What we leave behind.

What We Leave Behind.
Is it the bloom or the scent that lingers?

There are some people who don’t just exist—they disrupt.
Not with violence. Not with noise.
But with the audacity to be whole in a world that demands fragments.

And in watching them, sometimes—if we’re lucky—we glimpse it:
the roadmap to True North. Not a path paved with certainty,
but with choice. Trembling choice. And grace.

Alok Vaid-Menon is one of those people.
Brown, brilliant, trans—Alok moves through the world like a poem with teeth.
Unapologetically honest, relentlessly compassionate, devastatingly funny.
They wear color like resistance.
They speak with a rhythm that softens walls.
They love, even while bleeding.

Watching Alok isn’t just witnessing someone speak their truth—
it’s witnessing someone reclaim the right to exist in joy, in rage, in beauty, in contradiction.

And on a warm Friday afternoon, watching them bleed into a microphone,
it stirred my soul enough to dig through the rubble and question what we leave behind.

We do not leave behind heirlooms polished to a gleam, or titles heavy with someone else’s history.
We leave behind the ache of becoming. The spark struck in the dark when the world said “no,” and we said, “Still—yes.”

We leave the blueprint of defiance pressed into bread dough, cooked imperfectly but beautifully.
We leave moments folded into poems and whispered into stew.
We leave behind unspoken permissions: to cry without shame, to laugh without permission,
to walk away from cages—even gilded ones.

We leave behind a roadmap that doesn’t point north—it just says:
Here. Try here. Try where your soul calls, even if you tremble.

We gift the embers, not ever the fire, that you must light yourself.
The kind of passion that warms and warns, that dances in your chest and never asks to be tamed.

We leave behind stories we were never allowed to finish, hoping they’ll take the pen and dare to write the next word.
We leave behind the freedom to be soft. The freedom to be seen. The freedom to exist without being explained.

We leave behind the stubborn tenderness that says:
You belong. Even now. Even here. Even as you change.

We leave behind questions that splinter the silence.
Not to confuse—but to crack open the facade, to let the wind in.

We leave the pulse of ancestral drumbeat beneath your skin, and the right to choose silence
when the noise becomes too much.

We leave behind the fact that love can be a scalpel, and that laughter can be revolution.

We leave behind the knowing that softness is not surrender.
That the ones who bend often survive the storm while the rigid break.
And that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—but you are the only beholder that matters.
Because the world is defined by you.

We leave a compass made of contradictions:
Be kind, but unyielding. Be wild, but rooted. Trust love, but also your gut.
And if it leads you away, follow it. Even if it leads you away from us.

We leave behind the memory of when we first realized the world wasn’t fair—
and the moment after, when we decided to fight anyway.

We leave behind the scars we turned into constellations.
Not to romanticize pain, but to show you the shape of survival.

We leave you the right to walk away from anything that asks you to be less.

We leave behind no answers, no arrows, just the scent and the spark—
a compass etched in contradiction, and a single, stubborn truth:
You are already enough.

And maybe, just maybe,
we leave behind a scent that lingers long after the bloom has fallen.