no caption needed. the city already said it.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #traces #surfaces

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

the conference ended. or maybe it didn’t. people lingered like the performance was still going. hallway laughter. cups half-full. a woman nodding too hard at nothing.

i had asked my question. black faces in every slide, but no data that spoke to us. just placement. just image.

the speaker deflected. clean. soft. the room let it happen.

i stepped outside. cold air, wet pavement, nothing sticking.

then he said it. ben énervé, hein? like anger was the problem. like clarity was a disruption. like i wasn’t still there.

i found him. calm. exact. you don’t get to narrate my presence.

he laughed. i didn’t.

i walked home with the cold in my hands. still here. still mine.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #traces

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

the slogans hang like memory. not exhibition. insistence.

#lisboa #refusals #traces #holdings #dérive

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

they still whisper her name like it’s dangerous. but this isn’t a whisper. it’s a scream, wheatpasted to brick. marie-josèphe angélique—enslaved, accused, executed. not for a crime, but for refusing to live quietly in a world built to crush her.

je me souviens, they say. but they don’t mean her. they mean the colony. they mean the order she tried to set fire to.

this paper will peel, fade, dissolve into dust. but she was never paper. she was kindling. and we’re still burning.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #traces #blackness #surfaces #fragments

theory. metaphor. refusal. how we stayed alive.

#tiohtiàke #queerness #holdings #fragments #refusals