FUCK ICE.

Every year, when my gremlin fur recedes and the sun starts clocking in a little earlier, I feel a shift. Subtle but noticeable, like walking into a spiderweb, but if it felt good. My performance schedule eases. Mornings get easier. Conversations less daunting. A bright, buzzing reminder that I’m still here. Still capable of moving through the world like a real person.

But I know better than to trust the light completely. It's that fine line of wanting to be free of the winter blues before the summertime saddies kick in.

You’d think it’d be the dark of winter that would bring endings, but summer, when anything is possible, invincibility redefines our borders. But our only borders are our bodies, and if we break those, what do we have to hold each other with?

Sly died. The next day, Marines were sent into LA. 47 is proving his reach for dictatorship by militarizing against protestors, fully stomping on state sovereignty. It’s not even subtle anymore. He’s testing how far he can go, how tightly he can grip the throat of a so-called democracy before anyone cuts his hand.

This is not a misstep. It’s a signal. The militarization against protest—against grief, against justified rage—is a page straight out of every dictator’s early chapters. This is not a coincidence; it’s choreography. And like a dystopian reveal, the illusion of state sovereignty is gone. Governor Gavin Newsom is like Senator Dasi Oran of Ghorman (you should really be watching Andor if only for lewksss alone)– he knows he is defeated as the tanks roll in. There is no "United" in these States. There’s only federal muscle and the silence that follows after a boot steps on a neck.

And I can’t help but think about escape routes.

There is a part of me that struggles with this idea, as I, in the past, have had so much fight in me. 10-year-old Shara would want her hand in burning it down and rebuilding.

What does resistance look like when you no longer have the strength to march? When your hope is cracked, weathered, and rusted? Is freedom something the body can still hold? Or is it just a fugitive thought now, something you chase in dreams but never touch?

35-year-old Shara, who has spent the last 20 years scraping by just to survive and wind up in the pits of poverty and debt, just wants to feel freedom in her body—or maybe in the mind?

I’m not sure, because I have so rarely tasted that nectar. But I’m starting to believe: if there is a way out, it’s through this flesh. Such that, if our bodies are our only real limits—our only borders—then any true sense of freedom, connection, or escape has to move through that embodied experience.

I fear for the bodies of the people in the streets of LA: for those who are being stolen from their families; for those under the siren call for incoming air raids and bombs. The wretchedness of humanity is showing its teeth right now, and I feel so less and less of a fight in me. Just a deep sadness and rage that is consuming my resolve and opening the deepest of my wounds. The grief inside me burns down what little hope remains, leaving only ash and a fragile flicker of belief—that in this terrible pattern, there is still a possibility for survival and change.

Maybe the rain will help. But no matter what:

FUCK ICE.

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