The White Rose

Isis,

There comes a moment,

not loud or planned,

when one chooses against the party.

Not because the party is wrong,

but because something inside

begins to remember the shape of entirety.

A silhouette seldom seen

when time is set aside.

On Thursday,

a formless shadow left imprints across my field,

and I obliged to make out its details.

I crossed with Katherine at camp,

a woman sober by fire, not fashion,

one who followed her own signposts out of chaos.

We walked to the water at sunset,

where reflection speaks louder than music.

I asked about her path.

She asked,

“Earth, or the festival?”

I said,

“Earth.”

And in that question lived the whole.

She did not believe in paths.

To her, life was water,

natural, symmetrical, divine,

until mind disturbed the puddle with will.

She told her story:

addict, dealer, prisoner turned witness.

She shared a vision,

the child’s eyes seated between soul and Aphrodite.

Right, left.

Death, rebirth.

Then the past arrived as flesh.

A man named Maxwell sat to her right,

a traveling merchant,

an echo of her former self.

He offered us ketamine.

We declined.

But the offering was divine.

“On your right,” I told her,

“sits the past you survived.

On your left sits Aphrodite,

beauty, witness, the feminine eternal.”

Maxwell drifted.

We stayed.

She cried.

“What did the old you need?” I asked.

“Confidence,” she said, “Release.”

What she mistook for freedom

had been escape.

She said the old her makes her feel

like an imposter

in her own presence.

I paused, recognizing this echo within myself,

the one who denied his true identity,

finally able to exhale into his creation.

So I handed her paper.

“Draw.”

She drew.

We burned it.

Two sticks forming an X,

two timelines crossing.

Flame on water.

Our pasts cast back to reflection.

And I remembered a poem

born of fire in water:

Love’s Lament.

I recited it beneath the night.

The next day,

I entered your ceremony,

a lament for the old architecture of love.

A throne for Venus.

The White Rose bloomed from Katherine’s picture,

and I watched as the patriarchy

laid gently to rest

by beauty’s burial.

Venus did not chant.

She did not dance in 2.

Again, she witnessed,

returned as 1.

You did not teach.

You opened a palace.

Where man does not yield,

he offers himself to the altar of devotion.

Where strength becomes softness.

Where witness becomes womb.

And so I write to you now,

not as a teacher,

but as ash that once danced as flame

on the surface of water.

To say this:

It was never “them.”

It was always our own flame,

caught in a reflection,

reaching for itself.

When the world hands you a relic,

an echo of your former self wrapped in flesh,

offering you the very drug

you once mistook for freedom,

do not run.

Bow.

Bow to the you who survived it.

And whisper to the moment:

Thank you.

I remember.

And if the water weeps, let it.

It is only the mirror washing clean

what you are now ready to see.

Love.