two days after Alabama passed the human life protection act, anti-abortion protestors lined the main walkways of campus with large, familiar posterboards. in order to get to the library, I had to pass through them.

they were unspeaking, made taller by their matching t-shirts and inaccurate diagrams of fetuses. my hands were shaking by the time I got to my table. I stared at the floor. I was thinking about social responsibility and public discourse and empathetic interactions with those who anger us and what I should say or do.

mostly, I wasn’t thinking.

my mind was rewinding tapes quicker than I could keep up with.

the first and only time I tried to watch the handmaid’s tale and woke up at 3am, paralyzed because dream logic said my partner had kidnapped me and I wasn’t able to leave the bed. pushing past protestors outside of planned parenthood to get treated for a UTI. a lifetime of impositions against my body, and just that week reading the live tweets of journalists on the ground in alabama. panic, nausea, guilt.

over the weekend, I collected wire coat hangers from friends and family and put them up around campus with sarcastic gift tags. they were all immediately taken down, the first one I witnessed by a group of humanities faculty entering patterson.

I am fascinated and disturbed by this functioning of the control of space. ewu’s poster policy forbids the unsanctioned posting of materials in this fashion. the protestors were allowed on campus because they were community members who followed the procedure for presenting on campus. from this perspective, the rules were applied fairly and consistently. (it is worth noting that there is a reading of the rules in which materials may be handed out, but the person responsible for them must remain with them. the person responsible for them must already belong to a group aligned closely enough with the majority for this to be safe.)

after I had calmed down, I went out and found an old woman wearing sunglasses. we spoke for thirty minutes and I never saw her eyes.

can digital landscapes make these memories visible? can we provide platforms for individuals to proclaim: here, see what I see. this happened, this happened, this happened.

now, outside the library, I see her often. on the inside of the bathroom doors, I see the coathangers that were removed. I see a choice that was made. when our country was in the midst of passing a series of the most restrictive abortion bans in history, ewu followed the rules and allowed this group to watch, from behind sunglasses, while each woman walked into the library. the coathangers were absorbed, balance restored. the sunglasses are still watching.