Once, in a yoga workshop, a teacher was discussing the philosophical underpinnings of violence and non-violence and stoicism—opining about the wisdom of the text, written down by a man who had lived all his life in an ashram, taught by someone who had also lived his whole life in an ashram. She had a warmth but no softness, an affection for the text but not the students in front of her. The onus is on you, the swami explained. If you are non-violent, then no violence can befall you. My heart crumpled, my face flushed, thinking of all the times I had received what she clearly believed I deserved. My hands shook taking notes, disbelieving what I transcribed.

            I am thinking about fluency and expertise and intimacy, all shades of the same color.

            I am thinking about tear gas and the way rubber bullets ricochet off asphalt on hot July nights. I am thinking about the way flashbangs light up the dark streets, the taste of the bandana that cannot save me from my poisoned snot. I am thinking about mutual aid, how we stick together, we do not run. We do not panic when they tell us to. I am thinking about the violence of a green carpet in an ashram with an altar adorned with rose petals, the cropped-hair nun who has never seen such things.

            I am thinking about the necessity for the most granular specificity that reveals a larger truth. This is not chicken or egg, acorns exploding into forests. I cannot accept a larger truth built without foundation or cause if you want me to see you as anything other than a charlatan, a realtor of fantasy.

I raise a shaking hand. I do not make eye contact. I ask my teacher about violence. She tries to answer my question by repeating the text: Broadly, generally, this is true, she points to the page, so it must also be true, specifically, she seems to say. Violence is bad.

            She is proud of this insight.

            I am thinking about the cops who attacked a mother holding her baby. How they both had names. I am thinking about how they are not theoretical but visceral. How their faces moved and flesh shook. I am thinking about the mother’s eyes as she took my camera so pictures could make it out. Seconds later, I was arrested, dragged to the police van. I can remember the songs we sang as they loaded us into a steel box. I remember the asphalt under my bare feet after they took my shoes away.

            They must have had violence in their hearts. She tries to make the people fictional. She says “they” but means me. She cannot fathom risk or the guttural cries of a baby afraid of losing her mother. This nun has not set foot on a clearcut, which is violence, too.

            I wonder, years later, if she believed the trees had violence in their hearts. If the land did, or the river, or the muskrat, or the stalks of wild rice, all poisoned with mercury. Whether the sky did, or the birds.

            They attacked that mother for standing on a bridge, which, according to treaty law, belongs to her more than it belongs to anyone else. I am thinking about how the English may have built it, but it is built on unceded land. How it might as well have been built on clouds: an etheric thing with matter and volume but without a reasonable claim. I wonder whether the nun believes theft is violence. I wonder what she considers theft.

            I am writing the stories I do not tell at parties. Buzzkill, doorway darkener, killjoy, good-time-ruiner. It sounds like “you had to be there” and feels like strange looks. There are memories I only replay to excavate something larger beneath the surface. It is no use trying to pick it apart from a distance; I have to squish it between my fingers. I choose to get close, intimate, sticky.

            I cradle it to my face to know before I know what it will really mean. Even then, I do not share these thoughts freely.

            I am thinking about Durga on the mantelpiece, resplendent with her necklace of skulls. I am thinking about her tiger’s teeth. I am thinking about her blade.

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