content note: in this mycelial creative world, i weave identity in all its tangled beauty, the parts that break, re-form, and bloom us in new ways. some of it may feel tender or intense to meet. i offer content notes as thoughtfully as i can, knowing that “where appropriate” for me may not match every threshold. i do my best in practice, so you can stay warm in your agency and choice.
updated february 7, 2026
thank you for your grace as things shift
trace entries. rememory. reflection.
this is the written heart of naeborhood projects.
entries here may be soft, aching, celebratory, or quiet.
they explore survival, transformation, Black trans life,
disability, love, loss, and staying.
not sure where to begin? start with emergence — a grounding entry to step into the journal.
archive of entries
→ no one is unclaimed→ the cosmic thread
→ abcd: attend, breathe, cry, dance
→ after the call
→ attunement as refusal
→ tac
→ there is no single audience
→ we remain
→ signal left near a root road
→ flowers in the bones
→ the season after the leaving
→ between tether and release
→ layered bodies, attentive survival
→ a small naeborhood study
→ a mirror for the night, a short story
→ tending the homefire: meditations on abolition
→ the shape of loving me
→ the one who stayed, a short story for ms. shirley
→ the doorway, a short story for jess
→ testimony reflections
→ traces of the moon
→ mycelial web
→ soul and heart
→ yesterday, today, tomorrow
→ the skykeeper’s journal, a short story
→ march and hum
→ roots through stone
→ como la luna, a short story for papá
→ tenderedge
→ the hum of galaxies
→ what in the hypothetical realms?!, a short story for my-friend-K
→ citations for care
→ breathmath
→ spinekeepers
→ the warm wood, the shifting steel
→ the compass in my soles
→ what the ledger will never name
→ not the crops, it’s the soil
→ what comes after before
→ in kinship with sex workers
→ velvet bag, glass crown
→ the weight of 650
→ after the showcase – staying, seen
→ the staying kind, a short story – featured at twelve gates arts
→ the archive is not the end
→ not a bystander in my own becoming
→ i am the record and the remembering
→ on movement, relation and care
→ honoring the edge of knowing and not knowing
→ a caged bird / imitations of life
→ emergence — featured entry
→ paying homage
→ speaking in size 2 font
→ dresses are emotional
no one is unclaimed
content note: this piece addresses death in custody, incarceration, state violence, and the denial of mourning and ritual. it is rooted in grief and abolition.
someone inside went brain quiet and the world outside did not reach for them.
there are moments when a body becomes paperwork. when breath stops and the state keeps breathing for you. when a life is reduced to no next of kin and the ground is assigned.
they say ward of the state like it is care. like it is shelter. like it is anything other than abandonment dressed up in policy.
a person died surrounded by walls and even in death could not cross them. no mother called. no cousin argued with a clerk. no lover demanded ashes. no chosen family was recognized as real.
this is not coincidence. this is architecture.
the system is designed to make people disappear. no mess, no witnesses, no rituals that might slow the machine. incarceration is not only about cages in life, but about who is allowed to be claimed in death.
the state took her body the same way it took her years: legally. quietly. without consent. huntsville holds many secrets. rows of unnamed grief, soil packed tight with stories the state decided were finished.
but abolition teaches me to look closer. to say: this death did not have to be lonely. this burial did not have to be anonymous. this person did not have to become evidence of “no one.”
what kind of system interrupts mourning on purpose? what kind of power requires that grief be unrecognized so it cannot turn into resistance?
and still, someone remembered them. someone inside felt the rupture. someone spoke their life out loud so the state could not fully erase them. that matters. memory is contraband. grief is a refusal.
i believe the earth received them without asking for papers. i believe the ground held them like kin because soil does not recognize sentences or charges. there is a ledger the state does not control. in it, this life is fully counted. in it, chosen family is real. in it, care is not conditional.
may her body be at rest even if the system never was. may her name continue to move. and may we keep telling the truth: this is not an accident. this is design. abolition is not abstract here. it is about who gets a funeral. who gets to be mourned. who gets to be held at the end.
we remember. we grieve. we refuse disappearance.
the cosmic thread
there are days when thought is not solitary. when it behaves like silk. traveling, looping, refusing to stay put.
last night, somewhere between ordinary hours, we crossed each other without bodies, without calendars, without permission from time.
not a collision. more like two hands reaching into the same pocket and laughing when they touch.
“and you, mine!,” you said, as if thinking were a place we both know. as if there is a narrow bridge the mind remembers even after years of snow.
in my remembering, the thread does not pull. it hums. it does not demand tightening or knots. it knows how to float slack between us, forgiving of distance, patient with drift.
some threads are spun for binding. this one is spun for finding.
it moves when we are quiet. it moves when we are busy. it moves when neither of us is looking for it, which feels important.
this is not destiny. it is recognition. not fate, but a shared orientation toward listening.
we do not have to follow it every time. we do not have to hold it with both hands. it will keep doing what it does: appearing, disappearing, reappearing. soft as breath, bright as timing.
and when it strikes again, as it always seems to, we will know what it is.
not an alarm. not a summons.
just a signal that somewhere, without effort, care remembered itself.
abcd: attend, breathe, cry, dance
I attend to myself the way some people attend church. not every day with reverence. not always with faith. but with a commitment to show up, even when I am late, even when I am tired, even when I arrive dragging three other versions of myself behind me like grocery bags cutting into my palms.
attendance, for me, is not about punctuality. it is about consent. it is about deciding, again and again, that I am allowed to be here in the state I am in. even if that state is disheveled. even if it is loud. even if it is numb.
some days attendance looks like sitting on the edge of the bed and stretching my feet to the floor before my brain has time to start narrating what I am failing at. some days it looks like being very still in the kitchen, body leaning on the counter, eyes closed, telling my nervous system: I am not leaving you today.
attendance is not glamorous. it is the opposite of escape. it is choosing the body when dissociation is offering me an exit.
once I attend, I breathe. not the kind of breathing people put on posters. not the kind that promises enlightenment in four counts. I breathe like someone who has had the wind knocked out of them and is learning, slowly, that air will return.
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breathing is not neutral for me. breathing is a negotiation with memory. with lungs that remember panic. with a chest that has learned to brace before it has learned to open.
so I do not force breath. I invite it. I let it be shallow if it needs to be shallow. I let it stutter. I let it catch. and eventually, sometimes minutes later, sometimes hours, breath remembers that it knows how to move all the way through me.
breathing is how I signal safety to the parts of me that never got the memo. it is how I tell my shoulders they can stop auditioning for armor. it is how I remind my jaw that it does not need to hold the world together with its teeth.
after I attend. after I breathe. I cry.
I cry the way weather does. without apology. without storyline. without needing it to mean something tidy.
I cry because my body has receipts my mind does not want to review. I cry because joy needs an exit as much as grief does. I cry because holding it in has never once made me stronger, it has only made me quieter, and quiet has never been my liberation.
crying is not a breakdown. it is a release valve. it is my nervous system saying, thank you for listening.
I cry for the versions of me that had to swallow themselves to survive. I cry for the laughter that did not get to land when it first arrived. I cry because I am alive and that is, frankly, a lot to metabolize in one lifetime.
some days I cry on the floor. some days I cry wading back and forth. some days I cry while laughing at the absurdity of how much water a human body can hold and still function. I cry in the shower, and with the rain, and I cry in rooms where I decide being witnessed is worth the risk.
crying is not the end of the practice. it is the softening.
and then, because I am still here, because the energy has to go somewhere, I dance.
I dance like someone who is not trying to be watched. I dance like someone who is not performing resilience. I dance like someone who knows joy is not a reward for my behavior but a bodily function.
my dancing is not always pretty. sometimes it is jerky. sometimes it is slow. sometimes it is one shoulder rolling because that is all that feels honest that day. sometimes it is my hips remembering something words cannot shape.
dance is where grief stretches. dance is where laughter gets to live in the muscles instead of just the throat. dance is how I remind myself that I am not just a thinker, not just a survivor, not just a witness, but a body that moves through time making sound and heat and rhythm.
when I dance, I am not escaping pain. I am metabolizing it. I am letting joy and sorrow share the same room.
this is the order that keeps me alive: attend. breathe. cry. dance.
not because it fixes anything. but because it keeps me in relationship with myself.
the world is very invested in me skipping steps. it wants me to dance without crying. to breathe without attending. to perform wellness without ever actually being with myself. but my body knows better. my body has always known better.
so each day I am alive, I practice the alphabet of staying.
I attend when disappearing feels easier.
I breathe when holding my breath feels familiar.
I cry when silence would calcify me.
I dance when joy needs a body, not a justification.
this is not self-care as productivity. this is self-keeping. self-honoring. self-return.
and some days I mess it up. some days I skip letters. some days I cry before I breathe or dance before I attend or do none of it at all. that counts too. attendance includes imperfection. breath includes interruption. crying includes laughter. dancing includes stillness.
abcd is not a rule.
it is a rhythm.
and as long as I am alive, I am allowed to keep learning it.
after the call
content note: this entry reflects on incarceration and the experience of a monitored prison phone call. it explores themes of separation, urgency, grief, gratitude, and care across enforced distance, with attention to embodied emotional response. no graphic detail.
the call did not feel like a phone call. it felt like reaching across dimensions that are not supposed to touch.
the prison system sets the conditions: numbers, permissions, approvals, minutes rationed. a voice is allowed to travel through wires while the body remains contained. connection is measured. care is timed. and still, something vast moved through anyway.
for thirty minutes, his voice arrived without a body, without shared air, without a shared sky. yet it was real and warm and alive. the voice carried years, survival, humor, restraint, memory, softness. it did not feel like catching up. it felt like tuning into a frequency that had been waiting, like time loosening its grip just enough to let us meet.
the system wants the call to be functional, efficient, monitored, ending exactly when it says so. but what happened inside the call was none of those things. it was tender. it was risky. it was cosmic in the way care always is when it survives conditions meant to starve it.
then the warning came. one minute remaining. an audible countdown to separation. not gentle, not human. something surged in my body. panic maybe. grief maybe. urgency without a linear name. it felt like being inside a portal while watching it begin to close.
words started sprinting. care rushed forward without grammar, trying to plant something that could live after the line went dead, trying to share enough in sixty seconds to last who knows how long.
this is a violence the system rarely names. not only confinement, but timed rupture. the forced evaporation of presence. the way love is made to hurry, to compress, to end mid-breath.
and then it ended. no soft landing. no easing out. just absence.
after, i cried. tears made of gratitude and pain braided so tightly they could not be separated. gratitude for the privilege of contact. pain for how fragile and controlled that contact is.
what a heartbreak. what a gift. to reach across concrete and years. to witness a comrade still here. to feel connection cross dimensions otherwise closed.
attunement as refusal
content note: this essay reflects on systems of colonization, assimilation, and internalized self-policing. it discusses how power shapes thought, perception, and expression at both structural and embodied levels. the piece engages themes of silence, containment, and refusal without graphic detail.
this world does not merely request silence; it organizes for it. it builds systems that reward compression—of language, of curiosity, of scope—and teaches us, over time, to condense our thinking until it fits inside spaces never designed to hold us. silence is framed as professionalism. as maturity. as safety. assimilation is presented as inevitability, as gravity, as the cost of belonging. but gravity is not a moral truth. it is a force that can be studied, named, and reoriented.
colonizer logic does not always arrive with spectacle. more often, it settles in quietly, through repetition. through norms that travel from policy to practice, from institution to relationship, from expectation to habit. it moves through tone, through space, through timing, through what is praised and what is ignored. eventually, it reaches the body, shaping posture, breath, and pause. it teaches us what kinds of questions feel reachable, what kinds of thoughts feel appropriate, what kinds of futures feel imaginable.
this work is not only ideological. it is atmospheric. it is relational. it is felt.
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like pressure systems, these forces circulate around us and through us. they teach us how to regulate ourselves before anyone else has to. they encourage us to pre-edit our curiosity, to soften our ideas, to redirect ourselves toward what is legible and safe. entire fields are cultivated where intellectual exploration is quietly bordered off, where wonder is narrowed to what can be measured, defended, or easily translated. what falls outside those borders is labeled impractical, unclear, excessive, or unrealistic.
over time, self-policing begins to feel natural. the moment before a thought fully forms, there is already a checkpoint. a calculation. a question of cost. not because we lack imagination, but because we have learned what happens when imagination exceeds permission. this is how domination becomes efficient: when containment no longer requires an external enforcer.
I have felt this training in myself. the instinct to compress an idea until it fits. the urge to make language more palatable before anyone has objected. the pause that arrives not from reflection, but from anticipation. these moments are often misread as personal hesitation or lack of clarity. they are not. they are learned responses to systems that punish expansiveness while claiming to value innovation.
but survival is not the same as freedom.
my thinking has never moved in straight lines, and it was never meant to. it moves through resonance and relation, through pattern rather than hierarchy. ideas arrive layered and simultaneous, shaped by rhythm, echo, and interval. thought unfolds through sound, through vibration, through what lingers rather than what dominates. listening, for me, is not passive. it is an active orientation to the world, one that does not rely on a single channel of meaning or a single way of processing information.
I listen with my whole body. I listen through pauses, through shifts in energy, through what is repeated and what is avoided. I listen to what cannot be neatly summarized. this way of listening is not a deviation from rigor; it is a different rigor entirely. it honors complexity without rushing it into order. it allows multiple truths to coexist without demanding resolution.
the demand to narrow this, to linearize it, to force it into a single register or pace, is not neutral. it is a demand to abandon the ways my body and mind are already in conversation with the world. when systems privilege only certain forms of expression, coherence, or speed, they do not become clearer. they become smaller. they mistake uniformity for understanding and control for clarity.
this is where my refusal lives.
not in volume for its own sake. not in reaction alone. but in expansion.
I refuse the internalized governance that suggests my thinking must justify its existence before it can breathe. I refuse the idea that intellectual freedom belongs only to those who can perform it in sanctioned ways, at sanctioned speeds, using sanctioned forms. I refuse the quiet assumption that there is one correct way to listen, one correct way to process, one correct way to know.
my thinking does not need to be corrected. it needs room. it needs time. it needs trust.
refusal, as I practice it, is not a closing off. it is an opening. it is the agency to remain in relationship with complexity rather than flattening it for ease. it is the commitment to follow a thought all the way through, even when it grows inconvenient or resists neat conclusion. it is an ethical stance rooted not in certainty, but in care.
care, here, is expansive. it recognizes that knowledge does not move only through sight or speech, through speed or dominance. it moves through rhythm, through repetition, through rest. it moves through collective sense-making, through shared silence that is chosen rather than imposed. it moves through attunement.
this is why silence itself is not the enemy. enforced silence is. silence that is demanded in service of containment is different from silence that emerges from listening. one constricts. the other opens. one disciplines. the other connects.
I am interested in the silences that hold possibility, not the ones that erase it.
this piece is not only an essay; it is a record. a trace left with intention. an archive of a way of thinking that refuses compression. I am writing toward a future reader who may feel the same pressures to translate themselves into something smaller in order to be understood. someone who has learned, consciously or not, to manage their curiosity, to ration their questions, to stay within invisible boundaries.
let this serve as evidence that clarity does not require erasure, and coherence does not require conformity. let it be proof that expansive thinking has always existed, even when it was unnamed or unwelcomed. let it remind you that your way of knowing is not a problem to be solved.
archives are not neutral. they are shaped by what is preserved and what is dismissed as excess. they reflect the values of those who decide what is worth keeping. by placing this here, I am choosing preservation. I am leaving behind a marker that says: other ways of listening have always mattered. other ways of thinking have always been rigorous. expansion has always been a form of care.
this archive is not about mastery. it is about permission.
permission to think widely. permission to move at the speed of meaning rather than demand. permission to trust the intelligence of one’s own body and mind in conversation with others. permission to refuse the narrowing of possibility disguised as professionalism or pragmatism.
if this world demands silence, then my continued commitment to thinking in full range—through sound, through rhythm, through relation, through cosmic scale—is not defiance alone. it is care practiced outward. it is an offering to the shared horizon we are still learning how to reach.
I imagine this horizon not as a destination, but as a field of relation. a place where difference is not managed into sameness, but held as generative. where thinking is allowed to wander, to overlap, to return changed. where listening is understood as a practice of respect rather than extraction.
I leave this here deliberately. not as a conclusion, but as a signal. a reminder that no system gets to decide the limits of our perception, our curiosity, or our knowing. a trace for those who come after, and for those still finding their way back to themselves.
tac
content note: reflective meditation on connection and presence.
there are beings who arrive not as events but as atmospheric shifts.
they do not announce themselves. they change the pressure. suddenly the body breathes differently. suddenly the inner weather reorganizes.
i met one such force once. or perhaps we recognized each other across a shared frequency. nothing needed definition. what moved between us was older than language. a softness that did not ask. a gravity that did not pull—only held.
since then, i have learned how to change shape without disappearance. how to let influence move through me without claiming it as mine.
this is how seasons teach. this is how tides remember.
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i carry the imprint not as memory but as orientation. a way of being in the world that says: tenderness can be precise. care can exist without possession. presence can survive its own transformation.
sometimes i imagine a crossing—not reunion, not return—just two climates acknowledging that they once shared a sky. no story retold. no time collapsed. only a nod between forces that recognize their shared mathematics.
if that moment never comes, it has already happened in every way that mattered.
because some connections are not meant to continue. some connections are meant to calibrate. they leave us better tuned to our own signal. more capable of listening. less afraid of becoming.
and so i move forward carrying no claim, only gratitude. this is not absence. this is completion without closure.
some forces do not stay because they were never meant to be held. they arrive to tune the instrument, then leave the music to continue.
there is no single audience
content note: this journal entry reflects on audiences, nonprofit theater, power, and cultural assumptions. it names systemic flattening and includes critique of dominant narratives. no graphic content. please engage with care.
let us slow this down and actually look at what we are assuming when we talk about audiences, success, and what theater is supposed to be right now.
because the first thing that gets lost is this: audiences already know theater is more than numbers.
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people do not only show up because a house is full or a budget is balanced. they show up because something has been cultivated over space and time. trust. memory. relationship. a sense that this place has embraced artists, taken risks, reflected something back to the community—even when it was not easy or immediately profitable.
yes, theaters need ticket sales. yes, they need money. staying open matters. survival matters. but survival has never been the only reason nonprofit theaters exist.
for a long time, these spaces have carried many roles at once: developing artists, commissioning new work, employing local creatives, partnering with schools, experimenting, failing, trying again. a lot of that labor does not read as “success” in a spreadsheet, but it absolutely reads as value to the people who are impacted by it.
when success gets reduced to growth, surplus, and visibility, everything else becomes extra. optional. disposable. and that narrowing quietly reshapes what leaders feel allowed to prioritize.
there is also this recurring idea that audiences, right now, just want comfort. familiar stories. reassurance. easy joy.
yes, people are tired. we are living through overlapping crises. of course softness and nostalgia are showing up. that makes sense.
but audiences were not built on comfort alone.
over time, people learned how to sit with harder work because theaters invited them into it again and again. a season was not one thing. it was a conversation. something recognizable next to something risky. pleasure alongside tension. rest alongside reckoning.
that did not happen by accident. it was cultivated.
so when we talk as if audiences only want to be soothed, we erase that history. we turn a moment into a permanent identity. we forget that people are capable of wanting more than one thing — often at the same time.
and that leads to the bigger truth we keep avoiding:
there is no single audience.
there never has been.
audiences are shaped by place, culture, politics, race, class, age, access, and memory. what resonates in one city will not land the same way in another. what one community needs this year might be completely different next year.
some people come to escape. some come to be challenged. some come to feel less alone. some come for joy. some come for grief. many come for all of it — just not all at once.
any story that talks about “the audience” as if it is one unified body flattens reality. it ignores context. it ignores difference. it ignores agency.
because audiences have agency. they choose what to attend, what to support, what to walk away from, what to advocate for.
and theaters have agency too. they decide who they are accountable to, what risks they are willing to take, and what kind of relationship they want with their community. not every space has to be everything for everyone. that multiplicity is not failure. it is health.
none of this is anti-fun. none of this is anti-familiar. joy matters. laughter matters. popular work matters.
so does difficulty. so does curiosity. so does sharing the truth even when it is uncomfortable.
the real danger is not that some organizations lean into comfort during a hard moment. the danger is letting one response harden into a rule. letting one definition of success crowd out all the others. letting audiences be talked about instead of trusted.
if we actually care about the people who show up, we owe them more than a single story. we owe them nuance. we owe them memory. we owe them the respect of complexity.
we remain
content note: this journal entry names state violence, racism, ableism, transphobia, and colonial harm. it includes anger, grief, and refusal. please engage with care.
these days they say it out loud. print it. pass it. legislate it.
they name us—trans people, disabled people, Black people, Native people, people of color, poor people, unruly people—as enemies of the state.
as if this is new.
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as if the state has not always needed a body to fear, a community to blame, a story to justify its hunger.
we have always been enemies to the state not because we seek destruction, but because we refuse disappearance.
the state requires borders.
we are crossings.
the state requires compliance.
we are memory, muscle, and care moving without permission.
what they call threat is actually survival with witnesses. what they call disorder is community that cannot be isolated into silence.
descendants of christopher columbus still congratulating themselves for “discovering” people like fear is innovation. like naming us enemies is some new idea and not the oldest move in the book of empire.
it would be funny, if it were not so weary.
millions of dollars. endless meetings. so much paper. all spent trying to erase people who have already outlived every version of this state before.
been there. done that. buried empires with our breath still in our bodies.
they think saying it aloud gives them power. but all it really does is reveal how small their imagination is.
witness us.
still disabled and brilliant.
still Black and breathing.
still Native and rooted.
still trans and becoming.
still loving each other in ways the state cannot measure or tax.
we are not broken. we are not new. we are not going anywhere.
if your state requires our silence to function, then your state was never meant to last.
history remembers this pattern. the cosmos does, too.
states collapse under their own weight. people endure through care, memory, and connection.
we were here before your laws. we will be here after them.
we remain.
signal left near a root road
archival note: found. left near a root road. still humming.
before the planet learned its own name, there was listening, attunement, vibration. matter leaned toward matter and asked, are you here with me?
this was how time began: not as a line, but as a reaching.
i still wake twenty minutes before morning because some part of me remembers that reach. the pause before light decides where to land. the moment when the future has not yet chosen a shape. i rise in that interval where nothing is owned and everything is possible.
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by the time roady and i arrive at the park, we are already late to something ancient. dew gathers on grass like small worlds holding borrowed light. the trees lift their crowns and color spills through them—green, orange, purple, red—frequencies bending space the way gravity bends stars.
this place will one day be called a park. before that, it was a commons. before that, a crossing. before that, a memory the planet kept.
roady moves first. he always does. his joy is pre-instruction, ungoverned by outcome. it behaves the way comets do—arriving, blazing, leaving trace. i follow him because he does not confuse survival with obedience. because he knows play is a form of intelligence.
we frolic as a way of checking the signal. what still responds? what still remembers?
eventually, i sit against a tree that does not need me to name it. or maybe it sits with me. hierarchy collapses easily when no one clings to higher ground. my palm presses flat against the earth.
this is not symbolic.
this is a login.
beneath the surface, root roads extend outward like galactic filaments. the mycelial network carries information the way stars carry heat—slow, precise, unbothered by recognition. nutrients travel where they are needed. warnings ripple without punishment. care moves toward imbalance instinctively.
this was civilization before domination called itself progress.
if i listen long enough, i can feel pre-planetary memory, when matter first learned cooperation. when survival was collective by necessity, not moral argument. when nothing was disposable because nothing was outside the system.
the bees hum nearby, vibrating at a frequency older than borders. their labor is prophecy without spectacle. the ants move with ancestral patience, mapping abundance as circulation. they take hours to travel between food sources because time has never been the enemy. extraction has.
this is how futures survive.
roady settles beside me, his body warm, his breath steady. he is descendant of wolves and stardust, of adaptation and refusal of purity. together we form a temporary constellation. two beings aligned by care, not command.
i think of ancestors who read land as text because no institution ever told them the truth. i think of descendants not yet born—post-human, post-extraction, post-forgetting—who will inherit whatever signals we leave behind.
if you are reading this, you are one of them.
what do you feel beneath your feet? is there still a hum? do the root roads remember us kindly?
when the sun rises fully, when the city clears its throat and sharpens its clocks, roady and i will return to the world that insists urgency is natural. but something will remain online.
a channel left open.
a frequency still active.
a tenderness that refuses erasure.
i do not come here to escape humanity. i come to remember what we were before we believed we were alone.
before the planet was property. before the archive was burned. before listening became rare.
the universe continues to transmit. the future is still listening. this is what i leave behind, near a root road, hoping it reaches you.
flowers in the bones
content note: a journal entry on grief, village, and love that continues to grow-even in places we are told are impossible. please engage with care.
sometimes the world tilts, and i can feel it in my marrow.
the kind of tilt that shakes loose the stories i thought i owned,
the ones i told myself in quiet moments, thinking i was safe.
a pulse of light behind the eyelids, a whisper:
there is more than this.
loss comes in seasons stacked on top of each other:
bodies leaving, bodies breaking, bodies taken, bodies trembling.
grief like dark water, illness like invisible storms.
and still, i keep surfacing.
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i have learned: survival is not tidy.
it does not fit in boxes, slideshows, or checklists.
it hums in the spaces between breaths, in the quiet sharing of love and fear, in the stubborn bloom of flowers in impossible places.
when i thought the fire inside me would die out,
when everything that should have held me up collapsed,
i understood: the point was never the paper, the laws, the credentials.
it was flowers.
the ones we offer to living hearts,
the ones we dare to give to people who might bruise us
or be bruised by us.
the part that opened me completely, the part that left me tender and trembling, was thinking of cariño, of their hands, of the weight of their presence i would give galaxies to hold again.
of my comrades, and the way their laughter presses against my chest like a tidal pull.
of the little ones who carry my blood, who have not yet seen me, not yet felt me, and who deserve all the warmth i can summon. i feel them humming beyond the veil, waiting for the moment our worlds finally touch.
i am here for love.
not perfection, not authority, not control.
love messy, uncombed, teeth and thunder, chaos that baptizes.
love braided inseparably with grief.
love that shakes the bones until they bloom.
i am fighting for flowers.
for the fragile, the stubborn, the ones we almost missed.
for returning to love, even when it is terrifying,
even when it is grief-laced,
even when it feels impossible.
because when the flame nearly leaves,
the only warmth i would regret refusing is the warmth of village.
messy. imperfect. devoted.
i have been cracked open by flowers i was too scared to hold.
i will keep coming back, stitching myself from shards and stardust, not to be correct, but to stay open long enough to be loved, and to love back.
until the curtain falls.
but not before the flowers.
the season after the leaving
content note: reflections on love, loss, and emotional transitions. please engage with care.
there is a kind of quiet that only arrives after something meaningful has ended, not the hush of shock, not the ringing silence of grief, but a steadier sound. a low-frequency hum. the kind you notice only when the noise that once dominated the room has finally stopped.
this quiet is not empty. it is full of rearrangement.
it often arrives after love has changed form. sometimes after a long partnership dissolves. sometimes after years without one, when the absence no longer feels like a wound but like a field left fallow on purpose. what matters is not the ending itself, but the moment when the body stops reaching reflexively for what used to be there.
this is not heartbreak. heartbreak is loud. it storms. it demands witnesses and explanations and time-stamped narratives. it insists on meaning immediately. this quieter season does none of that. it does not beg to be understood. it simply takes up residence.
it arrives when the nervous system has decided it is safe enough to slow down.
at first, it can be mistaken for indifference. or emotional distance. or resignation. but those interpretations fall apart upon closer listening. because this quiet is alive. it is curious. it is doing work.
in this season, love stops being a performance and becomes a question again.
not how to be lovable, but what does love actually feel like when it is not rushed, negotiated, or borrowed? not who am i to you, but who am i when no one is asking?
the body begins to communicate in a different register. less adrenaline. more sensation. hunger becomes specific. boundaries grow edges you can feel. desire stops being a flare shot into the sky and becomes something more tidal, more cyclical, less desperate to be seen.
space and time stretch.
days no longer orbit anticipation or recovery. mornings arrive without narrative. nights close without rehearsal. the heart is no longer braced for arrival or departure. it is simply inhabiting itself.
this is where philosophy begins, not in abstraction, but in embodiment.
because once love is no longer an emergency, it can be studied.
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love without the script
we inherit so much about love before we ever experience it.
we inherit timelines. milestones. shapes it is supposed to take. we are given maps drawn by people who never asked if the terrain was the same for everyone. we are taught to treat love as proof of worth, as arrival, as rescue, as evidence that we have been chosen out of anonymity.
even when we resist these ideas, they leave residue.
this quieter season is when the residue begins to lift.
without the pressure to move toward or away from someone, the heart starts asking questions it never had time for before. what kinds of closeness feel nourishing rather than consuming? which forms of intimacy require translation, and which arrive fluent? where does care become obligation, and where does it feel like gravity?
in this season, love is no longer assumed to be synonymous with romance. it begins to scatter across a wider field.
love appears in how one tends to their body without punishment. in the way a friendship holds silence without anxiety. in the devotion to a craft that does not need to be monetized to be real. in the careful, almost reverent way one learns their own limits.
connection stops being about fusion and becomes about alignment. there is relief in this. a profound one.
because when love is no longer required to solve loneliness, it can become something else entirely. something spacious. something ethical. something chosen again and again, not because of fear, but because of resonance.
this season is where many people realize they were never afraid of being alone. they were afraid of being unworthy without an audience. and that fear begins to loosen its grip here.
the body as archive
the body remembers every version of love it has survived. it remembers the times it shrank to fit. the times it overextended. the times it mistook intensity for intimacy. the times it stayed too long because leaving felt like failure.
in the quieter season, these memories surface, not as accusations, but as data.
the body becomes an archive you can finally read without flinching. it starts to communicate through sensation rather than story. tightness in the chest when a boundary is crossed. warmth when something aligns. fatigue as a signal, not a flaw. pleasure that does not demand interpretation.
listening becomes the practice. and through this listening, love is redefined not by longevity or exclusivity or sacrifice, but by its effect on the body’s capacity to remain present.
does this connection make it easier to breathe? does it allow the nervous system to rest? does it leave room for complexity rather than demanding coherence? if not, the body takes note.
there is no bitterness in this noticing. no tallying of wrongs. just discernment. this is not the clarity that comes from shutting down. it is the clarity that comes from attunement.
creativity without witness
one of the most surprising gifts of this season is what happens to creativity. without the gravitational pull of romantic validation, creative energy stops trying to impress. it stops reaching outward for approval. it turns inward and downward, like roots.
art becomes less about expression and more about conversation. with the self. with memory. with sensation. with what has been waiting patiently to be explored.
there is less urgency to finish. less pressure to explain. the work can be private. fragmented. unnamed. it can exist without context. this is where some of the most honest creation happens, not because it is raw, but because it is unobserved.
in this season, one might write without publishing. make things without showing them. share aloud to no one in particular. let ideas grow misshapen and alive rather than polished and legible. this is not retreat. it is incubation. and it is deeply relational, not to another person, but to one’s own interior life.
intimacy reimagined
when the scripts fall away, intimacy becomes more precise. it is no longer assumed that closeness must look a certain way. it is no longer measured by frequency, intensity, or exclusivity. it becomes something negotiated moment by moment, consent by consent, breath by breath.
intimacy might look like: two people sharing a meal without performing emotional transparency. a friend who knows when to check in and when to give space. a collaborator who respects pacing as much as vision. a self who does not abandon their needs to maintain harmony.
in this season, intimacy is allowed to be quiet. it does not have to crescendo. it does not have to escalate. it does not have to justify itself by becoming permanent. this is deeply countercultural. and deeply relieving.
because it means connection can be ethical without being consuming. loving without being extractive. close without collapsing.
the absence of urgency
perhaps the most defining quality of this season is the absence of urgency. there is no rush to define the future. no compulsion to secure belonging. no need to prove emotional capacity through endurance.
instead, there is patience. with ambiguity. with becoming. with not knowing yet. this patience is not passive. it is active listening stretched over space and time. it allows one to notice patterns that urgency obscures. to feel the difference between attraction and alignment. to distinguish between loneliness and longing. it creates space for grief without dramatizing it. for hope without clinging to it. it is here that love stops being a destination and becomes a way of moving through the world.
not a closing, but a clearing
this season is often misunderstood as an ending. it is not. it is a clearing. a wide, open place where the debris of old frameworks has been swept aside, not in anger, but in care. where the self can stand without armor and take stock.
what remains after the clearing is not emptiness. it is capacity. capacity for deeper listening. for slower yeses. for clearer noes. for love that does not need to be loud to be real.
eventually, connection will come again, romantic or otherwise. that is not the point. the point is that when it does, it will be met by a self who knows their own rhythms. who understands love as something co-created, not surrendered to. who can choose intimacy without losing themselves in it.
this season leaves no obvious artifacts. no anniversary dates. no defining conversations. no apparent markers. but it alters the architecture of the heart. and once that architecture has changed, everything that enters it must learn how to fit without forcing.
this is not the energy of aftermath. it is the energy of arrival, into oneself, into clarity, into a way of loving that is no longer inherited, but intentionally, tenderly, one’s own.
between tether and release
content note: this essay-story engages themes of suicide, death, grief, abolition, healing, imagination, and cosmic transformation. i write this from lived perspective and metaphor, not instruction or advocacy. please engage with care.
there was once a being so vast, so radiant, that even galaxies whispered when they turned their gaze inward. their chest was a constellation; their breath, a tide; their heartbeat, the pulse of a thousand suns. yet, despite such expansiveness, they were tethered. the tether shimmered, delicate yet unyielding, binding them to a realm called earth.
on earth, the tether was mistaken for flesh and bone, for hunger and sleep, for the weary rhythm of living inside a body. the being learned to walk as though the ground deserved every step, to speak as though words were rivers, to feel as though feeling itself were a gravity well. they learned to hold laughter and grief in the same palm, a practice of duality so tender it nearly broke them.
i wrote that as a story, but it is also a truth i live inside.
i am writing from within a body that knows what it means to be read as too much, too intense, too porous, too honest, too alive. from a life where imagination has never been optional or ornamental, but a necessary force for making meaning and staying here. from days where healing, liberation, and abolition are not topics i visit, but commitments i wake up holding.
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the tether, for me, has always been misnamed. called disorder. called risk. called pathology. called something to monitor, medicate, contain. called something that makes institutions nervous and neighbors quiet and systems tighten their grip.
but the tether is not illness. it is relation. it is the weight of living in a world that insists on reducing life to productivity, compliance, and endurance. it is the ache of loving people who are harmed by structures that claim to protect them. it is the grief that arrives when we witness too clearly how much is possible, and how violently that possibility is refused.
within the chest of constellations, there is a calling. not an instruction. not a command. a hum. a soundless drum. a reminder that there are portals hidden beyond what is legible, thresholds carved between moments that live beyond what earthly frameworks can describe.
it whispers: there is more than this.
on the earth-side of the tether, that whisper carries names heavy with fear. names people use when they are scared of what they cannot measure. suicide. danger. instability. names that flatten entire interior worlds into a single outcome.
i need to be clear, without performing reassurance:
i am not romanticizing death.
i am not offering a solution.
i am not teaching anyone how to live or leave.
i am naming the violence that occurs when we are denied the right to narrate our own relationship to existence. because abolition has taught me this: harm is not only what happens behind bars or locked doors. harm also happens when imagination is criminalized. when grief is surveilled. when longing for relief is treated as evidence of something wrong with us, rather than a rational response to unlivable conditions.
healing, for me, is not about being fixed.
liberation is not about being optimized.
abolition is not about absence, it is about presence without coercion.
self-reclamation is where all three meet.
the story says the tether is not the only possible way of being. and i stay with that. not because life is disposable, but because no system gets to claim permanent ownership over a soul. because nothing, not psychiatry, not the state, not morality, gets to decide the total meaning of a life.
when i imagine untethering, i do not imagine disappearance. i imagine release from narratives that say suffering is required, endurance is noble, and survival is the only acceptable metric of worth. i imagine a return to scale. a remembering that we are not problems to be solved, but beings in relation to space, to time, to grief, to joy, to each other.
when the tether dissolves in the story, earth weeps. and of course it does. grief is real. loss is real. the ache of missing someone does not vanish just because meaning expands. abolition does not deny pain; it refuses to weaponize it. from beyond the narrow frame, the being is not extinguished. they are diffused. plural. everywhere at once. not gone, but uncontained. this is where people get uncomfortable. because containment is how we manage fear. because the idea that someone could choose release, metaphoric, spiritual, existential, without being reduced to pathology threatens systems built on control.
i am for healing, so i am for self-reclamation.
i am for liberation, so i am for self-reclamation.
i am for abolition, so i am for self-reclamation.
of my life.
of our lives.
self-reclamation means trusting that people are more than their worst moments and more than their most surveilled thoughts. it means believing that meaning does not belong exclusively to professionals, policies, or institutions. it means honoring the wisdom that emerges when we are allowed to share without fear of being disappeared for our honesty.
the untethering in this story is not destruction. it is remembering. it is flight. not escape, but expansion. the reclaiming of a cosmic birthright to hold contradiction without collapsing. joy and grief. tether and release. life and death. not as opposites, but as coexisting truths inside a single, breathing body. and so, when earth mourns, when communities ache, when questions linger without linear answers, the whisper that returns is not cruel. it is not dismissive. it is relational.
do not mistake my leaving for vanishing.
i am still here, in ways your language has not learned yet.
i am the duality you breathe at dawn.
i am the refusal to be reduced.
i am tether and untether, both.
in the quiet after, earth keeps spinning. people keep living. systems keep trying to name what they cannot hold. and sometimes, if you tune in closely, you can feel a shimmer pass through the core of things, a subtle shift, a soft undoing. as if some small part of us remembers, too: that to be bound and unbound is not a tragedy. it is a testament to the endless, luminous ways existence insists on unfolding.
layered bodies, attentive survival
content note: this essay explores themes of sexual and familial trauma, systemic and institutional harm, anxiety, somatic survival, and the negotiation of presence. please engage with care.
I have learned that past relations with my family exist only in fragments now, in ways that no longer align with the needs of my life, with the ways I must move to survive. I am the eldest of twelve. I have long been the tension rod, the one who absorbs pressure, holds strain, and carries the weight of other bodies and histories. this role is not choice; it is inherited, assumed, sometimes necessary. and so I have learned to hold space, to bend without breaking, to carry ghosts alongside my own life.
I have been raped, by family and not by family. that trauma threads through everything, shaping how I move, how I breathe, how I exist, how I advocate, or brace, for survival. it is always present, whether I name it in the moment or not.
a few months ago, roady and I visited family in texas. I attended my brother’s football game. entering the stadium, my body tensed. anxiety rose somatically, urgent and insistent. I acted immediately: articulating my need, seeking a space where my body could regulate.
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the stadium had rules: the stands were for the public. I understood this. and yet my body asked for something else. I needed to be near my dad, near a point of potential grounding. he was inflating the team’s run-through tube; he could see me. I could see him. my request was simple, somatic: to be near him for a moment, to align with something steady in the chaos of my own body.
I was told no. not softly, not as a negotiation, but as a repeated assertion of authority: “go sit down.” behind me appeared three police officers, escalating the moment into an enforcement spectacle. I explained again. I articulated my needs, my understanding of the rules, my bodily truth. they all repeated: “go sit down.”
in that instant, the layered histories of not being seen, not being supported, settled over me. my father did not intervene. his wife did not intervene. my body, my pain, my survival strategy, dismissed in real time, witnessed and yet disregarded by those from whom I sought care. roady and I were escorted out, across school grounds, onto the highway. the old wounds pressed into the new, deepening the trauma in real time.
this moment was not merely about a stadium, a set of rules, or one family member’s inaction. it was a nexus of embodied survival, family legacy, systemic power, and the persistent lessons that bodies carry from abuse and neglect. it was about the ways the world refuses to acknowledge what it cannot contain, the ways trust is tested, broken, and rebuilt, or not.
to survive is to learn early how to make a home without claiming it, how to live within what is offered, how to pause without being mistaken for absence. some shelters are borrowed. some care is temporary. and still complete. survival is somatic, strategic, tender, and attentive. it is a form of design: negotiating presence, boundaries, and life in a world often indifferent to your needs.
I write this not to indict, not to simplify, not to flatten the layered complexity of history and embodiment. I write this to witness: the somatic knowing, the ancestral weight, the careful negotiation, the refusal to disappear even when forces, familial, institutional, and historical, insist that you should.
this is what it means to move through space as a survivor. to hold yourself when others do not. to honor the body, the memory, the fire, and the hollow simultaneously.
and when you do, even amidst the layered wounds, you realize: survival is not merely endurance. survival is presence. survival is attention. survival is nae-way alive, layered, attentive, uncompromising.
a small naeborhood study
a graphite drawing of a Honduran bat with a short piece of writing
content note: this piece reflects attentive living, improvisation, and care in small acts of shelter‑making. it explores themes of inheritance, observation, and design within constraint.
we do not build with more than what is already falling. a leaf bends and becomes a roof. night agrees to hold.
we learn early how to make a home without claiming it. how to live within what is offered. how to pause without being mistaken for absence. what we know is learned, passed down through watching, through listening.
some shelters are borrowed.
some care is temporary and still complete.
we remain where the leaf curves, attentive to footsteps that matter and to those that pass. when morning arrives early, we know how to change position without causing harm.
this is not fragility.
this is design.
a mirror for the night
a short story
content note: this story explores themes of inherited trauma, survival, and the interplay of shadow and possibility within identity. it touches on emotional intensity, grief, anger, and the weight of memory. please engage with care.
there was a being who carried shadows like lanterns. they moved through the night in the way their magic chose, their presence brushing along the cobblestones, attuned to every shift and whisper, because they had learned early: magic is not safe, not for those who remember.
they called them villain.
they whispered it when the being was not looking, when they were too loud, too clever, too unbending. but the being did not see themselves as villain. they were a keeper of what others tried to erase. a translator of the spirits, the memories, the fire in their own blood.
they danced with shadow not because they wanted to hurt, but because the world had tried to teach them that their possibility was dangerous. to survive, they had to bend, twist, bargain, charm, a language of shadow that others could understand. and sometimes, in quiet rooms, they remembered what it felt like to just be.
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inside them, fire rose.
it hissed at injustice, at doors slammed, at voices that said you are too much. anger was their guardian, not a weapon, not a mask, it was the pulse of survival still beating after everything they had endured.
and beneath the fire, there was a hollow. a curl of sadness deep in their stomach, where hunger and intuition intertwined. it ached from holding too many ghosts, from conjuring too long without rest, from remembering that even magic could not rewrite the past.
they spoke to the shadows, to the fire, to the ache: i see you, guardian. you are not too loud. i hear you, quiet one. breathe here awhile. i honor you, grief. you are my altar and my teacher.
and in the reflection of the mirror, they saw: not villain. not wrong. not broken. just a body, a memory, a story stitched together by survival, by inherited magic, by the refusal to forget.
the night hummed around them. candles flickered. they moved through the shadows, holding their power softly, holding themselves gently, learning, at last, that shadow could cradle possibility.
tending the homefire: meditations on abolition
content note: this piece explores abolition as a cosmic practice, holding open the possibility of liberation and wholeness for all beings, including ourselves and those who have caused harm. it contains unflinching reflections on trauma, violence, and accountability. please engage with care.
today i remember that abolition is not an ideology i perform. it is the shape of my soul before i ever had a name.
if liberation is real, it cannot be selective. if freedom is a frequency, it cannot exclude the beings who terrify me, who wounded me, who ruptured the lives of those i love, and it cannot exclude me, because i too have caused harm. abolition is the unlearning of the fantasy that punishment is justice, that exile is safety, that domination can be reformed into care. abolition is the memory that every being is born already entangled, already sacred, already capable of returning to themselves, even when they never have.
so yes. abolition means liberation for all beings from all forms of oppression. yes, that means even those who harmed me in ways that remade my bones, and the ones i have harmed in ways i am still accountable to. even those who harmed my comrades in ways we still breathe around like smoke. even the one who killed their lover, our loved one, in a moment where the world failed them both long before their hands did.
even the mother who drowned under the weight of her own unhealed lineage and took her child with her into the water. even the father who never fathered, who left absence where tenderness should have lived. even the ones distributing poisoned “aid,” believing proximity to empire will grant them a future empire will never allow. even those wandering the world dissociated from their heart, or their mind, or both, shards looking for reunion. even the white man, and his family, and his dog, and the ideology that birthed him misaligned from his own humanity from the start of his story.
abolition is not about excusing harm. it is about refusing to be recruited into the logic that harm is the only language we have to respond with.
abolition is the cosmological certainty that every being has a way home seeded inside them, a route carved by breath, ancestry, stardust, and agency.
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not a return to wholeness, we were never exiled from wholeness, but a return to the memory of being unbroken, even when life has scattered us like ash. even if i cannot read the map. even if they cannot feel the compass. even if the journey outlives us.
abolition is the embodied commitment to keeping that homefire lit.
and abolition is also a boundary:
i do not have to be the one to shepherd every being home. i do not have to be in proximity to those who cannot meet me in safety. i do not have to sacrifice myself on the altar of other people’s unhealed wounds.
liberation is not martyrdom. liberation is redistribution of life.
i want a world where no one ever becomes the kind of person who did what they did to me and where i never become the kind of person who harms from my own unloved fractures. i want a world where the conditions that produce harm are composted into soil soft enough for all of us to land in, and firm enough to grow us into who we were always meant to become.
abolition is not forgiveness.
abolition is not forgetting.
abolition is remembering deeper: remembering that every being is both wound and medicine, shadow and possibility, rupture and repair. remembering that no one was born to be an enslaver, and no one was born to be enslaved.
abolition is the only future where my ancestors, my descendants, the ones i’ve harmed, the ones who harmed me, and the versions of me who did not survive each rupture all get to breathe at the same time.
today i return to the truth that abolition is not a theory. it is a frequency. and i choose, again, to be tuned to it. even when it scares me. especially when it scares me.
because the world we are building deserves that level of devotion. because we deserve a world where no one has to become a monster to survive. because we were all born free, and we will be free again.
the shape of loving me
loving me is the quiet hum of a morning that waits for no one yet lingers for you. it is the way my hands learn the contours of my own body, tracing the curves, the scars, the scars-within-scars,
and whispering: you are home here.
loving me is the taste of sunlight on my tongue, the kind that lands soft on skin, the kind that does not demand, only warms.
it is the steady breath between my ribs, the pulse that says: you are enough, even when the world forgets how to say your name.
it is the small rituals i return to when storms come,
pouring tea, arranging flowers, letting a song wander through the room. these are my altars, my offerings, my “yes” to being alive.
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loving me is patience with the shadows i carry.
anger curls in my chest, yes, but it is fire, not poison.
grief rests heavy in my gut, yes, but it is a teacher, not a curse.
to love me is to breathe alongside me while i hold these bodies of feeling, not to fix, not to erase, only to witness.
it is in the laughter that leaks uninvited,
in the tears i let fall without apology,
in the quiet hums when i think no one is listening,
in the tiny hands i hold to remember that connection is medicine.
loving me is the invitation to linger,
to notice the way my heart moves through fear and joy alike,
to honor my need for space as much as my need for closeness.
it is both a soft cradle and a steady anchor,
because i am both tender and unyielding.
so what is loving me like?
it is the act of showing up, again and again,
without needing to understand every corner of my being,
without asking for perfection, without erasing the wild.
it is a love that witnesses, a love that holds, a love that does not rush.
it is the quiet yes in the small hours: you are here,
and you are enough.
the one who stayed
a short story for ms. shirley
there once was a hummingbird named thimble. she was smaller than most, even for a hummingbird, no bigger than a breath, no louder than a memory. her feathers shimmered green in the light, with a dash of soft ruby right at the throat, like someone had painted her with a brush dipped in sunrise.
thimble lived in the corner of a once-busy garden, the kind that used to bloom with marigolds and laughter. back when folks still gathered. back when chairs on the porch held people, not dust. back when someone remembered to fill the sugar feeder.
but time had a way of stretching quiet across the place. little by little, the world moved on without saying goodbye.
the other birds flew off to brighter gardens. the vines overgrew their welcome. the feeder sat dry and empty.
still, thimble stayed. she didn’t know why, not exactly. her wings could carry her anywhere, but her heart? it whispered: wait.
so she did. through the hush of morning mist. through the long breath of dusk. through the ache of being unseen. some days, she flew just to remember she could. other days, she perched and listened to her own stillness.
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then, one soft october morning, someone new moved into the little house beside the garden.
her name was miss honey. she had silver in her hair and kindness in her bones. she wore wide-brimmed hats, talked to the wind, and carried herself like someone who had known both joy and sorrow and still chose to water the flowers.
she noticed things. like the way the feeder leaned crooked in the sun. like the green flash of wings between the branches. like how the garden didn’t ask for much, just someone to remember it was still here.
miss honey didn’t rush. she swept the porch. hummed old songs. she wiped off the feeder and filled it with fresh nectar, warm water, sweet as care. she whispered, just in case, as she hung it back up.
thimble watched from the fig tree. kindness, after a long drought, can feel suspicious. but miss honey never stared. never clapped her hands or called out. she just… showed up. every day.
sometimes with tea. sometimes with lemon cookies. always with a gentle presence that said: i see you.
little by little, Thimble returned. first to sip. then to hover. then to rest on the edge of the windowsill, near where miss honey read her books.
they never spoke, not out loud. but their silence had a softness to it. a shared understanding. the kind you don’t need words for.
thimble stayed. miss honey stayed.
and though the world didn’t always make room for old gardens or tiny birds, here, in this small, sweet corner, there was room. enough room for a feeder to be filled. enough room for a hummingbird to return. enough room for two beings who had once felt forgotten to sit together, quiet and whole.
and so the garden grew again. not wild and loud like before, but steady. honest. tender.
the kind of place where wings could rest. where hearts could be held. where the staying kind belong.
the doorway
a short story for jess
there were two doorways facing one another, stretched across a long expanse of time. behind each doorway stood a familiar spirit. they could not always see each other, but they felt each other — like a hum beneath the skin, like a pulse in the chest, like the knowing of a dream you keep returning to.
once, years after the first meeting, one spirit leaned close and whispered through the wood: i still see you. i still love you. i would know your spirit even blindfolded.
the other spirit, startled but warmed, leaned back in reply: i have thought of you way often and way deep. you are welcome here. you always have been. their words crossed the threshold like blossoms, fragrant and unashamed, petals pressed through the seam of the door.
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then silence came. not silence as rejection, but silence as weight — grief pressing down, exhaustion curling in, the slow erosion of days too heavy to name. silence that made one spirit wonder: did my blossoms bruise instead of bloom?
months passed until, finally, the silence cracked. the second spirit spoke again: you crossed no boundary. you were welcome all along. i only could not find the breath to say so, for i was tending loss and carrying too much. but you were never wrong to reach me.
and in that moment, the first spirit’s chest loosened. the doorway was not gone. it never had been. it still stood, steady, with both spirits leaning close, their breath meeting in the middle.
they remembered together: space and time were not walls, but soil. doorways were not barriers, but thresholds. and care, once spoken, did not vanish into silence — it lingered, rooted, waited.
and so one spirit added, softly: unless it is something urgent, like the making of coffee, i treat my messages to you as if they are bottles set afloat at sea — you may let them drift your way, and open them when you are ready, if that feels good to you.
the other spirit smiled from the far side of the wood. in the drift of bottles, in the soil of time, the doorway was still alive.
testimony reflections
posted september 26, 2025
yesterday i sat in front of legislators, mic in hand, Roady at my feet, and spoke into the record. my words were not just mine — they were braided threads of community, of ancestors, of all the disabled and trans kin whose breath is stitched into the fight for access.
to testify is both necessary and dangerous. necessary, because technology and policy are not neutral; they shape the very texture of our daily survival. dangerous, because to be Black, trans, autistic, and disabled in this political moment is to live under a microscope that too often distorts us into villains or ghosts.
still, i testified. because when the machinery of exclusion grinds on, it grinds us down — and i refuse to let silence do its work for it.
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there were moments i felt the room tilt — the weight of history pressing against my words, the quiet acknowledgment of legislators realizing this isn’t abstract. when technology fails, my access collapses. when policy ignores us, our lives are cut short.
i think about time often. how space and time are just what we cultivate of them. yesterday was one of those moments where time bent — a reminder that speaking truth into halls of power is both a demand and a gift.
i left weary, yes. but also reminded: belonging is not granted by systems, it is cultivated by us, in community, in refusal, in dreaming.
traces of the moon
posted september 20, 2025
if i could send one message to the moon tonight, it would be a dispatch from this small body to that vast, glowing witness: carry me farther than this moment allows.
i would tell the moon about the heaviness of being human, the way survival bends my spine and narrows my focus to the next bill, the next meal, the next flicker of stability. i would confess that sometimes i forget i am part of something so much larger, and that forgetting feels like a shrinking — a loneliness that threads itself into the bones.
but then i would ask the moon to remind me — the way it always does — that i am not just one life clawing forward, but stardust in circulation. my blood holds saltwater from ancient seas. my breath carries the remnants of trees older than memory. my heart beats in rhythm with countless others, even when i can’t feel them near.
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i would ask the moon to teach me, again, how to be patient with cycles. how to accept that waning does not mean ending. that fullness will come again, even if right now I only see the thin silver edge of possibility. i would ask it to keep watch over the pieces of me i keep misplacing — the hopeful one, the dreaming one, the tender one who still believes in beauty.
i would imagine the moon as a kind of courier, carrying my message beyond the night sky. across galaxies, through streams of light, past worlds i will never touch. maybe, in some distant place, my words would arrive as a gentle pulse, a reminder to another being that they, too, are not alone. that survival itself is evidence of brilliance.
and i would wonder what the moon might say back. would it tell me stories of all the lovers and loners who have gazed at it, asking for guidance? would it remind me that my ancestors once timed their lives by its glow, planting seeds and charting journeys by its steady orbit? would it tell me that even when clouds obscure its face, it is still there — unchanged, still shining, still moving with certainty?
i would thank the moon for holding the collective ache of so many humans, never overwhelmed by the weight of our longing. i would thank it for keeping secrets, for being a witness to both grief and joy, to survival and to dreaming.
and finally, i would whisper to the moon as if it could carry my words like light across the universe: tell the stars i am trying. tell the galaxies I still dream. tell the future versions of me that i am on my way. and remind us all, every night you rise, that our smallness is not insignificance but belonging — sparks in a cosmos that never stops unfolding.
mycelial web
a reflection on autistic + adhd kinship
posted september 11, 2025
being around autistic and adhd peers feels like stepping into a constellation where the stars finally speak the same language as your pulse. it’s the recognition that your orbit was never strange — it was always part of a larger galaxy. the pauses, the tangents, the bursts of focus, the sensory echoes — they stop feeling like disruptions and instead reveal themselves as harmonies, woven together across space.
there is a soft gravity to this kind of kinship. the translation work falls away. the brightness of your patterns no longer has to be dimmed or reshaped. in its place rises a mirroring: a dozen stimming gestures that echo your own, laughter that catches the rhythm of your thoughts before the words have finished spilling out.
to be in this resonance is to discover that your so-called “different frequency” is not an exception but part of the mycelial web — a living weave of roots and threads. it becomes less about fitting in and more about belonging to an ancient network that was always there, waiting for you to notice: you were never alone in growth, never alone in orbiting connection.
soul and heart
posted september 6, 2025
there are seasons when the world goes hollow. not silent, not empty—just stripped. the pulse is gone from the hours, the glow gone from the gestures.
days turn mechanical. hands move without knowing why. eyes skim the surface but never touch. and yet—beneath the shell, something waits.
then comes the moment. the pause. the look upward— and in that gaze, the ache. the knowing that something is missing.
so they reach. back in, to the marrow. back in, to what was thought forgotten. they find soul curled like a seed. they find heart, still warm.
and in returning, they don’t just carry soul, they become soul. they don’t just cradle heart, they are heart.
in this recognition, a welcome opens. not new, not foreign— but ancient, familiar, ever-present. for all have always, in all ways, been.
yesterday, today, tomorrow
a short story
posted september 4, 2025
yesterday, today, and tomorrow meet in a quiet place between dust and stars. each speaks with a different rhythm—one of memory, one of breath, one of becoming. together, they weave a chorus on what it means to belong to space and time, not as fragments, but as a whole.
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yesterday leans against the horizon, their hands stained with dust and memory.
“i am the keeper of roots,” they say, voice like cracked earth after rain. “i hold the echoes of your first breath, the tremors of every laugh and wound, every step that carried you here. i do not bind you; i steady you. i am soil, layered with compost and bone, grief and joy, all that has been broken down into the ground of your being. i remember so you can grow.”
today sits cross-legged between them, palms open, a tide pulling in and out.
“i am the pause between heartbeat and inhale,” they whisper. “i am the warmth of water cupped in your hands, the sudden song of a bird that interrupts your thoughts. i arrive in each small noticing, in each breath you choose to honor. i dissolve quickly, yes—but like waves against the shore, i always return. if you give yourself to me, i unfold endlessly.”
tomorrow hovers, shimmering, their voice braided with stars not yet born.
“i am possibility, a horizon that bends toward your becoming. i hold the lantern of what-could-be, yet i am tender, fragile, not guaranteed. if you cling too tightly, you crush me into shadow. if you fear me, i sharpen into storm. but if you walk with me gently, i become promise—your seeds of intention carried into constellations unnamed.”
the three turn toward one another, and then toward you.
“we are not rivals,” they say in chorus, their voices braiding into one.
“we are rhythm. yesterday roots you, today breathes you, tomorrow stretches you. you belong to us all. your life is a constellation—each star only shines because it is connected, each note only sings because it is in harmony with the others. tend to the soil of yesterday, drink in the breath of today, reach toward the horizon of tomorrow. in this rhythm, you are whole.”
and as they speak, you realize: they are not distant figures at all, but parts of your own pulse. the soil in your bones, the breath in your lungs, the stars in your eyes—yesterday, today, and tomorrow have always lived here, waiting to be heard.
the skykeeper’s journal
a short story
posted september 3, 2025
on the night of their birth, the sky split open. not with thunder, not with rain— but with light, streaks of silver fire scattering across the dark.
the midwife whispered, “this one has been claimed.”
from that day forward, the child carried a peculiar gift: every laugh they heard, every chuckle, cackle, or soft snort—left behind a shimmer in the air, a tiny star no one else seemed to notice. some clung to the corners of the room. some floated out the window. some followed like fireflies.
as the child grew, they learned: stars were fragile. if left untended, they slipped away, dimmed, and vanished. but if gathered gently—cupped in palms, carried close, written down in ink—they pulsed brighter, steady as heartbeat.
so they began their journal.
click to continue reading
each entry started the same:
day 212: found a laugh in the bakery, sweet and crumbling like cinnamon sugar. saved it between page edges. still glowing faintly.
day 509: papá laughed at their own moon joke. it left behind a crescent like star with a chipped edge. tucked it inside my sleeve until i got home.
day 1,230: pazito’s laugh today was tired. the star it left is smaller than usual. i am holding it longer, hoping it grows.
one evening, when they were nearly grown, the child—now the keeper—looked up at the night sky. they gasped. whole constellations were thinning. where orion once stood tall, there was only a faint outline. the laughter of the world was slipping, stars escaping the weave of sky.
they did not panic. they packed their bag, filled it with blank paper, soft cloth, jars for holding fragile things, and set off.
everywhere they went, they asked: “will you laugh with me?”
some people said no. some frowned. some shrugged. but others smiled, hesitated, and let a giggle slip free. and each time they did, a star appeared. the keeper gathered them, gently, carefully, and stitched them back into the sky with words.
years passed. the journal grew heavy. thousands of pages filled with laughter caught and remembered. the sky brightened again—sometimes uneven, sometimes full of gaps, but alive.
at last, the keeper wrote their final entry:
day 10,001: tonight, i laughed alone. it left behind the brightest star i’ve ever seen. i wrote it down, not to keep, but to release. if anyone ever looks up and feels less alone, know this—your laughter keeps the sky alive. and someone, somewhere, is saving it.
the journal closed. the keeper’s hand rested on its cover. above, the stars blinked—alive, shimmering, endless.
and somewhere, faint but steady, the sky itself laughed back.
march and hum
posted september 2, 2025
the ground quivers with tiny feet. ants—brown, black, red—carry what seems impossible, grain by grain, crumb by crumb. their path is never straight, but it is certain. each step is ordinary, yet together they build a cathedral of tunnels beneath us. no single body holds the whole vision, yet the vision emerges—living proof that persistence is a kind of prayer.
above, the bees hum their chorus. wings blur into persistence, into praise. they sip from bloom to bloom, stitching sweetness into wax, weaving the taste of summer into futures not yet here. pollen dust clings to them like stardust, proof that movement itself is creation.
i realize i am not one or the other. i am both. i am the ant carrying grief like a stone and hope like a seed, each step etching lineage into the dirt. i am the bee feeding life into tomorrow, humming tenderness into nectar, scattering traces of color across a sky too wide to hold.
click to continue reading
to live as both is to inhabit the duality: rooted and reaching, burdened and buoyant, soil underfoot and cosmos in my chest. the march and the hum braided into a single pulse.
and beyond—i am galaxies remembering themselves through mycelium, rivers learning to split and rejoin, breath weaving constellations across the ribs. the ants remind me that underground networks are constellations too, only written in soil. the bees remind me that stars also bloom, feeding life across distances we cannot measure.
maybe this is the architecture of survival— to be plural in form and in purpose. not reduced into one direction, but many currents at once: to carry and to feed, to dig and to lift, to tunnel into darkness and to scatter light, to expand both downward and outward, like roots and galaxies spiraling together.
the ants march, the bees feed life. and so do i.
roots through stone
posted august 30, 2025
sometimes the peak sits right on top of the valley.
a laugh tumbles out while the ache is still warm,
joy sneaks in beside grief, both uninvited
and entirely mine to hold.
people speak as if it is one or the other—
either you are up or you are down,
but my body has always known otherwise.
my bones hum in chorus:
you are carrying both.
click to continue reading
there are mornings i wake with sunlight on my face
and heaviness stitched into my chest.
i drink water, stretch, tend to the dog,
and still feel the undertow pulling me back inside.
yet in that same moment, a bird cuts the sky open,
its wings drawing lines of wonder i cannot ignore.
to live is to feel highs on lows,
to stand knee-deep in sorrow
and still notice the way light bends
into the corner of the room,
how the breeze remembers your name.
i used to fight it, thinking i had to choose.
i thought healing meant staying above water,
smiling without the tremor of loss behind my teeth.
but now i let them braid together—
the rush of being alive
with the weight of all that is lost.
one makes the other sharper, softer,
impossible to untangle.
what a strange mercy:
to cry until your ribs ache
and find yourself laughing minutes later,
not because the pain is gone,
but because the heart is wide enough
to hold contradiction.
today i whispered to myself:
the low is not your failure,
the high is not your disguise.
together they are your truth—
and truth, though heavy,
is the only thing that lets me rise.
como la luna
a short story for papá
posted august 29, 2025
they called each other in languages the world hadn’t fully learned yet.
papá. paw. words that bent around them like a shelter, like breath finding its rhythm after too long underwater.
most evenings they walked together, their shadows stretching long against the quiet streetlights, steps syncing into something more than chance. paw always said, i want to learn you always, and papá would smile, the kind of smile that stitched itself into memory.
when love needed saying, it came soft but certain.
“i love you,” papá would say.
“and i love you,” paw would answer, “como la luna.”
like the moon—constant in its shifting, faithful even in absence, offering light without asking for anything in return.
click to continue reading
on their walks they would trade secrets, laughter, even silence. sometimes they shared a body-double—sitting so close they blurred into one shape. the air around them held a warmth that did not fade with distance.
to love like this was to know that stars weren’t above but inside, scattered across skin, stitched into heartbeats. it was a friendship that didn’t stop at the edges of romance, a devotion that could carry itself beyond naming.
one night, looking up at the silver arc above, papá squeezed paw’s hand and whispered, “if love is like the moon, then even when it hides, we’ll know it is still there.”
and paw, eyes reflecting starlight, only said, “always. como la luna”
tenderedge
posted august 26, 2025
love does not promise ease.
it arrives as a cosmic duality—
both balm and burn,
miracle and monstrosity,
woven into the same fabric.
to love at its fullest is to enter a universe
where light and shadow share a sky,
where tenderness and ache
speak the same language of becoming.
click to continue reading
i want to believe love can be shaped
toward softer constellations,
but i also know it will always carry
its jagged stars,
its edges that cut as much as they illuminate.
perhaps the work is not to erase its sharpness,
but to refuse forgetting
that beauty is born there too.
that even in monstrosity
there is a pulse that insists on wonder.
so i keep walking beneath it—
not turning from the ache,
not turning from the radiance,
but letting them rise together in me,
two celestial lanterns
guiding a heart still learning
its own orbit.
the hum of galaxies
posted august 24, 2025
to become is not a line,
not a steady march forward—
it is the unfurling of galaxies
inside the chest,
stars spilling into places
that once thought themselves empty.
unfolding is tidal, messy.
like petals unsure if the sun will stay,
like the moon shedding silver skin
to remind us it is never whole,
only ever in process.
click to continue reading
i once mistook stillness for failure.
but the cosmos teaches otherwise:
nebulae linger for eons
before they blaze into sight,
and silence is sometimes
the only language vast enough
to hold becoming.
so i let myself be that—
a constellation not yet named,
a tide pulling toward unseen shores,
a seed swelling underground
in the dark and in the waiting.
expansiveness is not endlessness.
it is the permission
to hold contradiction,
to be both tender sprout and weathered stone,
to be arrival and departure
at once.
and so i unfold—
a becoming too wide to be contained,
a soft explosion,
the hum of galaxies
still singing me into form.
what in the hypothetical realms?!
posted august 21, 2025
a short story for my-friend-K
once upon a time, there was a young adventurer named K.
K was not just any adventurer—they were a keeper of wisdom and words.not ordinary words, either, but words that could open secret doors, make invisible creatures visible, and sometimes even turn a boring day into a story.
one afternoon, K was walking through the park, inventing new exclamations the way some people collect shiny rocks. Suddenly, a squirrel wearing a tiny red cape dashed past, carrying what looked like… a glowing acorn. K gasped and shouted their newest phrase:
“what in the hypothetical realms?!”
the words shimmered in the air like golden paint, and to K’s surprise,the words didn’t fade. they swirled together, spun faster and faster,and—whoosh!—a portal appeared right in front of them.
K peeked inside. the portal was filled with glittering bridges made of questions, rivers that hummed with possibilities, and clouds shaped like unfinished thoughts. it was the Hypothetical Realms themselves! a place where every “what if” became a world of its own.
click to continue reading
K took a step forward.
in one world, they saw a library where the books whispered back to the readers. in another, there were birds that sang riddles instead of songs. K laughed, shouted more favorite phrases, and each one spun into something new: a jellybean rainbow, a forest of glow sticks, a giant turtle wearing sneakers.
the realms were full of surprises, but k noticed something important: none of these worlds would have opened without their words. K’s imagination was the key that made everything possible.
at last, K stepped back through the portal, which winked closed behind them. the squirrel with the cape gave a little power-to-the-people fist before scampering away.
from that day on, whenever K exclaimed, “what in the hypothetical realms?!” they—and everyone nearby—remembered that imagination is not just silly or fun—it’s powerful magic that can build whole worlds.
and K, the young wisdom-word-keeper, kept inventing, kept exploring, and kept showing everyone around them that sometimes the best adventures begin with a single surprise.
love from the naeborhood
citations for care
posted august 19, 2025
they said it was unlawful
to hand food to a neighbor
without papers, permits, permission.
unlawful to share warmth
unless the city could measure it,
stamp it, sell it back to us.
so they wrote me a ticket:
$1,500 or a day in a cage.
not for theft, not for harm,
but for loving out loud.
i sat on the cold bench,
fluorescent hum drilling my head,
remembering the soft thank yous,
the eye contact that whispered:
you see me. i exist. i matter.
no fine can erase that.
click to continue reading
in this system:
mercy becomes offense.
generosity becomes crime.
survival becomes trespass.
neighbor becomes suspect.
but in the naeborhood we remember:
a sandwich is a sermon.
a blanket is a testimony.
a nod is an archive.
all of it evidence of life.
let them write their citations.
we will write rememory.
on benches, on corners, in breath—
proof that hunger met love
and lived another day.
breathmath
posted august 19, 2025
there are no monsters.
there is only monstrosity—
the choices, the equations,
the decisions made with a steady hand and no trembling
about who must be sacrificed
so that someone else’s “greater good” can live.
and yet—
i know monsters too.
but not as the world names them.
monsters as beings made of too-muchness:
too tender, too haunted, too alive.
dangerous only because they survived,
wrong only because survival does not obey
the order that power wants to write.
click to continue reading
a monster is not a thing to fear.
it is the story of what the world has exiled,
coming home in our own bodies.
sometimes sacred, sometimes shadow,
sometimes shimmering rage,
sometimes soft resistance.
a creature of echoes and return.
so when people justify monstrosity—
sacrificing others in the name of salvation—
they will call those they discard “monsters.”
but i know better.
the real horror is not the ones made too much for this world,
but the ones who keep redefining “good”
until the cost of breathing is written on someone else’s chest.
and i will not do that math.
i will not believe in monsters.
i will believe in us—
in the sacredness of every pulse,
in the refusal to make someone’s life expendable
to balance a story that was never theirs to write.
spinekeepers
posted august 13, 2025
i think of vultures—
the only creatures who’ve never learned to hunt,
yet survive because something else has ended.
they follow the scent of endings,
the quiet chemistry of decay
calling them like a drumbeat only they can hear.
eyes first.
then skin, soft and loosening from the frame.
then muscle, and the slow unthreading of what once moved.
always leaving the spine,
as if to say: this part still belongs to the earth.
click to continue reading
they love the brain—
the place where dreams and dangers once sparked—
as if they are carrying away the stories too.
and i think:
maybe some of us are vultures in another skin.
maybe we know how to live off what’s been abandoned.
maybe we, too, are here to make use of what’s been left,
to keep the world from drowning in its own remains.
not destroyers.
not thieves.
spinekeepers.
the warm wood, the shifting steel
posted august 10, 2025
some people are transformers—
built from sparks and grit,
wired for change,
shifting shape in the thick of the storm.
they hear the hum beneath the noise
and know how to reroute it,
how to turn pain into something electric.
others are benchwarmers—
not bad, not good, just still.
watching from the sidelines,
hands resting where they’ve always rested,
waiting for the game to end or start again.
maybe they’ve got the heart for it,
maybe they’ve got the skill,
but the weight of their own stillness
keeps them anchored to the wood.
i’ve been both.
transformer when survival said
“move or be dismantled.”
benchwarmer when my bones
needed the mercy of pause.
click to continue reading
you can survive the worst night
and still see the sun if you let it.
moving forward isn’t always a sprint;
sometimes it’s the quiet click
of a gear finding its place.
some days,
i am metal bending into a new self.
some days,
i am wood, warm and unmoving,
listening for the whistle
that calls me back in.
either way—
i let it all work out.
the compass in my soles
posted august 9, 2025
sometimes, leaving isn’t the end.
it’s the slow unfurl of something you didn’t know was waiting.
you pack your bag,
fold the soft things,
tuck in the sharp things too.
you close the door behind you,
and for a moment, it feels like loss—
like letting go of a railing on a steep set of stairs.
but the truth is,
each step away is also a step toward.
click to continue reading
toward air that doesn’t make you shrink.
toward rooms where your name isn’t an apology.
toward mornings that begin without dread curled in your belly.
toward the people who will see you and not just your use.
walking away isn’t just departure—
it’s direction.
it’s choosing the horizon instead of the corner.
it’s trusting that the road bends toward your becoming.
and maybe,
maybe you aren’t just leaving them behind.
maybe you’re meeting yourself up ahead.
what the ledger will never name
posted august 5, 2025
#DisabilityTooWhite wins every damn time.
especially when they can pluck a white person — already padded by generational wealth and safety nets — and frame it as “being in it for the right reasons.”
because in their eyes, sacrifice isn’t survival.
in their eyes, a body like mine
is too messy to lead.
too much truth in it.
too much reminder of the cost.
i am begging the arts, the nonprofit world, the so-called disability justice spaces:
stop turning wage gaps into pretty charts for funders and start asking—
what does this gap look like in a body?
in a Black, queer, trans, disabled body,
in a body with no cushion to fall back on,
in a body that can’t just “wait until the grant comes through”
because rent is due,
because the light bill is due,
because survival is a daily invoice that privilege never has to pay.
click to continue reading
these gaps are not abstract.
they are the reason one person can say yes to unpaid labor “for the cause”
while another has to turn down the same opportunity and be branded
as uncommitted.
these gaps are the reason leadership still smells like white saviorism dressed in accessible fonts.
the data is not the story.
the story is the body.
and some of us have been paying with ours for far too long.
not the crops, it’s the soil
posted july 30, 2025
before i knew the words for extraction,
i knew what it felt like.
to give and give and give,
until people praised the fruit but never tended the root.
click to continue reading
they say—
grow.
produce.
heal.
give back.
give more.
keep going.
they don’t ask if the ground is cracked.
if the water’s been poisoned.
if the soil ever got a chance to rest.
so i’ve stopped asking what’s wrong with my harvest.
and started asking who forgot to feed the land.
who walked across me without listening.
who left their weight but never stayed to witness.
it’s not the crops.
it’s the soil.
it’s me.
it’s all the places i’ve been planted but never truly held.
it’s the miracle that i still bloom at all.
and now—
i compost what didn’t serve me.
i mulch my grief into nourishment.
i name my needs like sunlight.
i name my boundaries like rain.
if i grow again, it won’t be to feed a world that drains me.
it’ll be because the soil was finally seen.
because someone asked,
are you okay down there?
what do you need?
because someone stayed,
not for the fruit—
but for the tending.
for the tending.
for the tending.
what comes after before
posted july 28, 2025
what comes after before?
i’ve been asking this in the quiet moments — the ones between action and ache.
the ones where the world softens and i can finally hear my bones whisper.
before was the stretch of waiting.
the breath held.
the plan made in case the plan fell through.
before was a dream deferred, not denied — but maybe doubted.
before was gathering. nesting. preparing. hoping.
click to continue reading
and then the after came.
not loud, not grand.
just… here.
a shift. a sigh. a soft now what?
what comes after before is not always a clean answer.
sometimes it’s grief.
not for what happened — but for who we were when we still believed it might.
sometimes it’s freedom.
or the fear of it.
because even liberation can feel like falling when you’re used to clutching.
what comes after before is the slow recalibration.
the meeting of self where the timeline cracked.
the understanding that maybe the point was never to arrive,
but to feel the shift in your own gravity.
after-before is the place i write from.
not quite past. not quite future.
a cusp.
a becoming.
a deep breath that remembers the one before it,
and still dares to draw another.
in kinship with sex workers
posted july 27, 2025
ours is a lineage of survival, care, and ingenuity.
i think about the ways bodies have been bartered, claimed, taken.
and the power it holds when we reclaim them.
when we name our own worth.
when we set our own terms.
when we move for ourselves and for each other.
click to continue reading
i write this not from the outside, but from a place of kinship.
as someone shaped by the violences of this world
and the tendernesses we make in response.
as someone who knows what it means to be seen as a body before a being—
and still, to love and live anyway.
i stand with sex workers not because it’s a trending politic,
but because it’s home.
because the fight for disability justice,
for trans freedom,
for Black and brown queer survival,
for bodily autonomy—
they’re not separate fights.
they’re braided.
interwoven.
stitched into the same cloth.
i see sex work as skill.
as strategy.
as somatics.
as art.
as resource redistribution.
as boundary work.
as intuition.
as hustle.
as healing.
as work.
and i honor it with my whole chest.
with my quiet and my loud.
with my platform and my pocket, when i can.
with my listening.
with my making.
with my rage.
with my softness.
to every sex worker—
current, former, aspiring, and unseen:
you deserve safety.
you deserve celebration.
you deserve rest, riches, and respect.
you deserve the world.
and you’re not alone.
not now.
not ever.
velvet bag, glass crown
posted july 25, 2025
i’ve never tasted crown royal.
never needed to.
just seeing the bottle—the deep purple velvet bag, the gold rope string, the crown stamped into the glass—is enough to stir something in me.
my father used to say it like it was a joke, like it was funny.
that i was an accident baby.
that he and my mother were drunk on crown royal the night i was conceived.
i don’t remember when he first told me, only that he told me more than once.
maybe because he thought it was a story worth repeating.
maybe because he wanted me to know he remembered something about that night, even if it was through the haze of liquor.
click to continue reading
and me?
i don’t know what to do with that kind of origin story.
part myth, part warning, part bruise you stop noticing until someone presses it.
was i an accident? sure.
but i was also a consequence of desire, of escape, of trying to feel something through a bottle and a body.
doesn’t sound all that accidental to me.
sounds like i was born into the residue of what people do when they don’t know how to grieve properly.
or love properly.
or stay.
i don’t hate the story.
it’s just strange to carry something so sticky.
like every time i pass a liquor aisle or see someone order crown on the rocks, i’m reminded of the night no one meant to make me.
but they did.
and here i am.
sometimes i wonder what it would feel like to have a conception story held in softness.
a story that starts with intention or love or even just sober clarity.
but then again—
i come from real life.
real mess.
real blood.
and maybe that, too, is a kind of miracle.
maybe surviving the aftermath of someone else’s blurred night
is a testament to my sharpness.
to my choice to be here, even if no one else chose it on purpose.
i am not crown royal.
i am what came after.
and maybe—
just maybe—
that’s the part that matters most.
the weight of 650
posted july 19, 2025
some laws are written like cages.
in 1978, michigan passed something called the “650-lifer law.”
it meant that if you were caught with 650 grams or more of heroin or cocaine —
you would be sentenced to life in prison.
no parole.
no release.
just steel and silence.
that’s about a pound and a half.
a bag of rice.
a baby born early.
click to continue reading
they called it a war on drugs,
but it looked a lot more like a war on Black and Brown people.
a war on grief.
on poverty.
on systems already set up to fail.
how many of us lost kin to that war?
not just to bars —
but to the silence after.
the family photos with one person always missing.
the graduations with one seat left open.
the holidays with one less voice at the table.
i think about how grief gets criminalized.
how addiction, survival, and abandonment get bundled into a box labeled “criminal,”
taped shut by white fear and state punishment.
and how many people were sentenced to die in those boxes.
the law was overturned in 1998 —
but what about the people still locked up from before?
what about the ones who didn’t make it out?
what about the cost of losing someone for 20 years,
30 years,
forever?
sometimes abolition feels too big to name.
but today, it feels like saying their names.
it feels like refusing to forget.
it feels like writing down the truth,
even when it trembles.
some laws are written like cages.
and some of us were born learning how to bend the bars with memory.
after the showcase – staying, seen
posted july 15, 2025
last night i read a story out loud that used to only live inside me.
a story that curled up in my ribs like a prayer.
a story i once wrote in quiet,
for the ones who know how survival hums through teeth and trembles.
and people heard it.
not just with ears—but with presence.
with that kind of lean-in softness that says i’m with you.
i looked up while reading and saw eyes that weren’t just looking
they were witnessing.
and for the first time in a long time,
i didn’t shrink under the weight of being visible.
i stayed.
like the story asked me to.
the staying kind isn’t just the name of what i wrote—
it’s what happened in that room.
it’s who we were together for those minutes.
a room of stayers. of still-here-ers.
of people who know what it means to hold grief in one hand and glitter in the other.
click to continue reading
i left a basket of resin fidgets on the table—
little anchors for anxious fingers, small offerings from the naeborhood.
and it felt right.
to give without asking, to trust the hands who needed them would find them.
one person held a fidget close and said,
“thank you. i didn’t know i needed this.”
and that was it.
that was the point.
i felt roady near my feet the whole time,
his steadiness mirroring mine.
he knows when i’m stretching into something brave.
he stayed too.
and maybe that’s what last night was—
a lesson in staying.
not in a place,
but in a truth.
in a voice.
in a softness that didn’t need to be defended.
i think i’m learning how to be the staying kind,
not just in what i write,
but in how i exist.
and that feels holy.
the staying kind
posted july 14, 2025
this story was first shared aloud at the queer short films and stories showcase on july 11, 2025, hosted by twelve gates arts in philadelphia. it was my first time showcasing a short story at an art gallery, and the moment felt holy. to be witnessed in softness and story, to wear overalls hand-painted in theme, and to be accompanied by my service dog roady—was all a tender kind of becoming.
before you begin, i just want to say: thank you for being here. this story is stitched with memory, care, and cosmic softness. if you’ve ever loved deeply, lost quietly, or longed to be real in someone’s eyes—i hope you find something kind in these lines.
below, you’ll find the full story, as well as my artist statement and bio shared during the event. thank you for reading, for staying, and for seeing me.
click to continue reading
short story
the staying kind
in the quiet corner of a small, overgrown backyard in north philly,
where cracked concrete meets wild grass and moonflowers climb the fence like whispered prayers,
a child once buried a threadbare stuffed horse beneath thick vines.
the child was seven—full of questions with no easy answers.
the horse, called cariño, was worn from years of love:
one button eye missing,
a leg half-empty of stuffing,
seams unraveling like fading memories.
but to the child,
cariño was magic—more than cloth and thread.
some nights,
when the moon hung low and full,
heavy and warm like a mother’s gaze,
cariño seemed to glow softly in the dark.
the child whispered wishes into cariño’s stitched ears,
breath warm and hopeful:
“make me real too.”
time folded like waves.
the vine grew thicker,
curling like a secret embrace.
the child grew too,
but not how they imagined.
they became a soft-shelled adult—
someone who folded away wild questions,
who forgot how to say wishes out loud or expect answers.
the magic of cariño became a quiet ache,
a faint light flickering in the dark.
until they met him.
he didn’t try to fix cracks or smooth broken edges.
didn’t blink or flinch when captions were needed,
or when hands fluttered instead of words.
he simply stayed—steady, patient, present—
long enough that staying stopped feeling like a surprise
and started to feel like a promise.
they called him papá.
not because he demanded it or shared their blood,
but because he became the place where breath deepened and the world softened.
because he saw them—truly saw them—
in all their scattered, quiet beauty,
the spaces between words.
he didn’t tuck them in at night.
but he left water by the bed,
gentle and reliable.
he sent texts about the moon’s phase,
a secret language for two who knew how to find light in darkness.
he picked them up when spirals spun wild.
he called them his little tide—
ebbing and flowing,
always part of something bigger.
one slow summer evening,
on a porch bathed in soft gold light,
he said quietly,
“i see you, nae. you don’t have to become anything else for me to love you.”
in that moment,
something inside them—like the skin horse from a long-buried story—
started glowing again,
a light never fully gone.
[journal entry – tucked in between the lines of memory]
there is something I didn’t say enough when we had time—
maybe because I didn’t know how yet.
maybe I hadn’t grown fully into the kind of real that can look back without breaking,
that carries memory and still moves forward.
if I had the chance to chance again,
i’d say this:
you made me believe in staying.
not just in a place,
but in a becoming.
they say
in the story of the skin horse,
you become real when someone really loves you—
not just for a moment,
but all the way through.
and once you are real,
they say,
you don’t mind being hurt.
that’s not quite true.
i minded it deeply.
i still do.
but maybe real doesn’t mean pain stops.
maybe it means you love deeper anyway.
and I loved you.
como la luna. like the moon.
quiet but constant.
whole even in pieces.
always returning.
you saw me in ways the world never tried to.
you were my mirror in the dark,
my soft instruction.
you were my papá—
not a title,
but a name stitched in closeness,
in sweetness,
in love that takes its time.
even my stuffed horse was named for sweetness—
cariño—because even then,
i was learning how to carry tenderness.
even when I didn’t know how to be held,
you tried.
even when I pulled away,
i think you knew I was scared,
not ungrateful.
even when I was scattered,
you called me your little tide.
i wanted to be someone you could rest with,
not just someone you poured into.
i wanted to build with you—
something tender,
something that could last longer than our silences.
i wanted to be enough.
and maybe I was.
maybe I still am.
if i had the chance to chance again,
i would listen with the patience of stars.
i would braid joy into our hard days.
i would write you more poems,
leave soft things in your coat pockets.
i would remind you that even when you felt far away,
you were never unloved.
you were never not mine
in the way only chosen love can be.
you taught me to take care.
to slow down.
to speak even when my voice trembled.
you reminded me to soften without breaking.
to shine anyway.
like the moon. como la luna.
if you ever feel small,
if you ever doubt your worth,
remember this:
i loved you then.
i love you now.
como la luna.
even if you never read this.
even if we never sit across from each other again.
even if the skin horse in me stays quiet in the corner,
a little more threadbare than before.
you made me real.
and i carry you still.
in the marrow,
in the remembering.
in the moonlight.
always,
your nae
always becoming
como la luna.
epilogue
years after he leaves—gone to another city,
or maybe just to another kind of silence—
they return to the backyard.
the vine has grown wild,
thick with stories of seasons past.
gently,
they dig beneath the moonflower,
hands trembling with hope and reverence.
they find cariño,
soft and glowing still,
more threadbare but somehow more alive.
when they lift the horse from the earth,
something inside them settles—
a quiet knowing that roots deep and stretches wide.
they are real.
not because they were held together by another’s hands,
but because they kept loving,
even when it hurt.
because they stayed.
in the becoming.
like the moon.
artist statement
“the staying kind” is a soft offering—stitched from memory, imagination, grief, and love. it asks what it means to become real—not in the shiny, polished sense, but in the raw, tender way that comes from being deeply seen and held. this story draws inspiration from the velveteen rabbit, especially the skin horse’s wisdom: that realness is born from love. that once you are real, you don’t mind being hurt. but as someone who has moved through trauma, gender journeys, disability, and healing, i wanted to offer complexity to that idea. in this piece, becoming real is not just about being loved—it’s about staying. staying with your softness, your wounds, your chosen family. staying with the parts of yourself you once buried.
at the heart of the story is a relationship shaped by chosen closeness and deep care. the narrator—like me—is neurodivergent, trans, and hard of hearing, in quiet relationship with the moon. their journey mirrors my own: learning to be loved by someone who didn’t try to fix me, but stayed. someone who helped me become more myself, simply by showing up again and again.
the stuffed horse in the story is named cariño, spanish for “darling” or “sweetheart,” to honor the quiet tenderness we often carry alone. this story is my archival love letter to those of us who glow softly in the dark, who hold onto sweetness like a thread. to papá. como la luna.
as with all my work, this piece is a practice in collective care and accessible storytelling. it’s a reminder that becoming real is messy, nonlinear, and full of quiet magic. and it’s about the moon. always the moon.
thank you for reading. thank you for staying.
artist bio
nae vallejo (they/he) is a Black, disabled, AuDHD, deaf, queer-trans experiential archivist, and service animal guardian living in philadelphia. their work lives at the intersection of storytelling, accessibility, and transformation—centering the textures of disabled, Black, queer life not as spectacle, but as sacred. he is the creator behind naeborhood projects, a mycelial offering of grief, care, and color—a space where tenderness and access take shape in tangible form. through writing, visual art, and memory-work, nae explores what it means to stay, to become, and to be seen.
photos from the showcase
always becoming,
—nae ♡
the archive is not the end
posted july 10, 2025
some bonds stretch past their shape, long after the softness is gone. long after the laughter dries up and the names you once said like prayer start to taste like questions.
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there are connections i’ve held too tightly—not because i wanted to stay, but because leaving felt like failure. like i was breaking some sacred pact i didn’t even remember agreeing to.
but i’m learning:
you don’t have to name something to know when it’s done.
you don’t need the full map to trust the exit.
some promises only made sense inside the storm that birthed them.
and if survival wrote them, i’m allowed to rewrite them now.
just because the archive can be a place i leave
doesn’t always mean cutting the tie completely—
sometimes it’s a shifting-knowing,
a reordering of how the story lives inside me.
i’m allowed to put things in an order i can breathe around—
even if someone else wanted it to stay exactly where it was.
even if they don’t agree with my remembering.
so today, i let myself out of the archive.
not because the memories aren’t real,
but because i am.
and i’m not the same shape i was
when those stories began.
and maybe that’s the most loving thing i can do—
to choose breath.
to choose freedom.
to choose me.
always becoming
not a bystander in my own becoming
posted july 9, 2025
another heartbreak by the movement. i wish i could say i’m surprised. but i’m not.
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what i am—is tired. of being inside the machine and still disposable. of building something with my whole heart and having to beg for my wholeness to be seen.
i don’t just do the work. i shape it. embrace it. with care, with rhythm, with access in my bones. i offer breath to projects—my Black trans disabled body anchoring the very ground it rests on.
and yet.
still. dissonance. still, a quiet shrug dressed as gratitude. still, a reminder that even here—even here—my labor is praised but not held. my limits named but not honored.
what does it mean to build a disability justice platform and ignore the body holding the bricks?
i don’t want to become hardened. but this? this is why i stay soft and sharp. why i say no more while still typing out the last uploads with tenderness. because i do not abandon what i built. but i will not abandon myself to finish it, either.
i stand by my choice. to honor my embodied sense of value. to let clarity be louder than performance. to leave—not in shame, but in self-respect.
because if i don’t protect my spirit, who will?
and maybe this is also part of the work: learning when to step back, when to let go, when to say this is not care, even if it’s covered in kind words.
so i will finish what’s mine to finish. and then i will go. not empty—but knowing.
i am the record and the remembering
posted july 9, 2025
i wrote myself a love letter today.
not on paper, not with ink.
but with the way i let the sun touch my skin without apology.
with the way i let the wind part my curls like prayer.
with the way i didn’t rush my breath.
click to continue reading
i whispered:
“you are the moon’s favorite secret.”
and i believed it.
because i am.
because somehow, against all the odds,
i am still here.
not just surviving—becoming.
folding the ache into something tender,
holding it like the sacred teacher it is.
this love letter was not made of declarations.
it was made of small choices.
soft pauses.
refusals to abandon myself.
and it hit me—
this love i am learning to give myself?
this slow, spiraled, spiritholding love?
it stretches.
past the edges of my name.
past every time someone tried to unmake me.
past survival, into stardust.
into the roots of trees that never needed permission to grow crooked.
into you. into us.
into all-all.
because how can i write a love letter to my own breath
without honoring the breath of every being who has ever been asked to quiet their truth to be loved?
how can i cherish my scars without cradling the soft in others too?
i am not separate.
i am a galaxy in conversation with yours.
we are not meteors colliding—
we are constellations remembering.
re-membering.
piecing the holy back together.
so yes, this love letter is to myself—
the me who limps some days, who glows others, who keeps choosing to show up anyway.
but it is also to you.
and to every survivor,
every misfit,
every dreamer with their back against the wall
and their heart still open.
may this love letter find you.
may you know it is for you, too.
may you write your own,
and let it echo across time.
because loving myself like this—
fully, wildly, without edit—
is a liberation hymn.
a revolution of breath.
a map back to the all-all we have always been.
and i am learning,
slowly, surely, divinely—
that is enough.
on movement, relation and care
posted july 7, 2025
there is an ache i have been keeping company with lately.
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the kind that shows up in my jaw, in my belly, in the pause i take before speaking in rooms where i am supposed to feel safe.
autonomy.
we throw that word around like it’s freedom.
like it’s inherently liberatory.
but what is autonomy when it doesn’t root itself in the collective?
when it forgets the people it’s in relation to?
when it doesn’t listen, doesn’t ask, doesn’t wonder how its actions might ripple?
i’ve witnessed autonomy be used like armor.
like escape.
like justification for moving without accountability.
and i get it—survival teaches us to move fast, to move first, to move solo.
but there’s a difference between choosing yourself
and refusing to consider anyone else.
i don’t want autonomy that isolates.
i want autonomy that breathes with people.
that remembers we’re interconnected.
that doesn’t confuse sovereignty with entitlement.
to me, autonomy with collective process is care in action.
it’s slow.
it’s not always clean or easy or pretty.
but it’s real.
and when we mess up—and we will—we return.
we re-root.
we revisit.
we recalibrate.
because we are building something bigger than any one of us.
and we shape it together.
so today i’m asking myself:
where do i need to pause?
where do i need to be more curious?
how can i stay rooted in autonomy and integrity?
what does it mean to move in freedom without fracturing my people?
i’m not interested in being above or ahead.
i’m interested in being with.
always learning,
always returning,
always loving.
honoring the edge of knowing and not knowing
posted july 3, 2025
there is a rhythm in the cosmos that pulses not only outward but inward. the stars do not only burn to light up the sky for others — they also burn because it is their nature to burn.
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and still, how often are we taught to only shine outward? how often are we praised for our awareness of suffering, for how much we carry, how much we hold, how many wounds we witness?
but what of the ache inside?
what of the soft questions — what do i want? what do i need?
when a dear one says, “i am just realizing i do not know my own desires,” i hear the bravery in that moment. the quiet revolution of naming a gap inside a self that has so long been asked to pour out.
the world demands our empathy — and rightfully so, in many ways. the world is aching. but the world is also us. and if we deny our own needs in the name of compassion, are we not also perpetuating a forgetting?
there is no shame in not knowing your desires.
there is no failure in arriving late to your own longings.
there is only time, and tide, and tenderness.
to begin the path of knowing oneself is not to abandon the world — it is to re-enter it more wholly. more rooted.
i honor your unfolding.
i honor the you who kept going without knowing what you wanted.
i honor the you who is now listening, gently, for the whispers inside.
this is a sacred duality:
you can hold the grief of the world and listen to the beat of your own becoming.
you can weep for others and reach for what brings you joy.
you can be disoriented in the self and still be a sanctuary for others.
may you remember:
you are not selfish for seeking yourself.
you are stardust returning to the center.
always, in all ways,
you are allowed to want.
you are allowed to need.
you are allowed to become.
like the moon
a caged bird / imitations of life
posted july 1, 2025
this piece was moved by the song “a caged bird / imitations of life” by The Cinematic Orchestra featuring Roots Manuva.
the body doesn’t lie. and when mine moves—spins, stims, pulses, pauses— it tells the truth i often can’t say out loud. this isn’t performance. this is permission.
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today i danced to a song that has followed me like shadow and sun.
a caged bird / imitations of life— even the title sounds like me.
sounds like what it means to be Black, queer, trans, autistic, disabled,
to know the ache of being clipped, silenced, underestimated.
to live inside systems that mimic freedom but never quite offer it.
i move not to escape but to exhale.
i stim because my body is wise—
because sometimes rocking is the only thing that keeps me from collapsing.
because flapping, jumping, swaying… they’re my forms of staying.
my ways of saying: i am here. still.
i think about cages a lot.
not always the metal kind—
but the ones made of expectations, of gazes, of pity, of policy.
and i think about the way my joy still spills over anyway.
about how rhythm lives in my bones,
how my disabled body dances with truth
even when the world denies me a stage.
this stim is not for spectacle.
this is reverence. ritual. record.
this is what it looks like to be uncontained for a moment.
to be a caged bird mid-song.
to remember that even imitation has rhythm—
but freedom? freedom feels like this.
emergence
posted june 26, 2025
currently featured as a grounding entry for the journal.
this pencil sketch is a self-portrait of me mid-scream, with plants, mushrooms, and butterflies erupting from my mouth. It’s a visual language for how stimming feels in my body—simultaneously a release and a return, a translation of sensation into expression.
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My scream in this piece isn’t always audible—it represents the internal and external movement of stimming: rocking, flapping, pacing, breath, stillness, sound. This is what it means to let my body express without apology. I am Black, Caddo, Mexican, queer, trans, disabled, hard-of-hearing and a service dog guardian. I navigate a world that often demands my silence and composure. I created this piece as a form of resistance to that. Stimming is how I regulate, how I express, how I survive—and how I come home to myself. It carries layers of emotional release, sensory integration, gender euphoria, unmasking, and spiritual connection. This artwork holds all of that.
The mushrooms and butterflies emerging from my mouth aren’t decoration—they’re witness and transformation. Mushrooms are a deep metaphor for me: they grow in complex, unseen mycelial networks; they emerge when conditions allow. Like many of my stims, they live in quiet until they rise. The butterflies reflect the moment of metamorphosis—of reclaiming my body and its movements. They hold softness and motion, transition and freedom. The plants and foliage honor the natural, ever-growing parts of myself I access through stimming.
This drawing was itself a stim. The act of sketching—layering lines, repeating textures, moving pencil across paper—became a way to process and self-regulate. In a world that often demands I explain myself, art lets me be whole without translation. My hands drew until I felt my way back into my body. This piece is part memory, part sensory imprint, part prayer.
Stimming is often framed as something to hide or “manage,” especially in public or social settings. But for me, it’s sacred. It is the language of my nervous system, my spirit, and my survival. It helps me hold what feels too big. It gives shape to emotions that words can’t always contain. I stim not just when I’m overwhelmed, but when I’m alive—grieving, grounded, joyful, uncertain, free.
This drawing speaks for moments I’ve had to mask, moments I’ve been told I’m too much, and moments I’ve carved space for myself anyway. It is a sensory map of what it means to unmask and emerge—over and over again. Art is how I communicate when I can’t find words. Stimming is how I breathe when breath feels heavy. Together, they remind me I am not too much. I am enough, exactly as I am.
paying homage
posted june 20, 2025
there is something about memory that feels wet to me. not sharp like glass or heavy like stone— but soaked through. slow. seeping.
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when toni morrison said water has a perfect memory, i felt something old inside me stir. not a sadness exactly. more like… recognition. like my bones were nodding in agreement before my brain caught up.
because i know what it is to carry memory like water. not in a straight line. not with clarity or consent. but in the way a flood carries pieces of a home without asking. or the way mist clings to the morning, even after the night is done.
i’ve spent years trying to name this ache in me— this quiet, rippling pull toward places i’ve never been, but somehow still know. a familiar tree i’ve never touched. a silence that sounds like a grandmother’s hum.
maybe i am water too. maybe the reason i circle the same wounds or dream the same shadows or weep at the smell of river mud is not because i’m broken— but because i remember.
i remember what the world wants me to forget. i remember the feel of safety, even if i’ve never had it here. i remember softness that didn’t need to be earned. i remember what it means to be held without question.
maybe my grief is just memory trying to go home. and maybe healing is not about fixing or forgetting— maybe healing is the honoring of tides. the slow, sacred process of returning.
so i let myself ebb today. i let the salt on my skin stay. i remind myself i am not lost. i am remembering. and water always finds its way back. so will i. so will we.
speaking in size 2 font
posted june 19, 2025
some days i feel like i speak in size 2 font. not quiet, exactly—just small. like a whisper typed on the edge of a page, curled in the corner of a loud world.
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like being fluent in nuance when everyone else wants declarations in bold, all-caps, sans serif.
i think my voice got small from needing to listen so hard.
being hard of hearing made me a specialist in subtext, a collector of tones, a decoder of silences.
i trained my body to tune into things most people ignore—shoulder dips, eye flicks, pauses.
i learned to read conversations like i read wind on leaves.
but the irony is, the more fluent i became in the invisible, the more my own words got swept under.
and when you’re a Black, queer, trans, disabled kid who knows too much and asks too deeply—you learn real fast that speaking in size 2 font is the safest way to still say what you mean.
you tuck your truths between breath and gesture.
you make art with the margins.
you let your resin cure under the weight of all that wasn’t said aloud.
in naeborhood projects, i think i’m trying to speak again—not louder, but wider.
not in a headline, but in texture.
i pour feelings into chessboards and checker tiles, each square a little punctuation mark of a story i wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear.
i wrap wire around stones the way i wish someone had wrapped their hands around mine when i was trying to become real.
people tell me my work is bold.
but what they don’t see is that everything bold i make started in size 2 font.
a glance toward a color.
a memory of my pup’s nose pressed into my palm.
a whisper of grief that grew mossy in the corner of my chest until i cracked it open and poured it into something that shimmered.
i don’t need to speak in size 72 to be heard.
i just want to be read with care.
like a love note scribbled in the fold of a book spine.
like closed captioning that doesn’t get in the way, but makes everything more true.
like ‘ohana whispered across the board in a game i made with my hands, waiting to be played.
dresses are emotional
posted june 9, 2025
i’ve been thinking lately about how a dress can hold memory. not just a memory of a moment, but memory of resistance, of softness, of reclamation.
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i didn’t grow up with dresses meaning “freedom.”
they were wrapped in danger, control, expectation.
they were sometimes handed to me as a weapon masked as beauty, a costume forced onto me when my body was already screaming “no.”
or they were completely denied—too soft, too femme, too wrong for someone like me.
but now, i get to decide what a dress means.
now, a dress is emotional.
it’s not about fashion. it’s about healing. about tracing back to the me who needed to feel beautiful and safe at the same time. about letting my legs breathe, about letting the wind touch parts of me that were once hidden or punished. about letting myself glimmer—in sequins, in joy, in public.
and i notice the way people look when i wear one. some don’t know where to place me. some smile wide. some turn away.
and i keep walking. because the real gaze that matters is the one i offer myself.
a dress, now, is my softness and my power.
it’s the little girl, the nonbinary being, the trans adult, the survivor, the artist, the whole and becoming me.
it’s an offering. a prayer. a dare.
a mirror.
a moment of saying:
i am here.
naeborhood projects 