Good Morning.

Good morning.
I am my own witness.
I do not need another person
to validate what I have lived (and I do not need to share),
what I remember,
or what I can substantiate
through moving images.
If there is a fragile house of cards
so carefully protected,
I do not need to scatter every card
across the floor.
Sometimes it is enough
to remove the one
upon which the others depend,
then let truth,
evidence,
and scrutiny
decide what remains standing.
But I would rather not.
There is a quiet irony
in knowing that one day
I could sit opposite
the person who helped you play those cards
and simply speak.
No theatre.
No vengeance.
No hysteria.
Just testimony.
Because I know
that whatever lies beneath
everything I have experienced
is larger than you,
larger than your friends,
larger than any single explanation
I have been given.
I will not pretend to know
exactly what it is.
Certainty rests upon evidence.
Perhaps that is what
none of you understood about me:
I question everything,
including my own conclusions.
You may have believed yourselves players,
but from where I stood
you were only foot soldiers
at the edge of questions
you did not fully comprehend.
Human beings build machines,
systems,
and mechanisms
to observe one another,
to influence,
to intimidate.
But no machine
can possess another person’s consciousness.
There remains within me
a kind of knowing—
intuition,
pattern,
memory,
ancestry,
or something
for which I have not yet found
the right language.
It feels deeper
than the fragments guarded
by those who believe themselves
protectors of a secret,
some perhaps
even believing themselves chosen.
Perhaps one day
I will understand what it means.
Perhaps parts of what I believe
will change
when better evidence arrives.
I am secure enough
to allow that possibility.
But I will not be silenced
into abandoning the questions.
The greater truth
may be something
none of us fully understands,
perhaps because no one
has cared enough
to speak with me openly,
to listen closely enough
to understand
what I have experienced.
And that is why
I no longer need
to bring anybody down.
If a house is truly built
upon cards,
reality needs no help
from my anger.
I can sit opposite
the person who helped you play them,
place upon the table
what I can actually demonstrate,
and allow the cards
to speak for themselves.
Then I can walk away.
But what I carry
must be placed
in hands that do not seek
to silence or harm.
I do not want to cause harm.
I am standing on the bridge,
waiting for peace.
Still,
someone must understand
what I hold within me—
not for a judge,
not for a jury,
to decide what should be done,
but to add one perspective
to the wider question
of how we treat living beings
with the care,
the dignity,
and the tenderness
everyone deserves.
Because my destination
was never domination.
It was freedom—
dancing along the line
between dark and light.
Not purgatory,
but an embrace.
This morning,
I am going to speak with the birds.
They seem busy
trying to tell me something.
🌹