at the Joyce Theater. More info here.
• Our next soak circle will be on Sunday, February 25. Please save that date as we will gather in person in Harlem.
• For survivor and self-healers, a new workbook titled The Black Unicorn Journal of Passions is out by Samantha Thornhill and is available here.
• Torch Literary Arts is open for submissions in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and writers will be paid $150 for accepted submissions. Find more here.
• For those that knew Queen Naomi Francis, we learned from Sis Aziza that they made transition on the 31st of December. More about them here.

We've got today's letters below. Let us know what you think tho.

N

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1/10/24

Sitting here a few days before my birthday, I think of how I have grown. I think of the stability, the love, the consistency in my life. I think of how much that I now care for myself, how much that I now honor myself, my needs, my boundaries.  But I also think of how much I miss that former myself. Even if it was just two to three years ago. There are parts of Nzingha that I do miss, parts of her that I seek to resurface, parts of her that I wonder about. 

"we will all decompose | let us be free" @kalamispiritarts

In January of 2021 which would have been a little less than two months before my mother passed away, I spent about two weeks doing daily writing. It wound up being just two weeks long but I wrote some very tender pieces and also some very raw pieces that reflected my journey in mental health,  my journey in love and in life really. And while I sort of posted a couple of them here and there and I even put a few on my YouTube channel, for a host of reasons, I've hidden the bulk of those writings away for the last two or three years.

we will all decompose | let us be free

I think in the very first piece I wrote I reveal that I just gotten out of the hospital and in my case if you ever hear me say that, there is a good chance that it was a psych hospital or the psych unit at the hospital. Not just the daisy ward. And so I was going through my experiences with sleep and what to do about having little sleep and this, that and the other. It's very much sort of both the lighter form of myself, but also at the same time a bit of an intense form because I curse rather loosely in all of these pieces, which as many who know me know is not really my natural form of speech. 

we will all decompose | let us be free

So in some ways these pieces that I wrote two years ago are a reflection of myself, just merging out of an experience of unravelling and so then I asked myself: was that was my creative self then? Can I reach those depths of verve again? I would say that I can. I would say that I have to get in the trenches. You know, really set a discipline of consistency and passion in my daily life to get at what I'm looking for, what it is that I'm hoping for and what it is that I desire.

we will all decompose | let us be free

I am going to leave a b**** right there and end with some questions that I have been posing to the wider universe and also trying to decide for myself. What are the answers to these questions? 

How do I live life with enthusiasm 

when I know that one day it will end 

How do I channel my sense of the erotic? 

What is my sense of the erotic? 

when I know that one day it will end 

and I will not matter so to speak

What can I do to be more organized? 

What is my sense of the erotic? 

How can I choose kindness over apprehension and anger?

we will all decompose | let us be free

Well, I did say I was going to leave a b**** right there, but I actually wanted to just say that when we are offered the opportunity for someone to love us with a tenderness that we have rarely seen, that we have rarely experienced, and that someone might be ourselves, try to see it for what it is and return that love. Try to see that they are doing their best to administer to the parts of you that are broken, trying to fix your loving arms.

Be with you soon,

N