Never in One Place: On Waking in a Different Body

This poetic essay details some of the emotional and physical challenges the author experienced during a particularly difficult time and, in so doing, explores the synchronicity that exists between different time periods and places. It expands the idea of “place” to include spaces, emotional and mental states, memory, moments in time, and the many nuanced peculiarities of innumerable “places” within the author’s body. The essay maps a number of sensory, emotional, and physical territories that have impacted the author’s life and some of the relationships between them and his African American, autistic sensibility and disabled body. These include, for example, his relationships with his material home during the COVID lockdown (the foundation of their house had begun cracking, and the basement was flooding each time it rained), and relationships with and between the predominantly white neighborhood and Midwestern college town they live in, the wildlife and deciduous forest that surrounds it, and the rural, southern, segregated community they grew up in.