The Little Walls I Built To Set You Free
She doesn’t know why the mesh is there.
She just knows the terrace smells like sun and wind and something worth investigating, and that I am sitting out here with her now in a way I wasn’t before. She is not thinking about the drop on the other side. She is thinking about the pigeon on the railing two buildings over.
I am the one thinking about the drop.
So I bought room dividers.
Mesh wire.
Little walls.
Told myself I was doing it for her. And I was.
But I was also doing it for me.
Because I cannot enjoy the terrace if I am watching her like a goalkeeper every thirty seconds. The walls were not just protection. They were permission. Permission for both of us to just be up here.
I said it out loud to her this morning without thinking.
The little walls I bought were meant to liberate you, Freedom.
Her name is Freedom Pantera Swanson. She is a black cat. Street smart, docile, and smarter than people I have been in rooms with. She came into my life with that name already earned. She did not need me to give her anything. She needed me to stop being afraid long enough to let her be who she already was.
I sat with that for a while.
The Box I Built For Myself
I have a manifesto for the VengaDragon Substack.
An instruction engine.
A publishing system with named days and named voices and named rules for what goes where and why.
I built it thinking it would set me free.
Structure creates speed.
Constraints create clarity.
I believed that.
I still believe it.
But this morning on the terrace I started wondering if I had also built myself a room divider. Something that keeps me from going over the edge, yes. But also something that keeps me from getting close enough to the edge to feel anything real.
The best thing I have written recently came from a car in 1992. It did not fit cleanly into a category. It was a FORGE piece with a VENGA soul. I put it in THE FORGE because the manifesto said so.
The manifesto was right. And also the manifesto was a little wall.
What Freedom Knows
She is not grateful for the mesh. She doesn’t know it’s there. She is just out here, fully present, doing exactly what she came to do.
That is the thing about walls that work. You stop seeing them. You just get to be in the space they made possible.
She was street before she was mine. She knows things about survival I will never know. She does not need protection from the world. She needs me to stop projecting my fear onto her and just sit in the sun with her like an adult.
The mesh is for me. The terrace is for her. The sitting together is for both of us.
Maybe that’s what a good system does. Maybe that’s what a good manifesto does. Not a cage. Not a map. Just the thing that gets you out onto the terrace without spending the whole time afraid.
I am still figuring out where the walls go. Still moving the dividers around. Still watching Freedom to see what she does next.
She just knocked over my coffee.
So we’re both free.
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V➤ The walls that work are the ones you eventually stop seeing.