Kept

I didn’t expect a costume to hand me a mirror.

I thought I was preparing to inhabit a character—Elizabeth Báthory—her silhouette, her era, the weight of myth that clings to her name. Instead, the role turned and looked back at me. Not as monster. Not as accusation. But as a question.

Why do we reach for myth when reality is already enough?

The blood stories came late. Long after her death. Long after the records. They arrived when fear needed a shape, when power needed a distraction, when complexity was too heavy to hold. I felt that friction immediately—the unease of being asked to wear a legend instead of a truth. The discomfort wasn’t fear of guilt by association. It was the feeling of watching systems repeat themselves: spectacle replacing structure, monsters replacing accountability.

And then, unexpectedly, the dress began to teach me.

I noticed the sleeves first. Paneled. Slashed. Layered. Once functional—meant to expand, to adjust, to change with the body and with time. Over centuries, they became bell sleeves, bishop sleeves, gestures of volume without agency. The shape survived. The intelligence didn’t.

A shell of what once knew how to adapt.

That’s when it landed—not all at once, but unmistakably.

This is what I do.

Not just with clothing. With history. With myth. With technology. With abuse narratives. With power. With fear. I look for what something was built to do, how it drifted, where it calcified into symbol, and who benefits when function is forgotten but the form remains.

I’ve been told, more times than I can count, that I “never finish what I start.” That I should show up to businesses and tell them everything that’s wrong. As if insight must end in confrontation. As if completion only counts when it happens inside someone else’s structure.

Those words always felt like a narrowing. Like being pressed into a box that mistook depth for avoidance.

What I understand now is simple and enormous: I am not here to fix systems from the inside. I am here to see them. To map them. To translate their patterns so they can be recognized elsewhere. I finish when the template is clear. When the blueprint exists. Staying past that point isn’t virtue—it’s erosion.

Voltaire used to tell me I was a blueprint writer, that I held the templates. He spoke in a language I could hear then—mythic, symbolic, mirrored. I needed that doorway. I needed to arrive here slowly, through many rooms, many subjects, many proofs.

Now I can say it plainly.

I analyze systems.

I see where function collapses into performance. Where fear turns into theater. Where beauty survives after intelligence has been stripped away—and where it can be restored.

This isn’t arrogance. It’s alignment.

And it doesn’t mean I must do this with everything, for everyone, all the time. Focus isn’t a cage. It’s a lens. I get to choose where my clarity does the most good and costs me the least harm.

Today, it’s a dress.

Black velvet sleeves that remember how to move. Panels that acknowledge bodies change. A garment that doesn’t pretend permanence but honors adaptation. Fabric as thought. Clothing as system.

So I’m going to close this notebook now and return to my workbench. Needle. Thread. Weight of fabric in my hands. Because this understanding didn’t arrive to make me louder.

It arrived to make me truer.

And that, finally, feels finished enough.

https://suno.com/s/1C2jkbUzZ2KSGBid

Velvet holds memories.