Meeting Mishal
Beautiful Mishal, wearing Nette Rose
Photographed in Plantify, Cape Town
“That risk you are afraid to take, will change your life”
& the life of others
'Because the beautiful trans elders who have come before us, helped light the way' ~ Mishal
Words by Mishal
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'A fleeting reflection, who is that unrecognisable form?
A memory of a person in motion
A changeling molecularly reconfiguring.
Slowly melting and reforming.
And yet perfectly still.
Unmoving in the midst of the flux.
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An outward husk, a facade fortress.
Castle walls hide the endless cold fronts of others’ beliefs.
This outward husk softens, cracks, remoulds in a strange dance of aging.
An awkward second pubescence.
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Within the walls, the inner sanctum, an unchained unchanging knowing of self.
A desire to just be.
Seeking freedom from others’ normativity.
To be within the mundane of the everyday: sleep, eat, work, shit, repeat.
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Walking through my hall of mirrors, portals into long-dead lives.
The potentiality of the present and speculations of future selves.
The plurality of existence all within the being of now.
Learning, unlearning, consuming, producing.
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The search for authenticity.
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This castle used to float alone in a mist of its own making.
To escape the world around it.
Amongst the clouds it thought it was free.
Free to condense the clouds into tears of loneliness.
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Clearing away the vapours of delusion.
I add rocks to the foundations of the floating fortress.
A tangled bank. Grounding connection.
The core roots. Merged to the mycelium.
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We are never alone.
Unless we choose to be.
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Not random ramblings,
Or fantastical daydreams,
Yet feeling selfish and unworthy
Just hoping that at least one is touched by my journey,
through its sharing.
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Just a human, being.
“It’s your story babe, feel free to hit em with a plot twist whenever you want"
“There are all sorts of people telling us what to do, when really all we need is space to work out who to be.”
