Coffee steaming softly in a mug to my right, a nine volt battery and foil color silken tie adorned with gray roses to my left. My aim, today, is to get everything done in exactly enough time to keep my commitments to show a newer gay around town. He is the boyfriend of a dear friend, and he has a Boston accent so thick that it will be a misread Chicago and Boston duo sauntering about town, tonight.
If I really gun it, I can go to the graphic novel/comic/zine convention with a few of my friends. I'm all about getting fed/inspired/ignited by art.
(pause)
There is a context that I have been working in as of late that involves easily 30 children. There is one little girl who does not speak at all unless asked to. People label her as shy. Quiet. Her ways are familiar to me.
In the past month, each time I am there, she will come at sit at my ankles. When everyone is too busy in their bustle, she will poke my ankle with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. She turns her back to the crowd, as if she doesn't want them to see her speaking, and asks me a hundred questions.
This happens often with me: Quiet kids and feral animals always know that I'm safe. I don't ask them to do things they aren't comfortable with. I don't ask them to speak. I don't ask them to accept unwanted or unearned affection. But if they have something to say I will listen, and I will ask. And if they force their little harried and fur-covered head under my hand, I will pat them gently.
Trust is a slow burn process.
I have all the patience in the world.
be well; be loved,
k.
(image: Tokyo, 2013, Tatsuo Suzuki, via secretcinema1 tumblr)
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