Iris

Suppose I write the word iris on a piece of paper in the middle of May

Just that one word.

I tuck it into an envelope

Then I walk the letter down the hill.

And when you open it, maybe weeks from now, standing under the hard white light of some ordinary Tuesday, you will understand immediately that it wasn’t about the flower.

I was writing about the way we survived each other

About those majestic purple irises blooming near the fence line, extravagant as queens in leaf debris

How they opened overnight without asking permission from the world.

I was writing about your body beside mine in the quiet mornings.

The warmth of your shoulder. Your thigh. 

Your hair still carrying the scent of sleep.

Coffee between us while neither one of us spoke because the silence itself had become trustworthy.

That’s rare now.

Most people are exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix.

Too much noise.

Too much performance.

Everybody branding themselves like cattle beneath glowing screens while the soul sits somewhere off to the side waiting patiently to be noticed again.

But with you, I remember moments that escaped all that.

Standing on the porch at dusk watching hummingbirds dive bomb and squeal

The air thick with coming rain and lily of the valley growing whether the world deserved them or not

And those irises.

How they held color the way certain people hold grief — fully, openly, without apology.

So if someday you receive a letter from me containing only that single word, know this:

Iris.

Meaning:

I remember the softness we made together in a brutal world.

Meaning:

Even now, some part of me is still standing on that porch beside you while summer gathers itself around our ankles.

Meaning:

I loved you in the quiet way perennial things love the earth — returning each season without needing to be asked.

Sometimes the heart opens quietly, like a door left unlocked for years.

Letting the Wild Wind Back In

She kept asking me to wear her worry, 

and eventually it wore me down. 

She handed me her worry so often

I started wearing it like my own.

She wanted me to carry her worry. 

After a while I couldn’t carry myself. 

I wore her worry so long it began to fit.

She draped her worry over my shoulders 

until I forgot what lightness felt like.

Her worry became a coat I never chose 

but somehow kept wearing.

Devastated, I found sanctuary on the ridge,

gratefully unbuttoning that coat

one stubborn button at a time 

letting the wild wind back in.

Accepting the gift of knowing 

what I’m not meant to carry. 

Exhumation

The strongest version of me

is buried under the habits

I was afraid to break.

Not dead.

Buried.

There is a difference.

She has been under there

all this time,

beneath the old coping,

the nervous explaining,

the swallowing of anger,

the making-do with crumbs

and calling it gratitude.

She has been waiting

beneath the agreements

I never should have signed

with my own silence.

Waiting beneath the fear

that if I stopped performing,

I would stop being loved.

But today

I arrive with a shovel.

Not to punish myself

for how long it took,

but to begin.

I dig through the people-pleasing.

I dig through the apology reflex.

I dig through the ancient belief

that my needs are a burden.

And there she is—

mud on her face,

fire in her eyes,

laughing a little

because of course

she was never gone.

I do not resurrect her.

I uncover her.

I wash the dirt

from her hands.

I give her back

her voice.

And when she stands,

the earth itself remembers

my name.

The Refusers Make the Future

We are watching a collective of fascist enablers being branded into false categories of difference.

Race. Queerness. Straightness. Style. Vibe. Language. Access. Identity as costume. Identity as cover. Identity as market segment.

The machine knows how to do this. It knows how to make people feel distinct while training them into the same obedience. It knows how to decorate compliance until it looks like courage. It knows how to sell domination in different fonts.

And underneath all that branding, people are making decisions with enormous consequences for other people’s lives. Decisions to support forces of violent domination. Decisions made through tiny, myopic lenses of immediate access, attention, personal comfort, career protection, and endless acquisition.

It is the bloody kitsch of our era. The camp of the unwilling. The spectacle of people standing next to slaughter and calling it strategy, nuance, pragmatism, adulthood, realism, electability, professionalism, or whatever word they need in order to stay invited.

And the hard truth is this: we all cooperate to some degree in order to stay functional.

We all make our little bargains. We all calculate what we can afford to lose. We all know there are doors that close when you say the real thing out loud. There are invitations that stop coming. There are rooms you are quietly removed from. There are people who do not argue with your refusal because they do not have to. They simply make you disappear.

So maybe the question now is not whether we are pure. We are not.

Maybe the question is: what are our limits?

What brutality train are we willing to step off, even if stepping off means losing access?

Even if it means acquiring stigma?

Even if it means being discounted, disrespected, mocked, misread, unfollowed, unfunded, uninvited?

Even if it means disappearing from the world that taught us visibility was the highest form of life?

Because there is another history, too. A long one.

There is a long history of refusers creating their own worlds. Their own countercultures. Their own rooms. Their own tables. Their own rituals of meaning. Their own language. Their own forms of beauty, loyalty, friendship, rebellion, and care.

Without money.

Without permission.

Without institutional blessing.

Without the approval of people whose approval was never worth having.

That is the part the machine always lies about. It tells us that exile is emptiness. It tells us that losing access means losing life. It tells us that being locked out is the same as being erased.

But culture has so often been made by the locked out.

The ones treated with contempt by the contemptible.

The ones who refused to keep mimicking corporate product and calling it self-expression. The ones who stopped mistaking brand for soul. The ones who understood that seductive self-importance is still obedience when it repeats the values of the empire.

There is a richness in creating your own meaning.

There is a richness in stepping outside the assigned script.

There is a richness in building a life that does not require you to clap for brutality just because the invitation came embossed.

And yes, stepping aside has consequences. Refusal is rarely romantic in the moment. It can be lonely. It can cost you status. It can cost you momentum. It can cost you the easy warmth of belonging to people who never intended to love you beyond your usefulness.

But there is something on the other side of refusal that cooperation cannot give.

Internal coherence.

Humane boldness.

A life that makes sense to itself.

And that may be where the future is made. Not in the branded rooms. Not in the bloody parties. Not among the people still posing beside the slaughter, hoping the lighting makes them look principled.

The future is made by the refusers.

The people who step off the brutality train and start walking.

The people who lose access and find one another.

The people who are willing to become illegible to the machine in order to become recognizable to themselves.