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 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

the murals watched. we didn’t march fast. our orange shirts carried what couldn’t be said.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #traces #blackness

palestine in the frame. ballroom at the centre. blackness, unshaken.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #blackness #queerness #fragments #holdings

this city loves a moral lesson in spray paint.

#tiohtiàke #surfaces #traces #fragments

pink sky, mesh shirt, keffiyeh on the straps. joy is not the absence of struggle. it’s what we carry through it.

#tiohtiàke #queerness #holdings #refusals #surfaces #traces

we lay down because they can’t.

this was a die-in. healthcare workers, gathered in the middle of the city, bodies on the ground for gaza. we were there not just as clinicians, not just as queers, not just as people trained to care— but as witnesses to a system that pretends to be neutral while choosing a side. we already knew that silence wasn’t an accident. we’ve seen it before—in the wards, in the media, in the funding reports. but still, there’s something about laying your body down on cold ground that makes the grief feel sharper. and makes the refusal feel real.

my keffiyeh wasn’t a symbol. it was a practice. a reminder. a commitment to name genocide where others equivocate. to be present when presence costs something.

the pink triangle on my chest traced a line back to act up, to queer resistance in the face of state abandonment. but this wasn’t about metaphor. this was about gaza. about children buried under rubble. about medics killed in white coats. about naming what we know, and what our institutions refuse to say.

i didn’t speak. i didn’t need to. sometimes protest is not what you say but what you don’t move to stop.

#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #blackness #queerness #traces #surfaces

we stood still when the sun disappeared. a crowd without urgency. no one tried to name it.

the air changed first— cold, metallic, like something was watching. then the sky, folding into dusk as if the day had given up early.

i didn’t feel awe. not exactly. more like a shared breath held too long.

some people clapped when the light came back.

but most just stood there. under bare trees. on stolen land. watching a hole in the sky remind us how small we are.

#tiohtiàke #walks #holdings #surfaces #fragments

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.

#tiohtiàke #holdings #surfaces #fragments #drift