I have promised myself life in the key of me–which I hope is not unique–built on a foundation of selfish interest, structured by passionate ethics, and supported by love, sometimes rage.

My heart is a muscle and I am ready to flex.

I am saying goodbye to established paradigms and hello to my own set of parameters. I have companions to help me. We will set our own courses in nonmonogamy, active anarchism, alternative health, and anti-capitalism.

I am excited in the same way as before any big adventure: my nerves might wish I’d vomit, my heart thinks we could fly. Standing up and living precisely my own life unapologetically is newer to me than any observer may imagine. It’s scary in the best way. I’m 33, birthing my own dreams into this rough world and protecting them fiercely.

It is with that instinct that I offer only this brief sketch for what’s next. Please pay attention, if you feel so inclined. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Long have I loved dead flowers. They remind me that change is beautiful even when it might not be particularly prized by its surrounds. There is a perfect moment, if you’re paying attention, when a cut flower refuses water, settles in to death. A whole new beauty blooms then, as the crepe comes on with the falling of pistils, drying of petals, fading of leaves. For time on from that there is continued change. Patient. Beautiful.

Long have I loved to cry. And to love with vulnerability and reckless, then calculated abandon. I am an emotional thing, dramatic and comedic with laughter and tears always bubbling below the surface. Passionate.

I went to see Bumblebee in the theater yesterday. There was some corny moment: “The darkest nights produce the brightest stars.” Corny, but correct.

Dead flowers are just the beginning.

I’ve come to the painful realization that it has only been in the past two years that I’ve started calling my home country “America”. Straight from the rhetoric. Scheisse. I regret that it took a new friend from Argentina to point this out.

North America is made up of no fewer than twenty-three countries.  South America has twelve.  More than thirty five nations with unique heritage, culture, language, and food.  These are places with diverse people, countryside, farmland, cities, ruins, beaches and jungles. They have their own wars and shitty politics and glorious uprisings.  They do not belong to anyone in the U.S, no matter what imperialist money might try to say.

The US is not “America”: it is the United States, the States, USA.

So many of us are busying ourselves mending our psyches and trying to right the wrongs done by those who came before.  We’re learning new words for things in order to correct past behaviors. Add to the list that the United States cannot possibly represent “America”.

If for no other reason than that a fascist–and overall disgusting waste of human life–began this trend, let’s end it.

I have been pursuing my self these ten mostly alone and mostly not lonely weeks in Germany.

I am expanding.

I actively create, now. I claim my space as an artist.

I have even, bittersweetly, reclaimed my space as my own primary partner. I am falling in love with me again.

I am growing.

I have plans, but they are not the plans anyone prepared for me.

I am free.

I met an androgynous person at summer camp. This was long before “they/them” and so she was a she. A girl who went to girls’ summer camp and just cleaned house among a free and willing culture of budding women. I was desperately attracted to her. Mom saw my excitement when I came home from camp. She said, “Kiah is finally encountering androgyny!” And the truth was that I had to ask her what the word meant. Like so many women who came before, this young lady was deprived a space to be herself.

Step back probably nine years to the time I had short hair and a boy on the playground with blonde locks to his waist asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I vividly remember looking at his tangle of hair just freely caught on itself and all over his shirt like so many brambles in the woods. I said, “Are you a girl or a boy?” knowing full well that no girl’s long hair would ever be so messy. He was offended and ran off. I had won.

Not long after that, maybe two years, I trailed too far behind my mom entering the women’s room. Instead of cruising in after her as I intended, I received a tongue lashing from a stranger for going into the wrong restroom. This woman tore me apart–was probably having a bad day/life to begin with–even though I tried to tell her I was a girl. I remember my mom coming out of the bathroom to find me inconsolable. I remember her looking for that woman. I can’t remember if they spoke. I do remember holding my pee until we got home.

When I was much younger my pops taught me to play ball. I played t-ball and little league happily among the boys’ teams for several years. When I started to grow boobs, somebody noticed and sent me to softball. They separated me from my friends. It was a different game and all the girls were already cliquey. They were surprised when I faked an injury and sat out the rest of the season. I never played on a team again.

Fast forward to this past year, when cutting off my curls became terrifying somehow, right up until I did it. Pause right now then, and see me serving up androgyny like nobody’s fucking business. I’ve become the person of my dreams.

I have spent much time examining my female-ness. My chosen pronouns. How I feel about “womanhood”. I am absolutely genderqueer/nonbinary/gendernonconforming.

I do not want to adopt “they/them” mostly because I don’t like the way it sounds. I also don’t want to give up my sisterhood, not ever. More than anything though, I think the conversation about gender is already growing old. I appreciate my “they/them” pals for staying strong and queer. I respect everyone’s pronoun choices.

Here’s the thing, y’all: all of this is just a really beautiful, honest and human attempt to clean up a landfill-worthy pile of garbage built on policies made by people who are either dead (byeee) or might as well be. Their time is done and they are squealing like the stuck pigs that they are.

We are still here.

We have always been here.

I am eager for the time when this conversation is irrelevant, obsolete. I hope to live to see it. Someday we will know again, as our ancestors did: human is human is worthy. Everyone, every one.