Clovis welcomes the Blind.

 I’ve met you before.

You don’t call yourself blind. You call yourself realistic. You say things like “that’s just how it is” and “you can’t change people” and “it’s always been this way.” You wear resignation like wisdom and mistake endurance for understanding.

When I ask questions, you smile the way people do when they’re humoring a child. Not cruelly. Almost kindly. As if curiosity itself is naïve. As if seeing too much is a phase you’ll outgrow.

You tell me I’m overthinking. That I should focus on my own life. That politics, power, systems—those things are too big, too distant, too complicated to matter in any real way. You say this while living inside their consequences, while adjusting your expectations downward year after year and calling it maturity.

I don’t argue with you.

I’ve learned that refusal to see isn’t ignorance. It’s protection.

Because if you let yourself notice the pattern—if you really follow the thread—you’d have to grieve. You’d have to admit how much of your time, your energy, your hope was quietly siphoned away. You’d have to confront the fact that some of the cages you live in were reinforced with your own hands.

And that’s a hard thing to sit with.

So instead, you joke. You scroll. You distract yourself with small comforts and call it peace. You say you’re tired, and you are—but not in the way sleep fixes.

Sometimes you look at me like I’m dangerous. Not because I’m wrong, but because I won’t help you pretend. Because I won’t reassure you that everything makes sense or that the bargain you’ve made was fair.

I don’t hate you for that.

I don’t try to wake you up anymore.

I just stand where I am, visible but quiet. I let you pass by me in conversation, in crowds, in moments where the truth brushes close and then slips away again. I trust that if the day ever comes when pretending costs you more than seeing, you’ll remember this feeling. Not my words—the tension. The unease you couldn’t quite name.

And if that day comes, I won’t say “I told you so.”

I’ll just make room.

Because seeing isn’t a victory. It’s a threshold. And no one crosses it because they’re forced. They cross it when staying asleep hurts too much to continue.

Until then, I remain what I’ve always been.

Not an enemy.
Not a savior.
Just a presence you couldn’t unhear.