The Quiet Way I Kiss the World

I don’t go out much.

I don’t date right now

.And yet, I am wildly, wordlessly queer.

You won’t see me holding hands with a woman in a coffee shop.

You won’t see me posting pictures with a partner on Instagram.

But if you stepped into my bedroom, you’d see the brushstrokes—soft, deliberate, reverent—of women, painted nude from the back.

Not for seduction.

Not for attention.

But for honor.

These women are for me.

They live in the quiet sanctuary of my room,

where no one needs to understand them but me.

They are part of the way I kiss the world—not with my lips, but with my gaze.

With how I choose to see beauty.

With how I choose to stay soft, and single, and sapphic.

Sometimes, while I paint, I listen to I Kissed Shara Wheeler.

A story of messy girls and sacred questions.

Of queer longing and unexpected freedom.

And in the quiet—paint on my hands, sapphic fiction in my ears—

I remember: this is queerness, too.

It’s not loud.

It’s not for show.

But it is true.

This is the quiet way I kiss the world:

with art that speaks to my spirit,

with books that mirror the parts of me I thought no one saw,

with solitude that isn’t absence—it’s intention.

I don’t need to be in a relationship to be queer.

I don’t need to be witnessed to be valid.

I am here.

I am home.

I am whole.