Littoral

i haven’t been back to italian class. not really a decision—more like a slow unthreading.

at first i missed one, then two. a message half-drafted. a reminder snoozed. now it’s just a tab i don’t open.

i think of them sometimes, conjugating without me. the schwa still soft in my mouth. still mine even if unused.

there was no rupture. no reason. just me, always a little too tired, a little too elsewhere. it’s not quite shame and not quite guilt. just the shape of absence when you let it stay.

i’ve left so many places like this. no goodbye, no explanation. not because it didn’t matter, but because it did— and i couldn’t hold it all.

the leaving is slow. partial. unfinished. like language. like me.

stood there teaching, not to perform, but to remember. to speak of what refuses extraction. to name what pulses under erasure. black keffiyeh against the chest, kiki futures on the screen. the room knew. not everything had to be said. some things shimmered between us.

the room knew what this one meant.

I've been thinking about home.

Not the theory of it. Not the political economy of housing or the sociology of belonging, though I know those too. I mean the thing that happens when the coffee is the right temperature and the snow outside is doing what snow does and nothing is required of me for the length of one cup.

I mean the weight of a book before I've opened it.

The world is on fire in the ways it's always been on fire and in new ways too. Gaza. Congo. The slow legislative dismantling of trans life. The far right finding new rooms to move into. I know how to hold this. I've been holding it. What I'm less practiced at is setting it down for twenty minutes without calling that abandonment.

But I've been noticing the small things that feel like home. Not home as destination or achievement. Home as what accumulates. The familiar smell of my own products in the bathroom. Cooking for myself after a long day as an act that's for me and nobody else. The moment before sleep when the day stops requiring anything.

For a Black queer person the argument that rest is resistance is not a self-help slogan. It's a structural observation. The world was not built to sustain me. Choosing to be sustained anyway is not a small thing.

I'm not good at writing this. My instinct is always toward the collective, the systemic, the argument that needs to be made. But I'm learning that home within myself is not a retreat from those things. It might be what makes them possible.

The quiet. The coffee. The snow. Still here.

they look out like they won. the water doesn't care.

naky held up a portrait like it was a mirror. virgínia quaresma— journalist, lesbian, afro-portuguese. forgotten by design. remembered anyway.

the tour wasn’t quiet. it moved. spoke back. refused the way history gets told without breath, without body.

the archive wasn’t in a museum. it was in his hands. in the cadence. in the way we stopped on cobblestones to make space for her name.

the slogans hang like memory. not exhibition. insistence.

from up here,   the city looks soft.   terracotta roofs,   blue sky,   sun warming the stone.

but i know what these walls were built for.   how far their reach once stretched.   what was claimed from here.   what was sent.

it’s beautiful.   it’s brutal.   it’s both.

sometimes the view   is part of the violence.

maybe this is what pause looks like. sun on porcelain. bridge in the distance. book barely opened. the city behind the cup isn’t waiting. it just moves. but for a moment, i don’t.