“But then the moon was especially bright that night. Round, foreboding, and bright. Pressingly close. Like she had been summoned to a planetary council meeting just off the Bight of Benin.

She hung in the sky like a lantern left out on the front porch by worried parents. And for a second, I had a softening vision: I could see through the fog. I caught a glimpse of a breathless idea: that I was walking to my bedroom alongside denizens of cosmic cousins and compounds. That I was angling along a path on a planet that was itself roaming through the creases of a maternal blanket too dense for its own stitches. That I was participating in something so wondrous, something so maddeningly vital, so playfully insignificant, that there were no words adequate to its description.

Just before I crossed the threshold into the foyer that broke into impatient hallways that led to the dorm rooms, I remember thanking the moon. Okay, maybe I did - or maybe I didn't. I can't recall all the details. But I do remember smiling, and I remember not feeling so alone that night.

Most importantly, I remember that night was a miracle. And I am moved to soft tears as I write this out almost two decades later, lingering at the threshold of new crossings.

If my work is about anything, it is about gesturing towards the miraculous. About meeting the unmet, the unspeakable, the non-legible thing that scoffs at words and yet welcomes the wordsmith to try his craft. It's the reason I speak about cracks and then proceed to tell people to write 'cracks' within two backslashes (as in \cracks\) because something about them reprimands our attempts at a final answer or full capture. It's the reason I refuse to give steady answers when they are asked for. It's the reason I formulate and write about concepts like ontofugitivity, sensorial mutiny, ontological apostasies, postactivism, embarkation, and Afrocenes. It's the reason I can't risk being correct, frown at the essential, turn away from the doctrinaire, and flee from the righteous.

It's because I fell in love that night. And perhaps countless nights before that night. I fell in love one more time with the void.

I won't settle for heavens, justice, and a metaphysics of arrivals and final utopias. The moon infected me that night with a possessing sense that the bacchanal lives in the banal, queer openings within firm closures. Some haunting tune, vast and sprawling, round, foreboding, and bright, pressingly close, tells me there's more room - not in the distance, but in the intimate ordinary, in the overwhelm of the everyday.

Don't you hear it too?”

- Bayo Akomolafe