ESTEBAN PULIDO → a bit worse

After months of bodily participating in uprisings, months of watching uprisings in US cities from home, and rounds and rounds of watching police kill Latinx and Black men on videos, and then months and months of seeing the systems of oppression around me start to finally unravel but then tightly pull right back but this time even tighter around the working class, the poor, BIPOC, and Latinx families — I was left with a painful shrug of well it’s all like it was before, but like Michel Houellebecq wrote in the early pandemic days: just a bit worse.

What then can I see about what I am like on the surface if I look at myself over and over again. My body is like those that are killed on the videos, I am also Latinx, but I am light skinned so I survive. I drive my car with a busted taillight, no bulb on the front, expired plates, but I do not get pulled over. I do not get shot. When I look over and over, it all starts to smell and there is a stench that this is all the same and nothing has changed and every photo of me is different but not at all of me. The camera depicts me but it is the image of a body and an image apparatus showing everything that is just after me, just beyond myself.