Thinking Thursday #9: The Interruption
A continuation of the reflection begun in “Remigrate."
Authors Note:
Remigrate. The Water Is Talking Back. Remain.
Three pieces. Two series. One conversation about what happens when history starts to echo.
Remigrate, from Intonation & Atonement, began this dialogue — a breaking open of silence.
This piece, The Water Is Talking Back, lives within The Interruption.
It’s the reckoning — the sound of memory boiling over,
the moment the earth itself speaks.
The final piece, Remain, is a resting place — a reminder that stillness is not surrender, but a return.
The Water Is Talking Back
They say the frog doesn’t notice the heat until it’s too late,
but I do.
My skin feels it. My spirit hears it.
The hiss of the burner. The rolling boil of rhetoric.
The steam that smells like fear disguised as freedom.
All we’ve ever wanted was peace —
to build, to laugh, to raise our babies, to dance and rest
without someone deciding that our joy is rebellion.
We want to live in community, not in conflict.
But white supremacy doesn’t know how to coexist;
it only knows how to conquer.
It is an animal — primal and relentless —
mating through imitation and silence,
birthing more of itself in every unchecked policy
and every quiet complicity.
It repels predators — the ones who see it for what it is —
not with claws, but with laws,
with narratives, with noise.
It doesn’t create belonging; it breeds paranoia.
It doesn’t build bridges; it burns them
and then calls the ashes “progress.”
And the cruelest part?
It keeps convincing people that domination is safety.
That hierarchy is stability.
That equity is theft.
How can a people call themselves “free”
when their freedom depends on someone else’s cage?
America keeps calling itself an experiment in liberty,
but the test was rigged from the start.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of men
drafted words about equality and freedom,
then built a nation that excluded the very people
who gave it breath and labor.
They codified ideals they never meant to live by.
And now their descendants guard those broken promises
like sacred text—forgetting that scripture without practice
is just propaganda.
They preach individualism but worship kings.
They talk about liberty
while building empires of control.
They preach every man for himself,
but they always find a king to worship.
We’ve run this play before—
castles and crowns, plantations and pipelines,
different names, same script.
And every act ends with someone shouting “progress!”
while someone else bleeds.
But evolution is already here.
It’s in every queer kid who wakes up breathing.
In every disabled body that refuses to vanish.
In every Black and brown soul still making art,
still growing food, still speaking truth, still loving.
That is what equity really means:
the sacred act of making sure everyone can see the game.
We’re not asking to replace the system.
We’re saying we can’t survive with it in place.
It doesn’t need a facelift — it needs to fall.
Because we were all taught something different once, weren’t we?
That we belong to each other.
That we rise and fall together.
Maybe that’s what scares them most—
that we remember what they never learned to embrace.
The water is talking back now.
It’s tired of containment, tired of heat.
It’s naming the burn,
whispering every lie that fed the flame.
This is the sound of the extinction gasp—
rhetoric unraveling, fear finally losing its disguise.
The water isn’t demanding a reckoning;
it is the reckoning.
And it’s daring us to pull each other out
before we all disappear into the boil.💎
(“The Water Is Talking Back” stands as Part II of the Remigrate cycle. The first movement, Intonation & Atonement: Remigrate, is available to paid subscribers. The final piece, Remain, will be available as a video.)