walked here with oriol. afternoon sun too bright to ignore. the sign said bonjour like it meant something, but i was already thinking about leaving.

met with malica this week— potential postdoc supervisor at beniba. submitted the queen’s predoc application too. if it all goes through, this might be my last summer here.

the city looked soft in the light— like it didn’t know i was saying goodbye.

drift doesn’t ask for arrival. just movement. just the soft ache of being somewhere you already know how to leave.

#tiohtiàke #walks #holdings #drift #traces

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 shame. not quite guilt either. 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 isn’t loud. it’s slow. partial. unfinished. like language. like me.

#tiohtiàke #fragments #refusals #traces #drift

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

#lisboa #refusals #traces #surfaces #drift

capitalismo mata-nos.   not on a banner.   not in a book.   just a trash bin, tagged   on a side street in lisboa.

the message was already decaying,   paint dripping down like it knew   no one was coming to fix this.

i didn’t take it as warning.   i took it as witness.

sometimes the clearest truths   live where you’re not supposed to look.

#lisboa #drift #refusals #traces #blackness #fragments

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.

#lisboa #drift #blackness #fragments #traces #refusals

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.

#lisboa #drift #traces #refusals #fragments #blackness

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.

#lisboa #surfaces #traces #drift #fragments

pride is protest. still.

#kjipuktuk #refusals #blackness #queerness #holdings #drift

after the burnout.   after the heart palpitations.   after the kind of anxiety that makes your body forget itself—   i left.

no email.   no calendar.   just this.   water on my thighs.   sun on my shoulder.   a queer resort where no one needed me   to explain why i came.

i didn’t heal.   not fully.   but i stopped bracing.

and for now,   that’s enough.

#cayoguillermo #drift #holdings #surfaces #fragments #queerness

i looked up and didn’t try to name any of them.

no constellations. no directions. just stars— scattered, distant, alive.

i don’t always need meaning. sometimes it’s enough to know something else is out there.

something beyond   what this world keeps asking me to carry.

#cayoguillermo #drift #fragments #traces #holdings #blackness