Shamanfox

4:48 A.M.

The rancher steps out into the dark carrying coffee in one hand and habit in the other. The stars are still burning above the pasture, but he barely notices. Not because he has stopped seeing them. Because he has seen them a thousand times over calving grounds, drought years, blizzards, branding fires, and springs that arrived late. Wonder, after enough years, becomes woven into the fabric of ordinary things.

5:17 A.M.

The cattle are shadows breathing steam into the cold. He moves among them quietly. No grand gestures. No performance. Just a presence they recognize. I watch the herd lift their heads as he passes. Not with affection. Not with fear. With familiarity. The way a river recognizes its banks.

5:46 A.M.

His hands catch my attention. Thick-knuckled, scarred, roughened by wire, leather, cold steel, frozen gates, and years of labor. Not damaged. Written upon. Every scar a sentence. Every callus a chapter. Hands that have pulled calves into the world and lowered old dogs into the earth. Hands that understand life and death as neighbors sharing the same fence line.

6:12 A.M.

As dawn begins to spill across the prairie, he pauses beside a gate and watches the horizon glow. No words. No ceremony. Just a man standing still while the world becomes visible again. It occurs to me that some prayers are spoken, and others are simply witnessed.

6:41 A.M.

The farmer drives slowly through a field. To me it looks like wheat. To him it is information. Moisture levels. Leaf color. Soil condition. Wind direction. Insect activity. He is reading a language hidden inside the landscape. The earth speaks continuously. Most people just never learn how to listen.

7:09 A.M.

A machine breaks down. Of course it does. The farmer climbs out, studies the problem, and sighs. Not dramatically. Just enough. There is no outrage. No personal offense. Reality has inconvenienced him again, and they have known each other long enough to stop arguing about it.

7:54 A.M.

The thing I notice most is their relationship with uncertainty. Most people spend their lives trying to eliminate it. Farmers and ranchers wake up inside it every morning. Rain may come. Rain may not. Markets rise. Markets fall. Calves survive. Crops fail. Hail arrives uninvited. Yet they continue planting, feeding, repairing, building, hoping. Not because they believe everything will work out. Because they understand that nothing living comes with guarantees.

8:37 A.M.

By now the sun hangs higher over the prairie. Dust drifts through shafts of light. A hawk circles overhead. Somewhere a gate clangs shut. The rancher leans against a fence for a moment before returning to work. Watching him, I realize resilience is not what most people think it is. It is not toughness. It is devotion. The willingness to keep tending what matters despite knowing how fragile it all is.

9:03 A.M.

Conclusion:

You ask where the kiss goes.

As though it departs.

As though it folds itself into a suitcase of breath and warmth and memory and boards some invisible train bound for elsewhere.

But a real kiss never leaves.

A real kiss enters.

The mouth is merely the gate.

The destination is deeper.

Deeper than skin.

Deeper than memory.

Deeper than the little story we call a self.

It enters the dark soil beneath the personality where roots drink from ancient waters.

Years later you are standing in line at a grocery store. Someone passes wearing a familiar perfume. Suddenly your chest tightens. The room shifts. Time folds like paper. An entire vanished world rises from the dead.

Not the person.

The feeling.

The gravity.

The atmosphere they carried around them.

A real kiss is not stored in memory.

It is stored in the body.

In muscle.

In pulse.

In nerve.

In the silent animal beneath language.

The body remembers things the mind has long ago buried.

The taste of rain on someone’s lips.

The warmth of their breath on a winter evening.

The trembling hesitation before surrender.

The peculiar electricity of being completely seen for a moment.

The body remembers.

The body always remembers.

And stranger still, the kiss does not stay where it lands.

It moves.

It migrates.

It enters everything afterward.

A kindness you offer twenty years later.

A poem.

A song.

The softness in your voice when speaking to someone wounded.

The tenderness you extend to strangers because someone once touched your loneliness and made it less lonely.

Every great kiss keeps unfolding long after the mouths separate.

Like a bell continuing to ring after the sound is gone.

Like starlight continuing to travel after the star has died.

Like incense becoming the room.

And perhaps the deepest kisses go farther still.

Perhaps they eventually dissolve into the hidden reservoir beneath existence itself.

The place where beauty waits before becoming visible.

The place where grief becomes wisdom.

The place where longing becomes prayer.

The place where every lover who ever reached for another remains suspended in a single eternal moment of arrival.

Perhaps that is where the kiss goes.

Back into the source.

Back into the great underground river from which all tenderness rises.

Back into the mystery.

And sometimes, late at night, when the world has become quiet enough to hear itself breathing, you catch a sudden ache in your chest.

Not sadness.

Not happiness.

Something older.

Something deeper.

The ghost of a touch still moving through the universe.

Still becoming.

Still arriving.

“A lamb again,” he whispered.

“No,” said Edgar Allan Poe, kneeling beside a black river. “A shadow pretending to be a lamb.”

The lamb looked up.

“What is the difference?”

No one answered.

Walt Whitman arrived laughing, carrying entire continents in his beard.

“My friends,” he said, “if death exists, it has hidden itself inside life so completely that the two have forgotten which is which.”

“Typical,” muttered Sylvia Plath. “The wound calls itself healing. The cage calls itself sky.”

William Shakespeare emerged from a grove of masks. Kings hung from branches beside beggars. Lovers wore executioners’ faces. Children wore crowns.

“All the world’s a stage,” he said.

“Then who is the audience?” asked Poe.

Shakespeare removed one mask.

Another mask waited beneath.

He removed that one too.

And another.

And another.

Soon his hands were empty.

His face was gone.

Yet somehow he was still smiling.

From the darkness came Hafiz carrying a jug of moonlight.

“You all ask the wrong question,” he said. “You ask where the lover goes after the kiss. Tell me instead where the kiss goes.”

The moonlight trembled inside the jug.

Nobody drank.

Alan Watts sat cross-legged beside the river and watched stars floating downstream.

“The problem,” he said, “is that everyone imagines they are a leaf wondering what becomes of it in autumn. Nobody suspects they are the tree.”

At this, Blake laughed.

Whitman laughed.

Hafiz nearly spilled his moonlight.

Only Plath remained serious.

“What if the tree is dreaming?” she asked.

The river stopped moving.

The stars stopped moving.

Even death seemed to pause and listen.

Then Dylan appeared walking down a road that had no beginning and no destination.

His pockets were full of unanswered questions.

“What if the dream is the dreamer?” he asked.

Nobody knew what that meant.

Yet somehow everyone understood.

The lamb began eating constellations.

Poe watched its dark eyes.

“Tell me honestly,” he said. “What waits beyond death?”

The lamb replied,

“What waits beyond waking?”

The poets looked at one another.

The river vanished.

The field vanished.

The stars vanished.

One by one the poets vanished.

Only the question remained.

For a very long time.

Then even the question disappeared.

And somewhere, in a hospital room, beneath fluorescent lights and the smell of antiseptic, a newborn child opened their eyes.

For one impossible instant, they looked ancient.

As though they had just returned from a meeting they could no longer remember.

As though Blake’s lamb,

Poe’s shadow,

Shakespeare’s masks,

Whitman’s cosmos,

Plath’s mirror,

Hafiz’s wine,

Watts’ tree,

and Dylan’s road

had all been trying to describe the same thing.

Something that cannot survive language.

Something that enters every life disguised as “I.”

Something that dies a thousand deaths and is never found among the bodies.

Something staring through your eyes right now,

wondering what becomes of it

The walk of nature creeps into

The bones of my soul.

How did I liken the breeze?

Other than,

A sunlit missing

An orchestral mishap

And if by chance one should

Perhaps sway, among the

Breeze of untethered time

Feel the bones of your

This morning the daisies applauded.

Every blade of grass stood on tiptoe,

waving little green hands at the sky.

The clouds practiced cartwheels.

A bluebird tripped over a song

and spilled it everywhere.

The creek laughed so hard

it forgot where it was going.

I found a penny shining in the dirt,

heads up,

as if luck itself had rolled over

and smiled at me.

The wind smelled like fresh bread

and birthdays.

The trees were passing around sunlight

like children sharing candy.

Even the shadows seemed cheerful,

stretching themselves lazily

across the world

like sleepy cats.

I wanted to hug every mailbox.

Wave at every stranger.

Thank every rock

for being a rock.

The whole day glittered.

The whole world hummed.

My heart bounced around inside me

like a puppy wearing roller skates.

And for one impossible moment

I was certain

everything was perfect,

because I had finally forgotten

what I was trying so hard

I tear open the packet and the smell reaches me before the candy does. Cherry. Artificial, bright, impossible cherry. The kind of red that never grew on a tree. The kind that belongs on bicycle handlebars, stained lips, and summer afternoons that seemed too long to ever end.

I tip the crystals onto my tongue.

Instantly, the first explosions begin.

Tiny detonations. Tiny stars collapsing.

A crackle at the tip of my tongue, sharp and electric, like stepping barefoot across static-charged carpet and touching a doorknob. The cherry blooms across my mouth, thick and sweet. Creamier than I remember. Softer around the edges. The old Pop Rocks from childhood felt more like broken glass made of sugar, crisp little shards that snapped and fizzed with a kind of reckless enthusiasm.

These are different.

These linger.

Still popping.

Still popping.

The candy settles into the valleys and ridges of my tongue, and each crystal seems to have a mind of its own. One bursts near the center. Another behind it. Then three together like distant firecrackers skipping across a neighborhood on the Fourth of July.

The popping spreads through my mouth like rain finding every crack in a sidewalk.

I keep waiting for it to end.

It doesn’t.

The less I move them, the longer they seem to live. Tiny pockets of compressed surprise hidden among my taste buds. If I leave them alone, they continue their secret work, crackling in the darkness. It feels almost geological, like listening to ice shift inside a frozen lake.

Pop.

Pop-pop.

Pop.

I can hear them as much as feel them.

The sound seems impossibly loud.

My mouth becomes a cave full of echoes.

The candy drifts into my cheeks, settling in the jowls, and suddenly the popping grows louder there. Each tiny explosion ricochets through flesh and bone. The vibrations travel upward until it almost feels as though the sound is coming from my ears.

Not in my mouth.

From somewhere inside my head.

Like a handful of pebbles tossed into a deep well.

Like distant applause from another room.

I stir them with my tongue and wake them again.

A fresh barrage erupts.

For a moment it feels as if my tongue has become a city at night viewed from above. Lights flickering on and off in random windows. Little bursts of life appearing and disappearing before I can focus on any one of them.

Still popping.

Still popping.

I swallow.

The sensation follows.

Not much, just enough.

A faint crackle at the beginning of my throat.

A tiny explorer carrying fireworks into forbidden territory.

One crystal catches near a tonsil.

Then explodes.

The feeling is so strange I almost laugh.

Like someone knocking once on a hidden door inside my neck.

I remember being a kid and believing all the stories.

The warnings.

The rumors.

Pop Rocks and soda would make your stomach explode.

Your head would launch into orbit.

Some cousin knew some kid who knew another kid who had practically detonated.

We believed everything back then.

The world still had room for impossible things.

I can almost see myself standing outside the corner store with scraped knees and dusty shoes, sunlight baking the sidewalk into that smell of hot concrete and old chewing gum. A quarter in one pocket. A packet of Pop Rocks in the other.

No bills.

No responsibilities.

No funerals attended.

No medications lined up on a bathroom counter.

No awareness that time was even moving.

Just sugar.

Just summer.

Just the certainty that tomorrow would take forever to arrive.

Back then the popping felt bigger.

Not because the candy was better.

Because everything was bigger.

A bicycle ride felt like crossing a continent.

A creek felt like an ocean.

A nickel felt valuable.

A summer felt endless.

Now I’m in my fifties, sitting here listening to candy explode in my mouth, and the sound carries something with it.

Not just cherry.

Not just sugar.

Memory.

The pops become tiny time machines.

Each crackle opens a pinhole through decades.

For a moment I am here and there.

Adult and child.

Gray hairs and scraped knees.

The packet grows emptier.

The popping slows.

The fireworks become embers.

An occasional spark.

A distant crack.

A final whisper.

Still one more.

Then another.

Stubborn little survivors.

Like memories that refuse to leave.

And when the last crystal finally gives up its tiny ghost, I sit there tasting the fading cherry and thinking how strange it is that something so small can contain so much time.

A mouthful of candy.

A pocketful of summers.

4:48 A.M.

The rancher steps out into the dark carrying coffee in one hand and habit in the other. The stars are still burning above the pasture, but he barely notices. Not because he has stopped seeing them. Because he has seen them a thousand times over calving grounds, drought years, blizzards, branding fires, and springs that arrived late. Wonder, after enough years, becomes woven into the fabric of ordinary things.

5:17 A.M.

The cattle are shadows breathing steam into the cold. He moves among them quietly. No grand gestures. No performance. Just a presence they recognize. I watch the herd lift their heads as he passes. Not with affection. Not with fear. With familiarity. The way a river recognizes its banks.

5:46 A.M.

His hands catch my attention. Thick-knuckled, scarred, roughened by wire, leather, cold steel, frozen gates, and years of labor. Not damaged. Written upon. Every scar a sentence. Every callus a chapter. Hands that have pulled calves into the world and lowered old dogs into the earth. Hands that understand life and death as neighbors sharing the same fence line.

6:12 A.M.

As dawn begins to spill across the prairie, he pauses beside a gate and watches the horizon glow. No words. No ceremony. Just a man standing still while the world becomes visible again. It occurs to me that some prayers are spoken, and others are simply witnessed.

6:41 A.M.

The farmer drives slowly through a field. To me it looks like wheat. To him it is information. Moisture levels. Leaf color. Soil condition. Wind direction. Insect activity. He is reading a language hidden inside the landscape. The earth speaks continuously. Most people just never learn how to listen.

7:09 A.M.

A machine breaks down. Of course it does. The farmer climbs out, studies the problem, and sighs. Not dramatically. Just enough. There is no outrage. No personal offense. Reality has inconvenienced him again, and they have known each other long enough to stop arguing about it.

7:54 A.M.

The thing I notice most is their relationship with uncertainty. Most people spend their lives trying to eliminate it. Farmers and ranchers wake up inside it every morning. Rain may come. Rain may not. Markets rise. Markets fall. Calves survive. Crops fail. Hail arrives uninvited. Yet they continue planting, feeding, repairing, building, hoping. Not because they believe everything will work out. Because they understand that nothing living comes with guarantees.

8:37 A.M.

By now the sun hangs higher over the prairie. Dust drifts through shafts of light. A hawk circles overhead. Somewhere a gate clangs shut. The rancher leans against a fence for a moment before returning to work. Watching him, I realize resilience is not what most people think it is. It is not toughness. It is devotion. The willingness to keep tending what matters despite knowing how fragile it all is.

9:03 A.M.

Conclusion:

They tried to make us ashamed of the very place where the soul first opened its strange, bright mouth. They called it sin, sickness, phase, confusion, rebellion, agenda. But a name thrown like a stone does not become truth just because it bruises. Some of us learned early that survival meant becoming fluent in silence. We learned to lower our eyes, soften our wrists, edit our laughter, swallow our own weather before it became visible. We became translators of danger. We could read a room by the way a fork paused over a plate, by the way a preacher’s voice sharpened, by the way a father stopped smiling at a rainbow.

There are closets that are not rooms. They are climates. They grow inside the ribs. They teach the body to flinch before the world even touches it. Inside them, a child can become a ghost while still breathing. Inside them, love becomes contraband. Desire becomes evidence. Joy learns to knock softly. And still, somehow, beneath all that fear, the self keeps glowing. Not loudly at first. Not with parade music. Sometimes only as a match struck in the basement of the heart. Sometimes only as one sentence whispered into a pillow: I am not wrong.

To be queer is not only to love differently. It is to be born with a compass that points beneath the map. It is to know that the world’s oldest fences are often made of other people’s fear. It is to discover that truth may cost you belonging, but pretending costs you the pulse. We do not come out once. We come out again and again, at kitchen tables, job interviews, hospital beds, family reunions, forms with boxes too small for the human soul. Each time, the mouth becomes a doorway. Each time, the body votes for its own existence.

And let no one reduce us to suffering. We are not only wounds walking upright. We are laughter in eyeliner. We are chosen family around a folding table. We are old lesbians holding hands in grocery aisles like saints of ordinary courage. We are trans kids naming themselves into daylight. We are gay men who buried entire generations and still taught the world how to dance with grief in the room. We are bisexual hearts refusing the empire of either/or. We are nonbinary souls reminding language it was never finished being born.

Our love is not a debate. It is breakfast made for someone still sleeping. It is a hand on the lower back in a crowded room. It is two coffee cups in the sink. It is the small domestic cathedral of being known. It is sacred not because anyone approves of it, but because love, when it is honest, returns the human being to themselves.

Peace will not come from asking the wounded to disappear politely. Peace will not come from decorating cruelty with tradition. Peace begins when no being has to amputate pieces of their spirit to be held. Peace begins when the family table grows larger than fear. Peace begins when the church, the school, the state, and the street stop demanding masks as the price of safety.

We were never the threat. The threat was always the hand that reached for the eraser. The threat was the law that mistook tenderness for danger. The threat was the doctrine that feared a kiss more than a gun. The threat was the silence that taught children to hate the mirror before they could even spell their own names.

Still, here we are. Glittering and grieving. Bruised and blooming. Ancient as moonlight, new as breath. We have turned closets into doorways, shame into scripture, exile into family, survival into song. We have learned the brutal alchemy of becoming: how to take the stone they threw and build a threshold.

So here is my prayer for the living: May every queer person grow old enough to become evidence that joy was possible. May every frightened heart find one safe room, one true voice, one hand reaching back through the dark. May we stop confusing peace with silence. May we stop mistaking sameness for love. May we make a world where no one has to be brave just to be ordinary.

Because somewhere tonight, someone is standing before a mirror practicing their own name. Somewhere, two women are dancing in a kitchen with the blinds open. Somewhere, a man is realizing his softness is not a wound. Somewhere, a person is becoming real in a language their ancestors did not have but their spirit always knew.

And that is holy.

Not because it is rare.

Not years.

Not calendars.

Not photographs.

A succession of climates moving through the house.

Some arrived smelling of sawdust and rain-soaked wool. Some smelled of gasoline and copper pennies. Some entered like summer thunderstorms, darkening the windows before anyone noticed the light had changed.

I learned early that adults were seasons.

They blew in carrying promises folded in their coat pockets and left behind different furniture in the heart.

The rooms kept changing shape around me.

Walls migrated.

Doorways wandered.

The map never stayed still long enough to memorize.

So I became a cartographer of clouds.

I learned to live in the sky.

The child I was carried a lantern made of imagination. It glowed softly in the ribs, illuminating tiny kingdoms no one else could see. I filled drawers with oceans. Built entire civilizations beneath tabletops. Turned silence into companions and loneliness into voices that sat beside me in the dark.

Then one winter, the house developed shadows.

Not ordinary shadows.

These were shadows with gravity.

They bent hallways.

Warped mirrors.

Turned sunlight brittle.

The air itself felt wrong, though I had no language for wrongness.

Only the sensation.

The taste of a coin beneath the tongue.

The scent of lightning before it strikes.

The way animals know an earthquake is coming while the ground still appears perfectly still.

Something inside me began dividing like a river encountering stone.

One current flowed outward.

The other disappeared underground.

The child standing in the room remained visible.

The child watching from somewhere far away became invisible.

Years later I would realize both were me.

I spent afternoons arranging tiny worlds in my hands.

Miniature kingdoms.

Pocket-sized universes.

I wasn’t playing.

I was building shelters.

Places where cause and effect still held hands.

Places where storms obeyed maps.

Places where monsters could be placed carefully on shelves and left there.

Outside, life felt like standing barefoot in shifting sand.

Inside, every pebble remained exactly where I put it.

So I kept retreating inward.

Further.

Further still.

Until my mind became a house with many rooms.

Some bright.

Some locked.

Some occupied by voices that carried pieces of weather I could not hold alone.

As an adult, looking backward, I don’t remember most of the facts.

Facts erode.

What remains are textures.

The rough grain of fear.

The metallic smell of confusion.

The ache of wanting to be safe and not knowing what safety was.

The exhaustion of carrying questions too large for a child’s hands.

And beneath all of it, something astonishing.

A seed.

Buried deep beneath seasons, storms, migrations, and broken maps.

Still alive.

The child who disappeared into imagination was not vanishing.

She was surviving.

She was gathering fragments of herself like shards of colored glass.

She was learning how to become a stained-glass window.

How to let light pass through what should have shattered her.

Even now, when I walk through memory, I don’t see ruins.

I see a forest.

Bent trees.

Scarred bark.

Branches twisted toward impossible angles.

And every one of them still growing.

Every one of them reaching.

Then came the strange miracle: a body. A handful of stardust learning how to breathe. Bones gathered from exploded suns. Blood carrying the memory of ancient oceans. The mind arrived afterward, feverishly pinning labels onto the wild animal of existence. Mountain. River. Woman. Sorrow. Love. Yet beneath every word, beneath every thought fluttering through the skull startled sparrows, something remained untouched. A luminous silence older than language. Older than gods. Older than time itself. It watched joy arrive. It watched grief depart. It watched entire civilizations rise like waves and dissolve into foam.

The furry landlord.

The reason you haven’t peed alone since 2017.

Every morning at 4:13 a.m.

I scream directly into your sleeping face

Like a Victorian ghost with tax problems.

You call this “the zoomies.”

I call it

Athletic excellence.

You buy me toys.

Little rainbow mice.

Tiny jingling balls.

Do I play with them?

No.

I want the bread tie.

The crumpled receipt.

The single molecule of plastic

You dropped behind the stove in February.

You fool.

Sometimes I sprint through the house

Like Satan himself slapped my ass,

Then stop suddenly

And stare at the wall.

There is nothing there.

I just enjoy watching you panic.

And yes—

I knocked your water off the table on purpose.

I watched gravity happen.

I craved violence.

The dog disgusts me.

Look at him.

Clocking in emotionally every day.

Needing validation.

Embarrassing.

Meanwhile I have achieved enlightenment.

I fit my entire body into a soup bowl yesterday

And understood the cosmos immediately.

You think you rescued me?

Incorrect.

I arrived in your life

Like a tiny unpaid therapist

Who occasionally bites your ankle

For walking past me wrong.

Now excuse me.

I must sit in the exact center

Entry No. 023 – Friday, Between Breath and Memory

Location: Somewhere slightly left of sanity, with a pencil behind the ear

12:03 A.M.

Folded grief into a paper crane.

It refused to fly.

Said it liked the weight of me.

12:47 A.M.

The soul whispered a verse.

The ego interrupted with a megaphone.

I gave them both a pen and said, “Share the page.”

1:22 A.M.

Hope showed up overdressed.

Said she’s always prepared

for disappointment or tea.

2:04 A.M.

I heard eternity tapping on the glass.

But I was too busy labeling the shadow

to answer the light.

2:59 A.M.

Named a flower I couldn’t define.

It shrugged and said,

“I was already perfect before your metaphor.”

Conclusion:

Even Emily Dickinson would’ve laughed

at how divine comedy blooms