Tuesday’s Telegram: On Living Through the Ache of Now
we are already in the break...
Tuesday’s Telegram: On Living Through the Ache of Now
“…because we’re already in the break.” – Fred Moten
Becoming Ones: There are days when depression doesn’t just sit in my body—it drapes across my shoulders like a heavy quilt stitched by a country that never wanted us to survive. Today is one of those days. I woke up with the kind of ache I can’t quite name, the kind that feels braided from exhaustion, tenderness, and the low-frequency hum of a world coming undone.
Some days I want to cry.
Some days I want to scream.
Some days I want both to be a prayer.
I keep thinking about how we are supposed to live in this cultural climate—where ambient suffering saturates the air like humidity, and institutional cruelty is no longer subtle; it is celebrated, televised, monetized. We are asked to perform resilience while the world burns. We are asked to “be well” inside systems designed to grind us down. We are asked to keep going, even when the horizon feels like a rumor.
And yet—here we are. Still breathing. Still aching. Still choosing each other.
Fred Moten reminds me that we are “already in the break”—already in that fugitive rupture where everything is supposed to collapse and yet something else—something tender, unruly, and impossible—keeps shimmering through. That glimmer is our fugitivity. It is the small, defiant insistence that we belong to each other more than we belong to the machines trying to unmake us.
Living with depression in this moment feels like a fugitive act.
A refusal to disappear.
A whispered no against the demand to perform wholeness.
A quiet yes to the fractured truth of being human.
My depression teaches me to move slowly, to listen for the sacred hum beneath the noise. My fugitivity teaches me to run—not away, but toward: toward community, toward repair, toward the undercommons where we practice being human again. In the fugitive spaces, the cracks become portals. The grief becomes instruction. The ache becomes an altar.
And I keep wondering:
Can we learn to have compassion for ourselves in a world that rewards disembodiment?
Can we truly suffer with one another in a time when suffering is privatized and hidden away?
Can we let each other be fragile without demanding a swift recovery or a polished narrative?
Maybe the Dispatch today is nothing more than this: a hand extended in the dark. A reminder that being human is its own kind of fugitivity. A soft truth that we don’t have to hold the ache alone. A quiet invitation:
Let us suffer-with.
Let us wonder-with.
Let us breathe-with.
Let us repair-with.
Because even here—even now—there is a community of us who are unwilling to abandon one another to the violence of isolation. There is a flock of us practicing a different way of being alive. There is a whisper inside the ache that says: You’re not alone. Not today. Not ever.
This is today’s telegram from the underside, from the borderlands, from the fugitive interior where we keep choosing each other in spite of everything.
And maybe that’s enough for today.
Maybe that’s the most honest dispatch I can offer.
Paz, —RCE+