What It Means To Survive
Bounty, Christina Mokwa + Katherine Alt (2025)
Digital collage
What It Means to Survive
(in 500 Words or Less)
To survive is, at its simplest, to make choices.
Survival is backup plans, backup hard drives, backup ammunition in the little white box // survival is saying, when you’re very young, I didn’t love them anyway — you did.
To survive is to learn to move beyond the running of the fawn // to survive is to broker deals with God after the Lord’s Prayer –– to forsake deliverance in favor of ferocity // to survive, as a woman, is to grow teeth –– just to escape by the skin of them.
To survive is to watch them destroy each other, stunned and silent through the slit in the stairs, while you feel the warm liquid of shame pool beneath you.
To survive is to get good with the gun.
To survive is to adapt // to survive requires a deadly mix of perception and reality — feigned acquiescence and steadfast vigilance –– gaze cast down, geisha-like and unobtrusive –– until it’s time to burn the house that birthed you down.
To survive is to provoke the gods –– remind them of their duty and their jealousy // to survive is to wield the hot-tongued wrath of Kali to the point of immolation, and to emerge, blue-faced, clothed only in black ash afterbirth.
To survive is to remember.
To survive is to hold your head high in the courtroom, to hold your gaze steady in the world of men — and then, to leave it –– shed your skin, let shine the pelt underneath, and howl.
In the end, to survive is to make peace –– with the creatures of this world, with the spirits that inhabit you –– without exception.
To survive is to open.
To survive is to worship reverently the full roiling body of the earth — her foot, mountain –– her mouth, river. To survive is to lap up sun and beauty like honey –– to decry the false narrative of sin.
To survive is to honor the apocryphal chant, I exist.
To survive is to gracefully defy the edict you never agreed to — to eat all of the fruit.
To survive is to say, I am here now, as I am. See me, taste me, smell me.
*Written work by Christina Mokwa – © Christina Mokwa/Mokwa LLC/Mokwa Creative Company
