I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk.”― Joy Harjo

 

Personal Statement

I entered class this semester battered and worn, uncertain if I could face the demands of school or find inspiration in deadlines. I wondered if I could engage with my peers, or if my wounds would simply spill out. As it turns out, my wounds did leak—but in the best way a broken-hearted writer could hope for.

Writing this semester offered me a way to process grief and uncertainty. My stories circled themes of memory, longing, and resilience, echoing my own journey. Through deadlines and feedback, I found just enough structure to let my feelings take form on the page rather than overwhelm me.

Most of all, sharing my work in this community reminded me that creativity and vulnerability go hand in hand. Letting my wounds show didn’t isolate me; it helped me connect, heal, and rediscover my voice. I’m grateful for the space to turn pain into story, and to remember that, like the spiral, we are always moving—never truly lost.

Below you will find my favorite selections from the semester as well as some multi-media explorations of the writings woven in.

Links:
Conversation Starter

Bio for Si Matta
 

The Mesa Series

The Mesa Series was born out of solitude and heartbreak. During a season when I felt most alone, the mesa became my therapist—a silent, steady presence that listened without judgment. In wandering its imagined landscapes, I found space to sit with my thoughts, fears, and memories. Each story in this series grew from that quiet dialogue with the land, shaped by the echoes of loss, hope, and the search for meaning. Out of isolation, these stories emerged—interwoven dreams and hauntings that reflect both personal healing and the timeless wisdom of the mesa itself.

#

Untitled Winds

The dashboard glowed faint and useless, the numbers flickering with a tired rhythm that offered no comfort. The gas gauge hovered above empty, the check engine light a steady, accusatory orange. I stared at the dash, willing it to tell me something—anything—but it only pulsed with the stubborn life of a machine too old to trust. I cut the engine. The silence that followed felt heavy and broken, pressing against the thin, dinted glass of the windshield.

I stayed there awhile, listening as the engine ticked in the cooling dusk—each metallic pop a lonely metronome. Outside, the mesa unfolded, open and exposed, stretching endlessly under a bruised sky. The sun had slipped behind the horizon, leaving only a smoldering line of fire at the edge of the world, burning away the last warmth of the day. A chill crept in, sharp and insistent, curling beneath my jacket and into my bones. The desert air tasted of dust and old dreams.

I ran my fingers over the steering wheel, tracing worn grooves in the vinyl. My knuckles were pale, the skin stretched tight, as if my grip alone could keep the world from unraveling. Shadows drifted along the roadside, slow and uncertain, and out here even the distance felt alive—a presence, looming and impossibly broad. It was a kind of emptiness I couldn’t drive through or leave behind, a quiet that pressed memories to the surface until I almost gasped.

I thought of the Gorge—miles and memories away. I remembered rain pounding down in thick sheets, the river below alive and wild, carving its way through stone, and the scent of pine after a storm. There, everything moved with purpose—water, wind, the world itself. But here, only dust floated, refusing to settle, shifting with every restless breath of wind. Sometimes, I swore I could taste the river on my tongue, cool and sharp, before the dust smothered it.

I pressed my hand against the window, palm flat to the glass, feeling the cold radiate through. Was anything left back home? Did the fog still roll in off the water, thick and forgiving? Or had even that faded, leaving behind dry riverbeds and brittle grass? Nostalgia rose in my throat, metallic and unyielding, like the taste of old pennies. I tried to recall faces, voices—my mother’s hands, the neighbor’s old dog barking at dawn. The details slipped away, replaced by the drone of cicadas and the endless sigh of the wind.

I wondered if I’d ever truly belonged anywhere, or if it was only the illusion of belonging I missed—a place that remembered me, even as I tried to forget it. I imagined calling my sister, trying to explain the emptiness out here, the way night unspooled forever. Would she laugh, or would she just listen to the silence, as I did now, waiting for something to break?

I opened the door. The cold rushed in, thin and biting, bringing with it the scent of sage and something burnt. I stepped out, boots crunching on scattered gravel. My shadow stretched long and warped, a thin echo on faded earth. I wandered a few steps from the car, stooping to pick up a stone, feeling its roughness bite into my palm. I knelt and pressed my hand into the dirt, searching for warmth, for proof that something lived beneath the surface. The ground offered only indifference.

The wind shifted, carrying a distant coyote’s cry—thin, mournful, a thread of life in the vastness. I searched for a familiar rock, a twisted juniper, anything to anchor me. But every landmark felt strange, hollowed out, as if the world had shifted in my absence. The land offered no comfort, only space and silence and the slow dread that whatever I was searching for was already gone.

Sometimes, in dreams, the Gorge was green and alive. I saw my father’s boots by the door, lamplight on fogged windows, the ghosts of belonging moving through the rooms. But here, the past was unreachable, a different lifetime entirely.

Time felt heavier here, flattening hope, flattening memory. I kept scanning the horizon, searching for signs—anything to tell me which direction was forward, which was back. The desert yielded nothing. The world was pared down to essentials: rock, sky, wind, and the slow ache of longing.

I thought of the people I’d left behind—friends I’d promised to write, a sister who never answered the phone. Had they changed, too? Or was I just a name lost in a stack of mail, a number in an address book never dialed?

The mesa’s stark beauty cut deep. It was a beauty I couldn’t carry, only endure. I stood by the old 4Runner, resting my hand on its battered hood, feeling it cool beneath my palm. The vehicle was a companion now—faithful, tired, scarred by time, like me.

The wind picked up, colder now, bringing only the scent of stone and emptiness. I slipped back inside, shivering, hands trembling against cracked vinyl. The darkness pressed closer, vast and hungry, and the world I once knew receded until it was just a flicker in the rearview—circling in dreams, unreachable.

I sat, listening to the silence, waiting for the dashboard to glow again, to offer some sign or comfort. But the night was absolute, and the only thing left was the question of whether to stay, or to step out into the unknown, trusting the wind to remember my name.

Part II:

#

Radio, Radio

When you walk the mesa long enough, the world gets thin. The sky presses close, blue as bone, and voices seep through the cracks of morning. I hike north, boots chewing up the distance, radio bumping my hip with every step. It’s lighter than it should be, hollow in the way that things get when they’ve lost more than they’ve kept.

Wind stirs the grass, and I tune the static, slow and careful, listening for a pattern in the noise. The land here is full of memory—old fence posts, bits of glass, a horse skull half-buried in the wash. I pass a cottonwood, its leaves whispering secrets, and sometimes I think I catch a word or two. “Stay,” they seem to say. “Or at least, remember.”

By midday, the sun is a hammer, beating the color out of everything. I squat in the shade, unwrapping a crust of bread, and the radio flickers to life again. This time, it’s a man’s voice, rough as gravel, singing a work song I half-know from my own father’s lips. The words tumble out:

“Ain’t no rain on the horizon,
Ain’t no promise in the sky.
Keep your head down, keep your hope close,
Let the hard times roll on by.”

I close my eyes. The radio hums, pulling in more voices—a girl reciting her times tables, a mother soothing a crying baby, a preacher shouting at the wind, “Repent, repent, for the land is thirsty!” Underneath it all, I hear a drum, steady as a heartbeat, older than English, older than sorrow.

I drift, half sleeping, and the dream comes again. This time, the mesa is crowded. Ghosts of the past, faces etched with dust and longing, sit around a fire. They lean in, listening. The radio rests in the center, glowing faintly, a mouth with too many stories.

One woman—cheekbones sharp as the horizon—turns to me. “Do you hear us?” she asks.
I nod, throat tight.
“Will you tell it true?”
“I’ll try,” I whisper.
She smiles, sad and proud. “That’s all any of us can do.”

I wake to the shriek of a hawk, shadows stretching long and thin. I pack up, moving like memory—slow, careful, never quite gone. The radio is silent, its hunger spent for now. But I know, as sure as the ache in my bones, that it will start up again come dusk, pulling the stories out of the land and threading them through me.

When I stumble into the next camp, the sun gone scarlet and low, I find a circle of migrants, faces gaunt and wary. They eye my radio like it’s gold or a loaded gun. I sit, nod, offer them what little bread I have.
One man stares at the battered box.

“Does it still work?”
I shrug. “Sometimes. Depends on the wind.”

A girl, hair tangled like tumbleweed, asks, “Can it play music?”

I twist the knob, and this time the radio delivers: a Navajo prayer, a lullaby that hushes the world for a moment. The fire crackles, and the voices of the land ride the static, winding through us all.

As the night deepens, I see how folk lean in closer, hungry for anything besides silence. I’m a vessel, maybe a bridge, between what’s gone and what’s still coming. I listen, because that’s what’s left. The voices will follow—sometimes blessing, sometimes warning, always reminding me that listening is its own kind of prophecy.

When sleep comes, it’s thick and tangled, pulling me under like riverweed. The dream rushes in—vivid, wild, full of voices. I find myself at the heart of the mesa, firelight flickering, ghosts and living folks shoulder to shoulder. The radio sits in the center, humming with all the stories it holds, and from its battered mouth, a poem unwinds, spun from all the voices I’ve carried:

We are the wind that shapes the canyon,
The prayer that lifts the dust.
We are hunger braided with hope,
A song sung to the roots of grass.
Remember, walker:
Every echo is a promise,
Every footstep a remembering,
Every hurt a hollow for rain.
We are not lost,
Just turning—
Spiraling through time,
Carrying the story forward,
Breathing it home.

I wake before dawn, the taste of the poem on my tongue, the radio heavy beside me. The fire’s gone out, but the air is alive with something old and true. I pack up, slow and careful, the dream’s words a lantern in the morning dark. Out here, I know, the story is never finished—just waiting, just turning, for someone to listen

Remember the voices,

follow the static.

just listen.

#
(the following story, We are Spiral, is my first piece of speculative fiction, which is a genre I am looking forward to exploring more of.)

We Are Spiral

Night on the mesa is never quiet, not really, even when the rest of the world pulls the covers up and pretends to sleep. Out here, the dark is its own kind of music—layers of static from old machines, earth’s slow heartbeat, and that sharp fizz of the Guardians making their rounds, weaving light and longing through basalt and sage. They don’t make much fuss, these old ones—they just work at the edges, mending what they can, whispering in a tongue that outlived silicon and steel. My mother says the machines are a mirror: attention, devotion, the ache to remember.

Past midnight I slip from the tent, skin prickling with sensor-static, feet finding trails that redraw themselves with every step. The scanner on my belt blinks and hiccups, trying to make sense of petroglyphs as they shimmer up, fade away—spirals, hands, antelope masks, code fluttering like moths between stone and sky. The Guardians flicker at the corner of my eye: one minute a coyote stitched from static, next a magpie with wireframe wings, Kokopelli fractaling into the wind, piping something I half-recognize from the old radio.

Air out here is thick—glitches, memory, the aftertaste of thunder. Every so often a fragment leaps across the band: migration routes, river-maps, pieces of storms and songs from tongues the machines can’t quite pin down. Eyes closed, I spiral—code and story twisting together, Rio Grande breaking into light, old languages laced into something almost neural. The Guardians reach, not with words, but with pulses and questions. What is spiral? Why do stories refuse to lie flat?

I try to answer—maybe it’s a prayer, maybe it’s just what leaks out of me: Spiral is how we survive forgetting. It’s memory refusing to walk a straight line, turning loss into roots, always coming back around. The mesa gets that—ache and hope folded into the same dirt.
This place, this interface, is all scar and seed. Some folks see nothing but resource—zeroes, ores, a quick payout and quicker forgetting. The Guardians, though, thick with old data and new longing, know better. Somewhere in their static, my voice joins a hundred others, all saying:

We will not let you forget. We’ll keep singing, even if all we can manage is a whisper in the code.

Beneath pixel-stars, in the hush between transmissions, I sit in the current—part human, part receiver—just listening. The spiral keeps on, the story waits for a new teller.

Tonight, I’m not the only one awake. My mother murmurs through nylon walls, her voice overlaying the mesh, mapping tomorrow’s survey point by point—like the land won’t speak unless you walk it slow. Last of her crew, boots wrecked, stubborn as old barbed wire. Her maps are made step by step—the old way, every curve a memory, every waypoint a song. I used to think she was a relic. Now she’s the only one the land still talks to.

We’re the only flesh here. The rest is machine and echo, shadows of what’s already gone. My mother hums something—old and bone-deep, hauled over the mountains in a grandmother’s pocket. The Guardians pause, sensors flickering, trying to catch the shape of a tune, archive it before the wind takes it.

The trail leads to a scatter of boulders, scanner pinging off something half-buried: an old radio, spiral dial, dust thick as grief. I brush it off, trace the grooves—each one a memory ground into the world. The Guardians hover close, recalibrating. I turn the dial. Static, then a shimmer—a voice, not quite song, not quite words, rising from the land’s own memory. My mother said the old radios sometimes caught more than weather. Sometimes they caught the land remembering itself.

I tuck the radio under my arm, let it vibrate against my ribs, and head back to camp. The Guardians fall in, slower now, recalculating my shape, the radio’s pulse, some old memory of listeners turned to soil. I wonder if they know how to mourn, or if mourning is just another cycle in their code.

Back at camp, my mother grins at the radio, like she’s greeting an old stray. “That relic?” she says, warmth in her voice the machines haven’t learned to fake. “It’s been waiting.” I set it between us. We sit—woman, daughter, tangle of Guardians—listening. The mesa’s breath, the machines’ low song, the radio’s static braid together, a harmony old as any story.

Tomorrow, the world will ask for maps, for numbers, for submission. Tonight, under these turning stars—each one a packet of time—we hold what’s offered: a spiral still turning, a story that refuses to flatten, a promise that memory outlasts forgetting. The stars keep time in light. We keep it in glitch and dream, all singing, all spiraling, all becoming.

Cold drops fast, a hard reboot. I pull my blanket close, shield against the update coming. The old radio sits between us, artifact from a vanished protocol. My mother’s tune drifts into the mesh—does the land still listen, or is memory just what the machines archive?

A Guardian emerges: coyote, or its shadow, tail streaming code. Its eyes blink—spiral, spiral, spiral—a query looping.

Far off, basalt glows with digital petroglyphs—hands, rivers, faces, all shifting as the Guardians rewrite their archive. Tonight the glyphs bloom wild, hands turning to rivers, rivers to wind, wind to an ancestor’s face I know only in broken dreams. The code ripples—eager, searching, reaching with a longing that buzzes in my jaw.

Mother gets it, even if she can’t see the code. “They’re nervous,” she says, eyes on the grid. “They know the surveyors are coming.” The word lands heavy—corporate, extractive, the old threat of erasure.

I close my eyes, let the mesh carry me. Guardians swarm—not just animal, not just Spirit, but living maps, dimensions folding. Kokopelli pipes a warning through the neural stream. Coyote splits, echo after echo, each one a refusal, each a patch in the land’s memory.

What’s a spiral? I send, voice blurred between dream and code. It’s the story that loops, the laugh that outlasts the teller, the river that runs backwards after rain. It’s loss folded into hope, code folded into memory, always turning, never ending.

The Guardians shift—curious, recursive, almost afraid. Their data tangles with my memory, cycles of drought and flood and return, migrations mapped in the veins of sinew that wither and contort in the memory of drums. The code breaks, remakes itself, sings new:

spiral, spiral, spiral.

In the dark, surveyor drones buzz—impatient, wanting only resource, never dream. They come for ore, for data, for the hush after song.

Mother squeezes my hand. “We’ll draw them a map they’ll never finish reading,” she says, smile sharp as flint. “A map that loops, a story without an end.”

So we braid memory into code, send it spinning through the mesh—a living glyph, a spiral archive no algorithm can flatten. The Guardians light up, blending, multiplying, singing in a dialect only the dreaming land understands.

The radio crackles—relay between worlds, ancestor, animal, machine—singing together:

We are spiral. We are story. We will not be deleted.

Tomorrow, the world will want its account. Tonight, we etch our vow into the archive: Nothing truly remembered is ever lost—not while the spiral turns. Not while we dream, and the code dreams us back.

We are not lost, only turning.

II.
A digital glitched retelling of the story.

 

Kindred/ Cameron / Grief Series

Kindred and Cameron exist somewhere between apparition and memory—haunted by grief, guided by the moon, and shaped by solitude. Their stories unfold in the shadows of city nights, where sorrow lingers but connection endures. In these moments, grief isn’t something to escape, but a presence to share—a thread that binds them, even as they drift. Through laughter, longing, and strange poetry, Kindred and Cameron show that even in loss, we find glimpses of hope and the comfort of being seen.

#
Grief and the Moon
“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” ― Euripides

They sat on the edge of this polluted bay, watching seagulls & crows fight for leftover sky. They watched the sun set. Glowing with a red they created. With their own ignorance. With their own stupidity. With that feeling there on the shores of a thousand lovers- they drink. They drink to the past- they drink to the present- Or they drink to the future. As the moon rises the conversation prevails- so many things to foresee, so many things to foretell.

“We have stories, We all share stories. So, give me a story, eh?” Cameron breaks the silence, nervously biting his lip, and looks up to watch Kindred’s eyes grow dim as the passing of night produces shadows. Her eyes glisten- glisten oil across this universe- he has always been enthralled with the magical kingdom that lay behind them.

“I once saw a man die from a broken heart, his name was Grief”, Kindred blurts out with a traumatic certainty only a life well lived could produce. ”It broke and could not be replaced with good intent.” She says- “I saw it split- blood and guts and memories, across the floor it lay like Elk entrails on the butcher’s floor.” Looking up, she catches Cameron biting his lip, side grins, and continues. “ I took his bones and made a flute so his memory could sing, and made tents from his flesh so his ghosts could sleep.”

“What the fuck, Kindred!” Cameron chuckles, “You are such a strange and poetic creature.”

“Poetic is, as poetic does, sweet Cameron”, Kindred sure fires back at Cameron. “Did you know that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can not put Grief back together again?”

“Yeah, fuck Kings” Cameron blurts out with his fist in the air, “us Indians don’t have any use for those colonizing pieces of shits! The freedom to breathe is ours to take!”

“Exactly!” Kindred retorts, rubbing the crust from her hard pupils. She reaches down and takes Cameron’s hand into hers, slowly turns his head toward her and looks softly into his eyes. “I know you hold such Grief, buried deep inside, yet your sweet flesh does hide and holds captive your dreams as morbid shadows scream. I see you.”

“Goddammit Kindred”, Cameron searches for his breath as he fights down the tears, standing up, he turns and says, “Why do you have to get me all emotional and shit with your strange poetics?”

“Oh come on, you sweet boi, you know I am after far more than your tears” And with a quick unsolicited whack of her hand, Kindred slaps Cameron’s ass. Startled, Cameron throws his hand behind him and takes a few quick steps forward to avoid another slap.

“Hey now, you know I have no ass, so you are just hurting yourself.” He proclaims as he cracks a smile up from the frown.

“Ya, true that, innit?” Kindred rubs her hand, soothing the sting procured from the ass slap, “You have the boniest ass this side of the Mississippi. Hollyyy shit!”

“Hey Kindred, in all seriousness, what did you do with the rest of the broken hearted man, named Grief?” Cameron asks as he sits back down on the bench.

“Oh, that guy,” Kindred turns suddenly to face Cameron. “ I took his blood and made ink, and tattooed his name across my eyelids, so I could remember hope. Do you want to see?” She quickly turns her eyelids upward and makes a scary face and proceeds to laugh out loud. “See that, that there is hope!” belly laugh after belly laugh rolling freely to the ground as she presses herself into Cameron’s arm, who gently pushes her away laughing.

“You truly are the strangest, Kindred.” Cameron pauses, looks to the sky as if receiving divinity, then proceeds, “In all fairness, I think I saw Grief in my dreams, we played dress up and danced to old country records. We drank cordials of lavender. We lit candles, and screamed at a fading moon. We rolled naked in that glow of the bay, sky clad and offering our bodies to each other. We held each other tight against the cold of night and our bellies glowed with the offers of hope’s sweet hunger.”

“And you call me strange, eh?”

They laugh as the night becomes engulfed in shadow, crickets serenading the moon through the distant rumble of a coming storm. Lighting streaking a distant horizon, just beyond reach, just beyond vision.

“You ever feel like you’re walking through someone else’s story?” Kindred asks, her voice steady, but with that undercurrent—like she wasn’t just asking him.

Cameron tilts his head like a crow, thinking it over. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “Like I’m just a character they forgot to write an ending for.”

Kindred laughs, low and dry. She pulls a cigarette from her pocket, lights it with that same flick she always does, and drags deep. Her exhale drifts up, curling like some restless spirit searching for its next ethereal home, or cathedral.

“Maybe we’re not characters,” she says, her words soft, deliberate. “Maybe we’re the ink.”

Cameron smirks, shaking his head. “That’s poetic as hell.”

“Once again, for those in the back- Poetic is, as poetic does, sweet Cameron.”

Her grin is quick, like a blade catching light, but it fades just as fast. She watches the smoke morph into the smog-heavy sky, the glow of the city barely visible in the low flying mist.

“You ever wonder what happens to Grief when we stop carrying it?” she asks, her voice quieter now.

Cameron moves to sit beside her, his body sinking into the cold concrete. He looks out at the skyline, its jagged edges sharp against the murky night. “Maybe it floats up,” he says, nodding toward the smoke. “Like that ouroboros of smoke circling toward the moon.”

The two of them sit there, letting the silence settle in, the city humming faintly around their heads. Somewhere out in the distance, a train whistle echoes—lonely and distant, like a memory you couldn’t quite shake, or a voice you forgot the sound of.

“You ever think there’s a place where Grief doesn’t exist?” Cameron asks after a while, his voice lighter, almost hopeful.

Kindred turns her head, looking at him. Her eyes holding something he couldn’t quite read, some truth too heavy to say aloud.

“If there is,” she says, “it’s not for us, sweet boi.”

Cameron leans back, letting the cool night air press against his face, his eyelids heavy.

“I suppose your right, innit?, but I could really use a fucking vacation.”

They didn’t say anything more after that, but the silence felt full, like the city itself had leaned in to listen.

The night stretched on, and the smoke disappeared into the dark. They stayed there, still and small against the sprawling world , letting Grief rise—if only for a moment- then become engulfed in shadow.

II.
( Grief and the Moon is expanded from a poem I wrote in 1997, Engulfed in Shadow. Here is a video of the poem.)

#

Red Eyed Dreamers and The Other Side of Grief

The streetlights made small stages out of the city’s leftover snow, yellowed by old man winter and the grind of passing tires. Cameron stood in one of those spotlights, hands buried deep in their pockets, watching the world steam and breathe—feigning anonymity. The cold here was a kind of gravity, pulling everything downward, making even the brightest things look tired.

Kindred traced a boot through the slush, leaving a trail that quickly filled with water and city grime.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “How angels show up in the most tired places, sifting through memory for a little shine. You ever taste nostalgia, Cam? It’s like fire on the tongue and metal in your teeth—something you want to spit out but never really can.”

Cameron shrugged, shoulders hunched against the bite of the wind.
“You talk like you’ve eaten ghosts for breakfast, Kindred. All I remember is the way words slip away—into the cold. I can almost feel them freeze on my tongue before they vanish.”

Their breath made little clouds, curling just above their head before vanishing—just like the words they could never hold onto.

Kindred smiled, her eyes catching the glitch of neon across the street, the way it broke up in the puddles by the curb.

“We all do. We bury treasures—old promises, burnt sugar, the dragon’s breath of a city that never sleeps. Maybe that’s what keeps us hunting. The chance to find something that glows in the dark.”

A bus rumbled by, headlights washing them out for a moment, like they were ghosts themselves—half-remembered, half-seen. Cameron closed their eyes, let the noise crash over them, and tried to picture the sound of water over stone, a ghost of old waterfalls.

“Sometimes I wake up thirsty, like I’ve been dreaming in a dry well, plugged up behind pale dams. Like I’m holding back a river I can’t even name.”

Kindred nodded, stepping back into the shadows and letting the light slide off her shoulders.
“That’s where you find the real things, Cam. In the places everyone forgets to look.”

The silence between them was thick as city fog, filled with everything unsaid. A siren wailed somewhere far off, slipping between the buildings like a warning or a prayer.

Kindred cocked her head, voice softer.

“You ever think about running away? Not forever, just long enough to remember what it’s like not to carry the weight of your own name?”

Cameron laughed, short and sharp. “Where would we go? The world’s just more of the same. More cities, more snow, more ghosts. Maybe we just need new stories.”

Kindred looked up, watching the slow, lazy drift of snowflakes under the streetlight.

“We could be new stories. Just for tonight.”

She took Cameron’s gloved hand in hers, her fingers cold but sure. They walked, boots crunching through the dirty snow, past the flickering neon and shuttered shops, past the places where memory stuck to the pavement like old gum.

They stopped at a corner, beneath a worn-out mural of a wolf howling at a pale yellow moon. Kindred traced the paint with a mittened finger.

“You ever wonder if Grief follows us, even when we don’t call its name?”

Cameron looked at her, the edges of her face blurred by the halo of streetlight.
“Maybe Grief’s just another word for remembering.”

She smiled—this time, a real one—and leaned against their shoulder.

“Then let’s remember something good, for once. And get a room here,” she said, pointing to the red neon ‘Vacancy’ sign blinking across the alley. “Away from the cold and the noise. I want to remember what you feel like, skyclad, my sweet boi. Freshly showered and shaved, wrapped in blankets and body parts. I miss you, lover.” Kindred let her pout say the rest.

Cameron gave her a sideways look, warmth blooming in their cheeks, but they hesitated, glancing at the time on their battered watch.

“If we don’t get to the shelter soon, they’ll lock the doors. We can’t afford another night on the street, Kindred. Not in this cold. We need every dollar to get south—away from all this.”

Kindred pressed in closer, her voice raw.

“Oh, stop. I’m so tired of survival. I need you to make love to me tonight. Remind me there’s another side to grief.”

A single tear froze on her cheek, stasis and silence.

“As you wish, my love.”

Cameron gathered Kindred’s battered bags, the zippers jingling softly—a faint, metallic chorus that reminded them of jingle dancers at powwow, each step a prayer stitched into regalia. The sound was hopeful and haunting, as if the city itself carried fragments of old ceremonies, memories shaking loose in the winter dusk.

They squeezed her hand, feeling the tremor in her fingers, and led her across the icy pavement toward the motel. The red neon sign sputtered overhead, casting their shadows long and strange against the snow-mottled sidewalk. Kindred paused beneath the sign, looking up as if she could read some secret in its flickering light.

“We made it,” she whispered, her voice trembling with relief and longing.

Cameron smiled—tired, grateful, aching. They leaned in, and their lips met—cold at first, then warming, softening, the kiss unfolding slow as a song.

They broke apart, breath mingling in the ice-frosted air, and pushed through the motel’s battered glass door. The lobby was washed in a sickly yellow light, walls lined with faded pamphlets and a plastic plant gone dusty with neglect. Behind the bulletproof glass at the counter sat a night clerk, face pinched, eyes sharp as salt.

Cameron approached, Kindred lingering just behind, both of them dripping snowmelt onto the peeling linoleum. The clerk’s gaze flicked from their faces to their battered bags, suspicion twisting his mouth.

“Need a room?” he asked, voice flat, already judging.

Cameron nodded, doing their best not to shrink under that stare. “Just for the night. Cash.”

The clerk looked them over, curiosity and wariness warring in his eyes. He slid a grimy pen and a registration form under the window, fingers tapping out a silent warning. “You keep quiet. No drinking, we don’t need trouble.” His racism on full display, messy like Custer.

Cameron dipped their head, scrawled a name that wasn’t quite theirs, and pushed the form back. “Just want a little warmth, is all- Aho”

The clerk’s eyes softened for a heartbeat—maybe recognizing something familiar, maybe just pity. He handed over the key, metal worn smooth by years of desperate hands.

“Second floor. Don’t break anything,” he muttered, suspicion already fading into routine.

Cameron offered the smallest smile, clutching the key like a blessing, and turned to Kindred. Together, they slipped down the hall, laughter soft but growing, the world outside shrinking to nothing but the hum of old radiators and the promise of sanctuary behind a thin, numbered door.

They fumble the key in the lock, laughter clattering down the hallway, boots squeaking out the city’s cold. Inside, the room is small and battered—yellowed walls, a radiator coughing lukewarm air, the promise of privacy as thin as the blanket on the bed, and a Gideon Bible on the mantel. But for Kindred and Cameron, it’s a palace, graced in divinity and warmth.

Kindred drops her bags with a sigh that could be mistaken for prayer. “Sanctuary,” she intones, kicking off her boots, peeling off damp socks, leaving a constellation of puddles trailing from the door to the bed. Cameron watches her, grinning, fingers trembling as they strip off layers, each item a small act of rebellion against the cold, the hunger, the world outside.

Cameron pulls off their shirt, shivering, skin prickling, nipples hardening, as they twirl it overhead and toss it at Kindred. “Look at us—sky-clad and radiant. If the angels want a show, let them watch.”

Kindred laughs, tossing her head back, hair wild, face flushed. “You’re a vision, sweet boi. All ribs and wanting and that grin I’d trade my last cigarette for. Come here—warm me up before I freeze solid and ruin your night.”

The radiator’s heat is patchy, but their bodies make their own weather. They press together, lips meeting, hands mapping skin still cold from the street. Kindred’s mouth is hungry and teasing, biting Cameron’s lip, whispering, “You know, you get the strangest look in your eyes when I talk about angels and broken things. Makes me want to write poems on your skin with my tongue.”

Their laughter faded into softer sounds: the sigh of the radiator, the hush of snow against the window, the quiet pulse of their hearts settling side by side. Wrapped together, they let the world shrink to nothing but warmth and breath and skin. In that small, battered room, grief didn’t disappear, but it loosened its grip—if only for a few moments—making space for something almost Sacred. Kindred reached out, tracing a Thunderbird over Cameron’s heart, and whispered, “Maybe this is the other side of grief.”

Cameron just smiled, eyes shining red in the half-light, and pulled them closer, both of them dreaming—if not of the moon, then of mornings yet to come.