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To be a tender human facing the end of the world. To be feeling reaching grasping for air, thick with unfulfilled promises and spilt blood. To be twisted before we learn the natural proportions of our curves. This is not why we were made. This dermis, of fat and collagen, held by fascia and ancestor cells, was never meant to be armor against the world. The desire of our design is to feel moss caressing stone, tell when tea is cool enough to drink, sense the texture and timbre changes of a lover’s skin. Our intricately arranged cranial bones, crafted to hold neural mycelium, and allow infinite gestures of expression, were never meant to bear the brunt of fascism’s fury and a terrified dictator’s impunity, however much rubber blunts the blows. This, this moment of anguish, this apocalypse unfolding cataclysmic revealing of long-standing lies, this messy unraveling of the nets that only caught us, the structures that taught us we are somehow separate from life, doesn’t need to cost so much. To those who serve violence and control, we say Learn how to put down your weapons. Your hands were meant to plant trees, sift seeds from stones, scratch behind a cat’s ear, hold newborn babies, never to waste life. To be a tender human, facing the end of the world, learn how to meet, how to see. Let your dragon heart howl with anguish at what you never knew you were supposed to have. Stop punishing people striving to grow gardens in the field of tortured yet tenaciously possible transformation. Stop capturing those who have run from destructive complicity. We are fugitives, all. Forging a way of being that requires separation, Defining ourselves through what we choose not to participate in. Refugee, the fugue of being sung by choosing to believe in a possibility beyond what we can see with our visible eyes; yet know in the truth of our beings we will be free. We are fugitives, all. This, this moment of anguish, this precipice of vast ending, still holds the sinews of faith. And we, we who refuse to be crushed, rushed, or denied our personhood, who choose to believe in the potency of a world of reciprocity, regeneration, and healthy imagination, Revel in our interpenetration with nature within and around us. Bury us: we will grow from the darkening. Defile us: we will shine from the polishing. Pressure us: we will rise from the weighing. We will not be silenced. We will not be erased. We will not be manipulated into the spoils of war. We will create, We will rise, We will live. Oh, to be a tender human, greeting the beginning of the world.
