I accept your offer of an embrace as I crave your touch more than anything… connection, communication, the reassurance of being alive. And yet, I hold back too ― my eyes shift from yours to the wall, my shoulders pull up towards my ears, my breath becomes shallow so that my chest and belly don’t move, so I don’t risk inadvertently pressing into you. I hold myself in place, a stone statue, cold, hard, immobile. Sometimes when I reach out across the void (the line that has been drawn between us by others, because I am X and you are Y), I do it with a deep courage, with a full on I-don’t-care-what-people-say confidence, or a quiet this-is-how-it-ought-to-be simplicity. And sometimes I shrink into the space I’ve been given by a culture that’s way too afraid to deal with me at full size.
— heidi kalyani, 2016
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line