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.
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
sometimes being above it all isn’t about distance. it’s about breath.
the snow kept everything quiet. even the city below. as if the cold had pressed pause.
i wasn’t looking for anything. just letting the light reflect off the ice and the railing hold my weight for a minute longer than usual.
a counter.
a cortado.
a book that doesn’t let you look away.
the sugar on the pastry barely held. like the light outside—thin, unsure.
i wasn’t reading to learn. not exactly. more like remembering with someone who already knew.
there are days when survival is this: coffee warm, pages open, grief in the margins.
the sun was generous. the grass didn’t mind. but the quiet felt too practiced.
i spoke because not speaking would have been a kind of surrender. not to correct. not to clarify. but to stay present, even when presence felt like exposure.
this is where the wealth came in. sugar. cotton. tobacco. extraction and enclosure made into ornament.
the names are still here— merchant, plantation, st. vincent— not by accident. this city remembers through what it refuses to rename.
i walk this route not to map it, but to feel where the archive ends.
this dérive isn’t about finding answers. it’s about tracking the infrastructure of forgetting. what the buildings obscure. what the street names naturalize. what passes for neutral.
these façades aren’t just stone. they’re policy. they’re inheritance. they’re proof that the empire never left— just rebranded.
i wasn’t here for this. just passing through— a few hours between panels across town, a few steps off schedule.
but the building held something. not promise exactly. just presence. age without apology. history without invitation.
i looked up and thought: maybe.
