it’s fuckin hot out today we sweat at each other, perspiring punctuation; this is my sentence and i am lying on the dying lawn

I was struck not only by the stories that were presented on the night, but also by those that weren’t – so often our community is considered to be a monolith of identity and of opinion, when in fact even this small slice of life showed our deep and beautiful diversity.

What started as a trickle of hashtags, a game of safety and invisibility in numbers, quickly grew to become personal, overwhelming, and eviscerating. Longer and longer posts appeared, ritual defenestrations from our hard-won rooms of our own into a world that remained silent and complicit. The gamut of responses from fellow victims alone ran from deep sympathy, love, and solidarity to complete and utter standstill (switching off modems at the wall and burying phones under concrete slabs). I was firmly in the latter camp.