Before the final story, a moment to witness what we've carried, what we've shared, what we've survived together. Your witnessing has been part of the alchemy—turning silence into song, shame into revolution.
The Prelude: Where It All Began
Before the essays, before the questions, before the declarations—there was a boy. A boy on the West Side, gathering shadows, carrying weight stitched into skin. The prelude that set the tone for everything that followed: "This is the ritual of staying. Breath after breath, night after night."
The poem that became prophecy, the image that became inheritance: a boy walking a road not built for him, crying to a night sky, carrying a world he didn't choose. "Each silence folded into brittle marrow—an inheritance for the next one."
This was our invocation. Our warning. Our promise that what followed would not be soft.
The Beginning: What We Carried
Week 2
INHERITANCE, PT. 1 - Does My Blackness, My Queerness, My Status Offend You?
We began here, with a question that wasn't really a question but a declaration. The refusal to shrink, to be consumed in secret, to become anyone's hidden shame. "Then sit with it. Let it sear into your skin like the heat of a Southern sun." This was the opening salvo—the announcement that this collection would not ask for permission to exist.
THE WEIGHT OF MY NAME (Interlude)
The names given, taken, whispered behind closed doors. The burden of carrying what was never ours to hold. "I have been renamed a thousand times by the mouths of strangers who never knew me."
The Diagnosis: When the World Changed
Week 3
THE TRIFECTA - Strike One: Blackness / Strike Two: Queerness / Strike Three: HIV+
The body with three strikes before it even speaks. A meditation on how the world measures worth, how we learn to carry shame that was never ours to begin with. "Before I ever spoke my first word, the world had already written my obituary."
THE LIES I ONCE BELIEVED (Interlude)
What they told us about Blackness, queerness, survival. And what we had to unlearn to reclaim ourselves. "What if I was never meant to be half of myself just to survive?"
Week 4-5
I WAS 21, IN LOVE, AND HE GAVE ME HIV
The story that changed everything. Love as both salvation and betrayal. The moment trust became trauma, and how we learn to carry what was done to us. "I let him inside me in every way a person can be entered. Heart first. Then body. Then ruin."
THE SHAPE OF LOVE (Interlude)
Love, longing, and the ways we mistake survival for love. What remains when love is stripped of shame? "I have mistaken the absence of violence for love."
The Weight: What We Inherited
Week 5
THE WEIGHT OF AN INHERITANCE
What is carried before breath. Family, history, and the burdens passed down through blood and identity. How we learn to hold both the beauty and brutality of what came before us. "I was born heavy. Not from the weight of my own body, but from the weight of those who came before me."
WHAT SILENCE SOUNDS LIKE (Interlude)
The absence of words is never empty. Silence as presence, weight, force. "Silence has a sound. It is the space between my name and the breath that should follow."
Week 6
WHAT SILENCE TOOK FROM ME
The cost of hiding, the cost of speaking, and the love that remained. Ten years of living inside lies, of performance as survival, of carrying truth like a stone in your chest. "To lie was to learn a new language. To fabricate was to step into a role and never forget my lines."
WHEN MY BODY WAS A WARZONE (Interlude)
The body as both battlefield and casualty. What does it mean to make peace with a body the world has warred against? "My body has been both the battlefield and the casualty."
The Reckoning: Learning to Fight Back
Week 7
WHAT MY BODY REMEMBERS, WHAT LOVE REFUSED TO FORGET
The body as both battlefield and home. A meditation on intimacy after betrayal, the silence after disclosure, and the way love finds its way back—always. "Some hands have hurt me without ever touching me at all. And my body—my body remembers."
Week 8
TO LOVE ME IS TO WITNESS ME
Radical visibility, self-love, and refusing to shrink. A challenge to erasure, a return to self. The moment survival becomes revolution. "I am not supposed to be here. I was supposed to break, supposed to fold, supposed to be a name they only whispered in past tense. But here I am."
THE AUDACITY OF STILL BEING HERE (Interlude)
"I have died a thousand times. And yet, I wake up. What does it mean to take up space when the world tells you not to?"
Week 9
THE AUDACITY OF STILL BEING HERE
Not just survival. Not just healing. But thriving, taking up space, being undeniable. A final declaration against erasure. "They tried to make me disappear. But I do not vanish. I do not break. I do not bow."
The Becoming: Who We Are Now
Week 10
BLACK BOY: A Diptych
This is the final breath before the inhale. The recognition of what we carry and what we refuse to release. "Black boy, you remain." The period is not punctuation—it's declaration.
Week 11
THIS NAME, THIS BODY, THIS LOVE
The final exhale—the return to self. The truth that was waiting all along. A love letter to the boy who learned to apologize for existing, from the man who refuses to shrink. "Love does not require your disappearance."
The Architecture of Truth: Why These Forms
The essays demanded space to breathe, to unfold trauma and triumph in their fullness. The interludes—those Saturday micro-essays—became the gasps between deep dives, the moments where smaller truths could crystallize without needing to carry entire worlds. The Sunday psalms arose as spiritual anchors, reminders that even in excavating pain, we were building toward something holy. Each form served its purpose: some truths need room to sprawl, others pierce deeper in brevity, and some require the cadence of prayer to be properly held.
The Trail We've Walked
Across these 12 weeks, we've shared:
11 Full Essays released throughout the weeks
6 Interludes released on Saturdays, preparing the ground for Sunday's revelations
17 pieces total that became breadcrumbs leading us home to ourselves.
We began with a question: Does my existence offend you?
We end with a declaration: There is nothing you can do or say that would make us stop loving you.
Between those two points lies everything—the diagnosis that tried to define us, the silence that nearly buried us, the love that refused to leave, the audacity it took to stay visible in a world that demanded our disappearance.
We've traced the arc from survival to revolution, from shame to radical self-love, from the boy who learned to shrink to the man who takes up space without apology.
What We've Learned
That inheritance is more than bloodline—it's the burden and beauty of what we carry.
That silence has a sound, and it nearly killed us until we learned to break it.
That love is not something we earn but something we are.
That our bodies remember both trauma and tenderness, and both are part of our story.
That visibility is not a privilege but a right.
That survival is not enough—we were meant to thrive.
That the audacity of still being here is not just defiance but revolution.
That your witnessing—you who read these words, who held space for these truths—has been part of the healing. Every time you chose to see what the world would rather hide, you became part of the revolution.
The Boy Who Gathered Shadows, The Man Who Became Light
Remember that boy from "Reliquary"? The one gathering shadows, carrying weight stitched into skin? He's still here, but transformed. No longer gathering shadows but casting light. No longer carrying just weight but wisdom. The road that wasn't built for him? He's paving it now, for himself and for those who will come after.
That boy who cried to a night sky has become a man who sings to the dawn. The inheritance that once threatened to bury him has become the foundation on which he stands. Those shadows he gathered? They became the contrast that makes his light undeniable.
Where We've Been, Where We're Going
This record serves as map and compass—showing us where we started, where we've traveled, and pointing toward where we're heading.
Next week brings the final story, the one we've been building toward: Dragon's Bark. The parking lot. The message. The choice. The sound that split silence and brought us home.
Why save this story for last? Because everything else had to be spoken first. The weight had to be named, the silence had to be broken, the inheritance had to be claimed. Only then could we tell the story of the moment when choosing to live became more than survival—when it became an act of love. Dragon's story needed the foundation of everything that came before, needed you to understand the full weight of what it means when someone at the edge chooses to step back, to stay, to love and be loved.
But today, we witness what we've already survived. Today, we see the inheritance not as burden but as strength. Today, we recognize that every word shared, every truth spoken, every moment of refusing to disappear has been part of a larger reckoning.
We are the accumulation of every piece we've shared. We are the sum of every truth we've refused to hide. We are the inheritance of our own survival, and we are passing it forward to whoever needs to know they're not alone in what they're carrying.
The Record Continues
This is not the end of the story. It's the end of this chapter.
On September 21st, the words I kept sacred, kept silent, kept safe until now will finally speak:
Every Word I Never Spoke Aloud
Poems by Taylor Allyn
The inheritance continues. The record expands. The voice that refused to be silenced keeps singing.
But first, next Sunday, the final piece of this particular map: Dragon's Bark. The story of how love with four legs and a wagging tail saved a life that the world had convinced was not worth saving.
Until then, carry this record with you. Let it remind you of how far we've come, how much we've survived, how beautifully we've refused to disappear.
The inheritance is ours. All of it. The pain and the joy, the silence and the song, the ending that became a beginning.
We are still here. And that is everything.
A Moment for Your Own Reflection
Before we close this record, before we move toward the final chapter, pause here with these questions:
What inheritance are you carrying that was never yours to hold?
What silence in your life has a sound, and what would it take to break it?
Who were you before the world told you who to be?
What truth about yourself have you been waiting for permission to speak?
If your survival is revolution, what does your thriving look like?
Take these questions with you. Let them settle into your bones. You don't need to answer them now, or ever out loud. But know that in asking them, you join a lineage of those who refused to disappear, who transformed inheritance from burden to strength, who learned that visibility is not a privilege but a birthright.
Postscript: To the Boy Who Became
To that boy on the West Side, the one gathering shadows in "Reliquary"—
You thought you were collecting evidence of your unworthiness. You thought those shadows were proof of what the world said about you. You carried them like stones in your pockets, weight that would eventually drag you under.
But look at you now.
Those shadows you gathered? They became the material for your light. Every piece of darkness you collected taught you how to recognize dawn. The weight that should have drowned you became the anchor that kept you grounded when the world tried to sweep you away.
That boy walking a road not built for him? He didn't just learn to walk it—he's rebuilding it with every step, leaving trail markers for the boys who come after, the ones who need to know that the road widens, that there's room for them too.
You became exactly who you were meant to be—not in spite of what you carried, but because you learned how to carry it. Not by putting it down, but by transforming its weight into wings.
The man you are now would tell that boy: "Every shadow you're gathering is future light. Every tear is watering something that will bloom. That road that wasn't built for you? You're going to make it home."
And he would be right.
Coming Sunday: A Glimpse into the Final Chapter
From DRAGON'S BARK - Week 13 of 13:
"The parking lot was empty except for my car and the kind of silence that comes before endings. The message on my phone sat there like a diagnosis, like a verdict, like proof of everything I'd been told about my worth. This was supposed to be the period at the end of a sentence nobody wanted to read.
But then—a sound. Not quite a bark, more like a question. A rusty-colored face in the passenger window of a truck three spaces over. Eyes that didn't know anything about my status, my shame, my inheritance of shadows. Just eyes that saw someone who might have treats, might have hands for petting, might have a heart that needed something to protect it from itself.
What happened next changed everything. Not because it was dramatic or profound, but because it was simple: something with four legs and a wagging tail decided I was worth staying for..."
DRAGON'S BARK
The Full Story
Sunday, September 14th
The Final Chapter
Let that be enough—for now.