The Cave of the Seven Sleepers is a medieval legend, shared within Christian and Muslim circles.

"Getting clean meant coming to terms with all the ways that the most comforting aspects of your life could also be the most destructive."

"Molestation did not hurt me as much as shame that surfaces. The point is not whether I experienced pleasure. But will I untie entrapment from trust, self-harm from intimacy."

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.

Decomposition does not happen in isolation. You cannot decompose alone.

Before I discovered this project, I never imagined the drum as anything more than an inert object behind glass, one that I knew belonged to my people but was so far from home that it didn’t have meaning anymore.

Maybe I’m still working from a place of collective composition toward a singular voice, trying to derive one true chord from that old cacophony. The steel strings went slack—too much tension over too much time.

And, yes, even now, even for me, there is joy in seeing the rainbow flag in public, in one of the last places I expected to see it. There is joy in not quite knowing why it’s there, but knowing that it means something to the person who chose it.

“Why did you put your eye on other things? Why did it all go on without you?”