About This Section
"The Archive That Isn't There" excavates the silences that shape us—the missing photos, the names nobody speaks, the death certificates that don't exist, the medical records sealed or destroyed. This section builds monuments from whispers, creates evidence from absence, and refuses to let erasure have the last word.
These pieces map what happens when your history lives only in the pauses between words, when love means learning to grieve someone you can't prove existed. This is about the brutal mathematics of the epidemic, the architecture of forgetting, and the holy work of remembering anyway.
No titles. No context. Just instinct. You vote. I release the one that calls loudest.
This is KINFOLK 3 of 44—eight essays live in this third section. I've chosen five for you to consider. Each piece stands alone. Together, they form an archive—not of what was saved, but of what we refuse to lose.
Your voice shapes this journey. Pass it on to someone who should be part of what we're building.
How to Vote Choose the line that reaches for something in you. Poll closes Friday at 5pm CST. The winning piece releases Saturday 8/23/2025 at 9am CST.
The Lines
"There's a birth certificate somewhere with a name blacked out, not with ink but something heavier, like somebody pressed their whole body down on that paper until the name gave up. Mama's eyes go somewhere I can't follow when I ask."
"In the waiting room, we all got the same look—like we been carrying something careful up a long flight of stairs. Everybody know but don't nobody say what floor we on, what kind of careful this is, what happens when you drop what you carrying."
"In this language, positive means you dying. They explain it twice like maybe you didn't hear them right the first time, like maybe the problem is your ears and not the world that makes positive mean its opposite when it's your blood they're talking about."
"Before the funeral, we buried him seventeen times in seventeen different mouths. Each version got its own casket, its own flowers, its own reason why don't nobody need to bring potato salad to this particular grief."
"You learn to build a person from what's missing—every gap in the photo album is a shoulder, every silence at dinner is a laugh. Some ghosts you gotta make."
Vote with your gut. Not your grammar.
Choose the line that stays. The one that follows you out the room.
The essay behind the most chosen line will be revealed by title and in full this Saturday, 8/23 at 9am CST.
Poll closes Friday at 5pm CST.
Tell your kin. Tell the ones who keep the ghosts.
Let them feel this too.