on descent, endurance, and the return of light

⚘ // a mythohuman field note

It happens when the night falls.
I leave to feed the stray cat I call Lucky, and the city performs its small dramas around me.
A girl stops me, crying, drunk and wrecked after seeing her ex with someone new.
I hold her, wait until she is on FaceTime with a friend, then keep walking.
Behind glass, couples are kissing. The gym glows with people who look aimed.
I remember another window, a year of childhood in a hospital, watching life continue without me.
The glass changes, the feeling does not. Belonging stays on the other side.

⚘ //

I ask myself, Will this ever be different.
I live among people yet feel unseen, as if the air swallows the signal.
When hope flickers, I survive another month, make the rented rooms beautiful, walk.
When I cannot pretend, I make things.
I took photographs that blurred night through moving glass.
I painted and stacked canvases no one asked for.
I drew clean geometric lines to steady my hands.
I cut and stitched mixed-media pieces that held together what I could not.
I built AI sequences of windows and city light.
I wrote anthems, including the one about walking in a city that erased my name.
All that was meant to happen did not. Something else kept happening. The work.

✴ //

In the oldest story, a goddess walks downward. Inanna leaves her throne and passes seven gates. At each gate she gives up a sign of who she was, crown, jewels, robe, until she stands bare before her sister in the underworld. She dies and hangs on a hook. The world stops breathing. Later she rises, changed, and life returns.

Marina Abramović lived a descent of her own. For twelve years she and Ulay moved as a single organism. Their Great Wall walk ended not in union but in goodbye. The identity called Marina-and-Ulay died on the wall. Years later at MoMA she sat alone across from strangers and met their eyes without defense. Endurance remained, but its purpose turned from pain to presence.

I think of that when I pass the lit windows. Each form I worked in, photography, abstraction, geometry, mixed media, AI, was another gate. Not upward, inward. Maybe resurrection is not getting back what was lost. Maybe it is discovering what still insists on creating through you when everything else is gone.

⚘ //

By the time night ends the streets are nearly clean. There is a mercy in the quiet. Not comfort yet, but a pause long enough to feel what is still alive inside it. Tomorrow I will swim. Then I will publish one image, one song, one page, and send it into the world. No more waiting at the window. I will be the one who opens it.


⚘ // mythohuman