Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern are two queer disabled diasporic Korean women of color in the process moving from the South to the Bay to create home and community with each other.
This tumblr documents their journey. For more info about Mia, visit her blog at leaving knowing and learning to miss: atlanta part 1
dear stacey,
I am supposed to be in bed, asleep, so that I can get up tomorrow and pack the rest of my house into boxes. I am exhausted, but I can’t sleep.
This last week, I have been slowly realizing that my time in Atlanta, as I know it now, is coming to an end after twelve-plus years, after arriving here when I was 17. Even if I come back later, it will never be the same; it will be different and so will I. I am realizing that my “lasts” are quickly approaching: the last time to sit on the east-facing benches at Candler Park, the last ATJC meeting, the last trio night, the last long talk with L on my couch, the last Saturday afternoon spent with the door open to a cool breeze.
I have been taking the long way home lately, looking purposefully around me, taking in a city that has birthed me in to my queerness, held me through some of my deepest sadness, and where I skipped class on a whim to go to my first political disability event, which changed my life forever and catapulted me in to disability justice work. A city where I found love and lost love, lost myself and found myself, again.
I have been driving up and down streets, trying to burn the memory of them into my brain for good. The way the air smells, the trees, the thick pillars that carry the MARTA rail through the sky from one end of the city to the other. The way I know these roads like the back of my hand, remembering my first year learning them in the passenger seat beside Adrian.
Atlanta was the first place that ever really felt like home, it was the closest to belonging that I had ever been. It was the first time I had ever experienced queer people of color community, all four (state-side) seasons, and the longest amount of time I have ever spent in the states. It was the biggest highway—road—I had ever driven on and I was terrified. Our highway in St. Croix is four lanes, two for each side. When I first saw the 14 lane highway that is 75/85, I never imagined I would be able to maneuver across it with ease.
Atlanta was where I learned about my self as an organizer and leader, where I learned about the deep, resilient history of the South, and where I first found reproductive justice. It is where I got to witness first-hand the way the South is (and Southerners are) forgotten about, ignored and blatantly under resourced in our movements and funding. It is where I began to connect the histories of the Caribbean, the US South and the global south. It is where I finally found a landing place, a political home, for the legacy of work I had been carrying with me around sexual violence and child sexual abuse, taking the form of the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative. It is where I could finally understand the violence I experienced as a disabled korean adoptee girl within the medical industrial complex as just that: violence.
These days I cry a little everyday for the city that I fell in love with and that I will love forever. And I take it all with me: the way Dekalb Avenue at the Krog St. tunnel looks as the sun sets and the feeling of winding down Ponce. The two trees at the corner of Clifton and Ponce that grew side-by-side in perfect-mirrored reflection, making the illusion of one giant tree, that watched over me when I totaled my car under them and came out alive without a single scratch on me. Sitting on the quad with Liz all day and into the evening just days before she killed herself. Mrs. Nelson and her 32-plus cats, a garden and a melon. 141, 745, and 659.
I hope someday I can show you some of it, Heck. I think you would have liked it. It is part of what has gotten me here today and it is a part of this dream too.
nostalgic love,
mia
