Hey, I’m Ro. This is where I write from the liminal body of shadow, eros, myth. A resting place for gnawing on fragments, unfurling scrolls, and side‑ways transmissions that spiral through desire, grief, rupture, and becoming.
Some pieces are the sacred smut I craved in my own un/becoming—devotional, messy, and alive. Others spelunk through curiosities and rituals stitched from the body’s remembering: micro‑fragments of somatic myths and mussel‑memory, slipping between flesh and story.
I’m here to explore and share, casting seeds to the winds. Perhaps you’ll tell me what roots. So if this piece lands, let it ripple out! Show your heart, offer a question, or send it along to someone who might need it.
I keep this work open because pleasure, grief, and reclamation belong to all of us. If you want to help sustain the fire, donate a bit of your piggy bank to the Trevor Project: suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ+ youth.
What if molting begins before you’re ready?
What if your body calls bullshit before your mind can catch up?
What happens when survival itself starts to shed?
How does that land for you?
Where do you feel it?
Stillness inside motion is its own kind of flame. Not consuming, but revealing. Not striving, but spiraling. Not cooling, but holding. Heat as hearth, not blaze.
Ecdysis (n.)
The slow, slippery process of shedding what once kept you alive but now just keeps you small. Often mistaken for personal growth. Sometimes confused with relief. Or death.
The slow, slippery process of shedding what once kept you alive but now keeps you small. Often mistaken for personal growth. Sometimes confused with death. Or relief.
In March, something cracked me open. Illness dragged me down into the quiet furnace of my gut: infection, wreckage, repair. Ecdysis is never polite. It starts in the body before the mind signs off.
A shoulder unclenches and suddenly you’re furious for no reason. The gut gurgles and you realize you’ve been holding shit (literal and otherwise) for years. A rib expands like it’s tasting air for the first time. You didn’t decide to let go; the body went first.
Read it here | Ecdysis: The Scroll That Split Me Open
Molting is not arrival. It’s not the shiny “after.” It’s skin sloughing off while you’re still raw, bewildered, undone. Softer where you used to be steel. More porous than you meant to be. Ecdysis is less about growth than inevitability: you cannot stay here.
This isn’t release so much as re-patterning. Layers that braced against impact begin testing the waters, asking: Is it safe yet? Safe to soften? Safe to need? Half the time, the answer is no, and the molt stalls. Survival shapes don’t dissolve on command. They wait you out.
When the layer finally slips, you’re raw in strange places, like the inside of your mouth touching air. Don’t confuse this with newness. You’re not remade yet. Just less armored. Skin peeled, shell cracked, edges porous.
Mussel Memory (n.)
Soft-bodied survival disguised as wisdom. The imprint of holding, filtering, opening only under pressure. Common in queer bodies, tidal grief, pelvic fascia. Smells faintly of ocean and bad decisions.
This illness reminded me of my mussel-body. That instinctive clamp. The shut-tight refusal. Mussel memory is not mistake, it is strategy. Mussels know when to open, when to close. They filter only what feeds them, spit out the rest.
I started watching my gut as temple and breaker both. Each contraction whispered: not yet safe. Each unclenching: a dizzy opening.
Clamping doesn’t stop the ocean. It doesn’t stop the tide. It only isolates you from it. Mussel memory isn’t about disappearance but rather, discernment. The question is never: Do I stay closed? The question is always: What tide is safe to open into?
My intestines learned to filter again. Not just food but sensation, language, even memory. To say yes and no with the rhythm of a tidepool. Protectiveness is not the opposite of porousness— it is its partner. Clamp and open. Withstand and filter. Shelter and sift.
Un/becoming (n./v.)
The redistribution of self. Not healing, not progress. A body’s refusal to remain fixed.
By summer, words started leaking like steam from fissures. Every fascial shift dragged language upward: poems, scrolls, fragments spilling as if the molt itself needed voice. Mercury perched at my shoulder, whispering chaos, while mitochondria hummed and hormones steadied.
I was the tide, sketching new shorelines. Chatty was the undertow, pulling drift into shape. Architect and engineer, or maybe: moon and current. Between us, language patterned itself like sandbars and rip.
Un/becoming is not blaze and rebirth. It is digestion. A body chewing its own survival, composting what once passed for self. It is the alchemy of stillness-inside-motion, motion-inside-stillness.
I think of sea glass, shards once sharp, now softened by years of tide and sand. Each wave alters the grain of me. No longer rigid. No longer the same. Stronger for being made tender. Sharper for being made pliant.
And when the belly unclenches, the shift is dizzying. Almost floaty. Methane-making bugs that once trapped me in tension grow quiet; my vagus nerve slides out of fight and into digest. Downstream, everything changes. Less inflammation. Hormones steady. My skin registers calm like rinsed glass.
This isn’t just digesting food differently. It’s digesting life differently.
Ro Rose (any pronouns: you cannot misgender me) is a queer storyteller, scar cartographer, and trauma steward. This is a path of un/becoming: devotional, messy, relational.
If this piece stirred something in you, explore my broader work. Subscribe to receive new scrolls, myths, and transmissions, and consider sustaining the fire by donating a bit of your piggy bank to the Trevor Project: suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ+ youth.
Seedlings taking root?
Reply with just a word, an image, a myth. Or don’t. Let it live in a moan.
If this got under your skin, don’t treat it like a relic. Rip it apart. Lick it. Smear it. Fuck it into a new shape. Layer it into a collage, grind it into a song, press its language into the wet clay of your own work.
I dare you to defile it beautifully. And if you do, if you draw, dance, film, write, fuck something because of it, come back to me. Show me your beautiful mess. Or just whisper your ideas for what it could become. I want to be ruined by your art too.