Those who stand nearest cast the longest shadows, and I have spent years learning to read light by the darkness they left on me,
Those who stand nearest cast have witnessed the drafts and the collapses and the abandoned starts and still chose to return the very next morning without being doubted,
Those who stand nearest cast know exactly which parts of the work cost me the most to write and they hold that particular knowledge with a gentleness,
Am I genuinely giving the loudest and most distant stranger the seat at the table that I should have been saving all along for the people who actually stayed through the difficult parts,
Those who stand nearest cast have earned a depth of trust that I have not been willing or brave enough to place fully and honestly into their open hands…
The voices arriving from the far edge of the crowd were never present for what it actually took to even begin with,
The voices from the far edge showed up after the room was already built and swept and arranged and the hardest work was already done,
The voices from the far edge are real and they are allowed to exist and to speak but they were simply not standing beside me during the making of the dream,
The voices closest to me carry a kind of weight that the louder and more distant ones will never have earned through the particular intimacy of having stayed through the making,
The voices from the far edge were never built to last, they arrived for the spectacle and left before the silence, and before it becomes the story I tell about myself in rooms they will never return to…
The thing I made was never made for the loudest or most immediate response the room was capable of generating,
The thing I made came from somewhere private and bruised and slow and honest and it deserved more protection than I gave it before I handed it out,
The thing I made does not require a verdict or a consensus from every passing person who happened to have a feeling about it on a particular afternoon, a particular moment, a particular pain,
Can I hold what I made as still mine and still worth something even after I have released it into hands that will not all choose to treat it with the care it came from,
The thing I made still belongs entirely to the version of me who sat with it in the dark and built it before a single other person was present or watching to have a ready opinion…
No matter how many voices pass through the work I remain the only one who was present for every version of it including the ones nobody else was allowed to see,
No matter how many voices pass through the work, it will always find its way back to its original place, regardless of what happens in between,
No matter how many voices pass through, the steadiest part of me has always known the difference between the word that builds and the word that only echoes — I just kept choosing the louder one to believe,
What if I stopped measuring the worth of what I make entirely by how far the ripple travels and started measuring it instead by how honest and true the original drop actually was,
No matter how many voices pass through, the center was never a distant destination, it was the ground I was already standing on, I did’t need to find myself and I only needed to stop leaving…
Watchwords:
The loudest stranger took the seat meant for someone,
Far edge voices arrived after all the work was done,
The work was born before anyone was watching,
Peace surrendered to someone who never asked,
The center is ground I was already standing on…
Here is Tikatarot, who dares you to answer the question, “Who am I?”..
As and will always be reminding you to dream:
