Eau De Protection
by JOHANNA HEDVA

You’re catching me at a weird moment. In November last year, I died. In December I took a holiday; in January I fled from fire and smoke in Los Angeles; in February I finally got so tired that I had to lie down because I couldn’t walk anymore; in March I lost my mind; and in April I was slouching towards resurrec- tion, stuck in the birth canal but not yet reborn. The in- vitation to write this text arrived then, when I was still stuffed into the warm dark. The future was veiled. The walls around me were close and cramped. I’d left LA to be in New York City with my partner. Even though New York was freezing and rainy and grey, it seemed better than being alone in Los Angeles. I still could not get out of bed, but when I could sit up, I’d stare out the window of our sublet in Bed Stuy, look into the apartment building across the street. I’d wonder how, exactly how, I was going to bear this? The email came in asking if I could write something about ‘deviant knowledges,’ a phrase from my artist statement about what I am devoted to—at the same moment that I was being tended to by a care group, of friends, family and lovers, tasked with ordering me food, sending money and memes, checking in on me every couple hours. It was not the first time I was dependent on such actions from a group of friends, and it will not be the last. Their job was simple: to keep me alive. Their job was simple—and who among us knows how to do it?

What struck me about this particular moment, in spring 2025, was that everyone in the care group was also in some form of crisis and dependent on collec- tive care to stay alive. There was a friend recovering from cancer surgery and chemotherapy, about to start radiation, and we ordered groceries for each other. There were new parents overwhelmed by anxiety and depression about raising their infant in fascism, and I would sit on their couch in the afternoons while their baby rolled and squealed in their arms, and they told me how dark their mood had gone during winter. A dis- abled friend was in and out of the hospital dealing with a lingering infection, and they kept sending me money even when I told them to stop. One friend, who signed up to order me food on Tuesdays and Thursdays, had just lost everything in the LA fires of January. All the documentation of thirty years of their work as a the- atre maker, all their possessions, furniture, books, the ashes of their ancestors: gone. And still, twice a week, for a month and counting, I woke up to texts from them, saying, “Hello! How are you feeling today? What are you hungry for?” They ordered me soup, salads, coffee, cookies.

Last weekend, in the middle of April, the sun came out in New York City for the first time in a month. I met some disabled friends from the care group in a park. We sat outside for the afternoon. It was hot and bright enough for us to wear sunscreen, to shield our eyes from the sun, to sweat. Upon arriving, I shout- ed, “We’re not dead yet, bitches!” Everyone had their canes and cute outfits. Everyone, at some point in the hang, had to deal with a part of their body malfunc- tioning: pain, bleeding, brain fog. The amount of times the phrase ‘I love you’ was said!

One friend I hadn’t seen since before the COVID pan- demic, and it felt amazing to be together in synchronous time with our bodies. Our relationship is sustained by leaving long voice notes for each other, but today, we were both here, wearing lipstick and jewellery. Our birthdays are close together, two Tauruses, about a week away. We spoke about our lifetimes of physical disability and mental illness, suicidal thoughts, our activism, our sense of doom, and how we haven’t succumbed yet.

I complimented her new perfume. She complimented mine and wanted to know what it was. “It’s called Eau de Protection,” I said. Water of protection.

She inhaled with her eyes closed and smiled. “Ughhhhhh,” she said.

“What is that smell?”

“It’s a weird rose,” I said. “There’s a blood accord list- ed in the ingredients.”

She nodded. “A rose that smells like blood. Perfect.”

“Protect me, water,” I said. “Water: protect us.”

I want to make a grand statement here. I want to say something about the interdependency of survival, about how care can be shared as much as pain, about friends showing up for each other as the world burns, about wearing perfume on days when you don’t know how to keep living. While writing this text, I learned the word ‘recrudescence,’ which means the outbreak of something after a period of rest or inactivity. It can be used to describe a disease, an infection, but it is also used to describe springtime.

I went home to LA in time for May 1. Spring had ex- ploded. My garden was overgrown, weeds crowding out the nasturtiums and rosemary. Hummingbirds, mock- ingbirds and stray cats had taken over my yard while I was gone. They hovered at the edges and watched me. I ordered food for them.

Maybe I don’t need to make a grand statement about how insistent life can be, how we cling to it and it clings to us, how we come back from the dead, recrudescent, and what protections are required for that to happen again and again. Maybe I just need to note that yes, I feel old, that sometimes I don’t know how to bear it, but I’ve not stopped yet. Maybe it’s enough to say that the perfume I bought while stuck in the birth canal— dead, resurrected, reborn—smells like a weird rose sprouting from blood.