One year ago today. It is strange to have said nothing at the time, on a site where almost every life event has been documented, in one way or another, for almost twenty years.
I kept a diary for the first four months or so, but every time I go back to it, I realise how raw everything was, and how vulnerable. Already, some of the first few thoughts written down by mid-afternoon on 26th August 2025 captured everything there was to say. It all started as it would tend to go on:
I am heartbroken, and for the first time in a very long time, I’m worried about what I might have to say, what I can say, what I should say. My immediate feeling, on hearing the news, is one of isolation. Perhaps it is a feeling also mirrored, or perhaps a camaraderie with their fellow action-takers is giving them strength – I hope the latter.
I wish I could be with them.
No longer willing to keep lying in bed refreshing my phone, I get up at midday and walk over to the local pub where I work a few nights a week, knowing my boss will be there. I want some company.
When I am halfway there, my phone rings, showing an unknown number. A man tells me he is calling from a custody suite in Staffordshire. He passes the phone over.
During the few short minutes we were allowed to speak, they say only that they were safe, and that they love everyone. All things considered, they sounded tired but in high spirits, like someone on TV who had just run a marathon, full of pride, providing a quick comment, but longing for rest.
They said they’d call whenever they were moved again, but I don’t know when that will be. I don’t know what they’ve been through or what they’re going through. But I know that I love them and I am proud of them.
Nothing else written down feels material. It is all raw scrambled eggs, sieved through the relentless onward march of time, grasping onto any passing sequence of words to see if they might bring about a lasting sense.
The sensation of looking back at the diaristic outpouring is like taking an old roll of film to the chemist, anticipating jogged memory, epiphany, revelation, clarity. Instead, you are presented with 35 sheets of light leaks and blur.
Back in December, there was a co-determination to say something. I went back to it today. It seems as true and worth saying now as it was then:
On November 28th, we were discussing Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, which they had read inside and felt deeply moved by. “We were never meant to survive”, Lorde writes, speaking — at least in my interpretation — to the softness that nourishes existence, set across from solid death.
What survives in the fossil record is that part of each being already tough. We dig up bones, shells, exoskeletons that are already hard in life and hardened further after it. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will be chicken bones and irradiated concrete. The soft parts disappear, whether in an instant or over time.
What enables our survival in the here and now is precisely all of that activity that will not be registered in the fossil record. What enables our survival will not itself survive. It’s how I feel looking at the archive of prison correspondence amassing around me. Our poems, letters, and drawings are inconsequential when viewed from the perspective of a much larger struggle. But aren’t they all the more beautiful for that? Isn’t this archive all the more precious in its fragility? Isn’t it a humble accrual of all that helps us to survive this?
It is precious, and in being so precious, we sometimes find ourselves wishing to share it. But we can’t. We cannot bring ourselves to share the softness of this experience. It is too precious to share, and to do so might even be cruel, since it has the potential to lead others astray from hard reality. There are no words for how inhumane prison is and how difficult life has become. There are no words to describe the efforts made to sustain some beauty within it all regardless. But more than that, there are no words because it is not yet history.