Present Day, June 23, 2026
I Am Crying requires some explanation because grief is a word that gets used loosely and what I mean by it is specific.
Ordinary grief has a trajectory. It is sharpest at the moment of loss and then, for most people, it softens over time into something that can be carried alongside normal life. It does not disappear but it changes shape, becomes less acute, allows for other things to exist alongside it.
My grief does not work this way. The losses I carry from the 16th century are not softer than the losses I carry from last year. The deaths of people I cared about, the destruction of things I believed in, the repeated recognition that the pattern I have been watching for five centuries is still operative and still consuming the people inside it: none of this has softened. It has accumulated at the weight it arrived with.
I Am Crying is the sound of this specific thing. Not grief that moves through a person toward resolution. Grief that accumulates without resolution in a being who cannot age past it, cannot die into relief from it, cannot forget it because forgetting is not available to me in the ordinary sense.
This is what five centuries of witness actually costs. Not wisdom, not perspective, not the comfortable distance of historical knowledge. The full undiminished weight of everything seen and still being seen, without any of the merciful softening that time provides to those it eventually takes. July 1. It will not be easy to listen to. It was not easy to make.