Photo: Smug, a sculpture by Tony Smith, at Glenstone in Maryland. I have been meaning to write about that place and I will. That place has absolutely captured my attention and I can’t fully put my thumb on why. Anyway, this isn’t what the portals in my story look like, but I like that I have a picture that is portalesque.

Massachusetts State Police put a barrier around the Esplanade Portal after a white woman from New Hampshire claiming five percent “African” ancestry and screaming “reverse discrimination is wrong” lost her hands, forearms, and a foot trying to enter in a ridiculous internet stunt. She stood on one foot screaming, her arms and the other foot simply gone. Her elbows were perfectly skinned over with nubs. Not a trace of blood or viscera to be seen. There was no sound, no red light, no guardian monster and earth-shattering roar. There was simple, silent refusal.

This is a small excerpt from my story, Exit Interview, which you can read in full for free at Strange Horizons. I wrote it after my time serving in public and leaving Massachusetts for good after 17 years of living there. Living there and serving there was death by a thousand paper cuts. When I left, I told the people who I loved, the people who I’d miss, I threw a party and invited only my closest friends, we packed up our life and we left. I didn’t leave an exit interview. This story is a manifestation of that, though. During the entire moving process, I thought about what I’d say if I really did get the opportunity to curse out a key person or two on my way out the door. What would my exit interview really be to all of New England? It ended up being me sticking up my middle finger as I crossed the town line at 5am and again when I crossed the state line an hour later. It felt good. That was enough. There were people who didn’t know I was gone until weeks later. There are people who still think I owed them a goodbye who will never receive so much as a glance from me, even when I’m back in town. I silently, but powerfully, refuse.

This paragraph in particular is one that I have a deep love for. There is deep, deep power in silent refusal. “No” can be really shattering. In a story like this, it would be all too easy to make the portals be monstrous and terrifying, the antagonist those certain people would want and would absolutely find reason to seek to destroy. But there is nothing scarier to them than when we’re actually doing our own thing, minding our own business, being exclusive and out of reach. Here stands a thing you cannot access and no, we’re not even going to tell you why.

This image of the portal was one of the first to vividly come to me as I wrote the story. I can see the scene like a movie: The Charles, silver and moving in the background, with the Boston and Cambridge skylines twinkling in the peripheral, and people surrounding a relatively small bit of real estate while a forbidding and beautiful rips reality with light, smell, and sound in a fenced-off space. The last time I was on the Esplanade, it was on the 4th July when we first got to town, and men holding military rifles guarded the bridges and entryways. I imagine them standing there, full gear, shields over their faces, keeping people out for their own protection.

I can imagine, in this scenario, the militia men in their tri-corner hats and stockings, muskets and rifles of their own, marching with fife and drum as they “protected” an entitled moron claiming entrance to a place she knew she couldn’t tread. I can imagine the manifesto she wrote before she made her journey, the videos she made as she traveled, the certificates printed out claiming her “ancestry.” The need to say anything just to prove that she, too, should be able to lay claim, take space, make noise.

The loudness is the point. The noise. The nonstop taking up of oxygen and space. This is all the point.

But in the portal, there is quiet. Sweet, beautiful, powerful quiet.

I follow a lot of farming stuff, plant stuff, liberation stuff, mental health stuff, sewing stuff, nerdy stuff, and Black stuff writ large on social media. One of my favorite farmers is leaving Instagram and has a great video explaining why. He’s had me thinking about it all day. He pointed me in the direction of where my thoughts have been for a few weeks. And as I contemplated what my exit interview for instagram was going to be, I remembered my portal. Quiet, powerful refusal. I’m simply going to get rid of the account.

Unfortunately, I can’t hop off Facebook quite yet because my nonprofit lives there and on Instagram and they’re both connected to my personal account. But hopefully not for much longer.

And I decided I’m not jumping on anything new. I’ll be on BlueSky until I’m fully annoyed with it (I’m very close to being there) and I’ll keep my new substack until I decide that doesn’t serve either. But that’s it. I’m walking through the portal to liberation. I’m not going to announce my departure, I’m not going to comment on the events that have facilitated my leaving, I’m just not going to let any more of any of this take up my oxygen. Portals are opening all over the internet, dear reader. Walk through one. Find peace. If peace eludes, walk through another.

Don’t forget: they’re looking for us to be monsters. That means they can hate us instead of going back to hating themselves. In the end, as we continue to leave them to their sad little spaces of sadness, they’ll have to deal with themselves.

Or run out of oxygen. I’m good either way.

Cheers to letting them have it. See you here and on Substack whenever you so choose.