NOTE:

Finding Light in the Dark

I am not alone, as some cliché insists — that we are all born alone, live alone, die alone. That is a philosopher's shorthand, and like most shorthand, it erases too much. There are people who are born into warmth and held there, families that function ideally, sturdy and load-bearing, sustaining a life from its first breath to its last. I have seen those people. I recognise them by a particular ease and loyalty they carry.

That was not my situation.

My family was not built to last. It fell away the way things fall that were never properly anchored — not dramatically, and after the matriarch passed away.

I learned early what most people learn late: that you will teach yourself most of what matters. The world is not obligated to explain itself to you, and knowledge, clarity — these are things you earn alone, in the hours when no one is watching.

I can count on one hand the people who have been honest with me. And I hold that number as a measurement — the precise distance between what people promise and what they do.

My oldest friendship has lasted since 1986. Forty years. He was my French teacher, one of four mentors who saw something in me worth seeing. The fourth is my partner, who came into my life and has remained twenty-three years — steady, present, and without condition. I have been fortunate in the most important ways.

—

I will not be returning to social media in any meaningful way. What happened there has affected me psychologically, and I will not pretend it didn’t, because I’m not in the habit of pretending. I also would like to be honest about what happened, because silence about it has become its own damage.

I am self-protective online even as I am open. I trust none. I have always found it difficult to sustain connections that live only in text, or in the scroll of a feed. Depth requires time, repetition, the ring of a voice and emotion. I do not make online friendships easily, and the ones I have made have been few and deliberate. When I returned to social media after nearly three years away, I came back carefully.

Someone approached me in late 2024. We had already spoken prior, briefly, several times. He was kind — genuinely kind; I believed it then, and I believe it still. We had a bond that felt real, layered, worth keeping. I had blocked him three times before I trusted him. I told him the conversation I needed to have was heavy. That I had lost a great deal and there was grief in it, also some violence at the edges. I asked for one week of his attention — the same thing I had asked someone else one month prior, who told me to go fuck myself. Mind you, this took a lot of courage for me because I am so private regarding certain things.

He said yes. I sent him hours of voice messages. We became close. Prior to that, I had been in therapy for five years because I suffered the loss of my mother, my step-father, and my biological father. All of my friendships and my family fell away when crisis hit my mother's life. I was dealing with somebody who was an addict and the people connected to them. I had nobody outside my therapist, and I wanted a normal human being to listen.

But he was not clear. And the lack of clarity did not stay contained to him.

Around him moved a cluster of people — accounts, presences, orbits — whose behaviour was not casual and not coincidental. I am highly attuned to pattern. I do not say this to be self-congratulatory; it has cost me more than it has given me. But I notice things. I had never logged any of it until now because none was bothersome or attention grabbing. End of last year, and into spring of this year, I logged them. Now, I no longer do.

I invested in tracking tools, documented what I found, and confirmed what I already knew in my body before I knew it in my mind: I was being watched. I was being mocked in places I was not supposed to notice. Private things I had shared with him had been passed along. Direct messages saying that my secrets had been told to them, also many accounts popping up that had things triggering to just me alone. My grief had become entertainment. It was connected to one person and had never happened in all my years of being online since the mid-90s.

I lost a friend once — a woman with an already difficult life — to this kind of sustained cruelty online. She was stalked until she could not bear it. I will not use softer language than that. Another friend sort of went off the radar because it was too heavy. I don’t take this lightly. I’m also not a quitter and not easily intimidated. I’d rather get to the bottom of the mystery and hold anyone accountable. And at the least, figure it out for myself so I can stop being bothered.

What makes pattern recognition a particular kind of suffering is that it is both undeniable and invisible. You see it fully. You cannot make anyone else see it without sounding like precisely what they want you to sound like. And so you document, alone, at odd hours, building a case that no one asked you to build and no one will fully believe, and you carry it the way you carry everything — without overflow or a spilled drop...

I had already tried ignoring it. I’d already turned a blind eye — and it wasn’t working.

—

What made this worse and reach somewhere I did not expect is that it was tied to a culture that was part of me before I had language for it. Persian culture is not something I came into as an adult, not as a choice or a passing interest. It entered me when I was born. When I was two years old, I started to know the books. Rugs. Poetry. The texture of a world that was not mine by birth but became mine by absorption, by love, by the kind of early imprinting that forms a person before they know they are being formed. I followed the news, and I read books written by women from that culture. I am not Persian. It does not matter. That beauty runs through everything I make, everything I write, everything I am. It is my culture and deep in my heart too, regardless of what anybody else wants to say.

To have trusted someone from that world — someone I believed understood the weight of what I carried toward it — and to have been treated as though I did not matter, as though being a white-skinned American woman made me a convenient object and an easy erasure: that is a particular grief. Not rage. Grief. There is a difference.

The people around him operated from a certainty that I did not count. I do not know how many of them were one person wearing many faces, or two, or three. Or worse, many more. I’ll never understand why I was targeted. What I know is that they were numerous and organised and that he was not uninvolved. That he gave three hours of his time to someone else's account of events and not one minute to mine, when I had given him everything I had — carefully, honestly, in the hours I could least afford to lose. I’m certain I was painted poorly. Sadly, I kept completely to myself. With the exception of June 2024, when I was being watched and noted it, then went to see the accounts of the person watching me. In hindsight, I realized I was lied to and being baited, and it worked. I took the bait, and I looked at the accounts, and I was the villain.

He said once, when I raised the situation with him gently, that he had no control over how other people behave. That is technically true. It is also a way of saying: I will not protect you. That is a choice, and it belongs entirely to him. Later, he blocked somebody I thought might be the person, but never really blocked her. She was orbiting him the entire time.

I am compassionate toward him. I say that without softness or apology. He was real to me. The friendship we had was real. The failure of his courage does not undo what came before it. I carry both things close. That is what my personal brand of honesty requires.

What I cannot hold — what I am setting down in public, because the only answer to a year and a half of surveillance is full daylight — is the silence around it.

I had to remove thousands of people to clean the space. Innocent ones among them — people from all over the world — who had done nothing but exist in the same orbit. I kept one: a young person I verified on video, polite and earnest, asking advice about their life. The reality was obvious. Everyone else went.

I will never be able to trust the way I once trusted across those distances, those cultures, those particular kinds of closeness that the internet makes briefly, dangerously possible. Not because those cultures failed me — cultures do not fail people, people fail people — but because the cost of this failure was paid in something I loved without reservation, and I do not get that back. There were a lot of angry people who reached out to me, no compassion, no understanding for what I carried, and who did not even bother to ask. That’s not my failure.

Cultures and countries can make it impossible for people to live and create conditions in which cruelty becomes a tool. I understand the pressure that produces. I do not forgive what it enabled in this person. Worse, when people from those cultures lie about what the government is doing, or use war as a tool to hurt somebody. I’m devastated because every morning at 6 AM, I opened up my phone to see if they were OK and how far the bombs landed from them. I wondered how many other friends of his were doing the same thing.

The light I am finding is not warm. It is not the light of resolution or of things that have healed. It is cold and clear — and comes when something has been seen all the way through, and one can (at last) stop the work of seeing it.

I know what happened, and why. I know what it did and what it showed, and what it means for how I go forward. I have the documentation. It’s put away now and done. I have the poems. I have "Dust" and "Erasing You," written at the end of all of it, and they will outlast the circumstances that made them.

I am sad. I want to say that plainly. I am sad the way anyone is when something real ends — alone, with nobody to hear, as usual. So I am telling the world.

And I am clear. Clarity, for someone made the way I am made, is its own form of light.

It is enough. For now, it’s enough.

My hope is that nobody is hurt further, that maybe someday this person will talk to me — the friendship was real and it was worth it. And I hope that anyone affected by this is all right. I do not like to see people hurt, never — but especially now, in these times.

M.

•Saguaro, Night I | 2026

•Sonoran Preserve area | Photoshop Edits

•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition 2 of 10