It does not arrive all at once.
That is what makes it slow.
That is what makes it hard to name.
If there had been a single moment,
a clear line between before and after,
a door that closed with a sound,
I would have known what to call it.
But it was not that.
It was the annual renewal
that kept the future always pending.
It was the decade of reached bars
and raised ones.
It was the committee work
that demonstrated commitment
without conferring rights.
It was the expertise that was used
and the belonging that was withheld.
It was the appreciation that was genuine
and the security that was not forthcoming
and the way those two things
coexisted for so long
that I stopped noticing the gap between them.
That is the slow part.
The not noticing.
The way the conditions became the weather,
the way the weather became the world,
the way you stop asking
whether the world could be different
because you are too busy
functioning within it.
I am noticing now.
I am naming it now
the way you name something
after you have finally stopped
being inside it,
after the distance gives you
the shape of the thing
you could not see
when it was all around you.
It was violence.
Not loud. Not sudden.
Not the kind that leaves a mark
anyone else can see.
The kind that lives in the shoulders.
The kind that negotiates with sleep.
The kind that sends you to the parking lot.
The kind that asks you to be grateful
for the conditions of your own precarity.
I am not grateful for that.
I am grateful for the work.
Those are different things
and I refuse to let them be confused.
La violencia lenta deja marcas lentas. Pero las deja.
Slow violence leaves slow marks. But it leaves them.
