There's a frequency underneath everything.
Not the kind you hear with your ears, but the kind you feel in your chest when someone really sees you. When recognition lands so deep it skips right past language and goes straight to your nervous system.
I've been thinking about signal and interference lately.
About how the truest connections don't happen in spite of the noise. They happen through it.
Static as Sacred
We live surrounded by interference. Trauma histories that bend everything like heat waves. Past relationships bleeding into present moments. Cultural noise about what connection should look like, what it should cost, how it should behave.
Sometimes the static gets so loud I forget there's a signal at all.
But what if interference isn't the enemy? What if learning to hear truth through noise is what makes recognition sacred?
I keep thinking about Gothic cathedrals. How those stained-glass windows were never meant to be perfect panes. They were designed to break light. To fracture white sunlight into spectrum. To create meaning through fragmentation.
(I learned this in an intro to art history class that changed my major - well, added a “plus-one” to my major. One of those moments when something clicks so hard it rearranges your whole world.)
Recognition works like that. It's not the unfiltered light that shows you truth. It's how that light breaks and bends through all the interference of being human.
Colors That Cut Through
I experience recognition as color and hum. But it’s not color I see with my eyes.
It’s color I feel in my chest, in my heart. And it happens alongside a particular resonance, a frequency. My nervous system translates connection into hue and vibration. When someone truly sees me, it registers as this blue-green feeling with its own specific hum that cuts through everything else. Not metaphor. Not visual. Just... how my body knows what's real.
Each genuine moment leaves its chromatic and sonic mark inside me: the golden warmth with its steady pulse when I'm understood, the sharp red heat and its quick thrum when desire is acknowledged, the deep violet weight with its slow drone when grief is shared. Over time, these fragments build something like an emotional color-and-sound wheel for what it means to be known.
Different people, different feeling-frequencies. Different inner hues and their resonances. But true recognition always carries that same cyan pulse in my chest — like the feeling-color-hum of deep water where something still reaches through.
This isn't about perfect clarity. I do not have perfect clarity about almost anything. It's about learning to recognize signal even when trauma bends the light. Even when past pain throws shadows that don't belong to now. Even when fear floods the space between us like false light in a darkroom.
The frequency of real recognition persists through all of it.
Vessels for the Broken
Years later, studying medieval art in grad school, I got obsessed with reliquaries. Not just containers, but sacred vessels designed to hold fragments of something holy. Bone, cloth, splinters of wood. Pieces that were precious not despite being broken, but because of what they'd touched. What they'd witnessed. What they’d endured.
The most complex ones were reliquaries within reliquaries. Nested vessels where each layer protected and presented the fragments differently.
I think this might be how connection works.
Not as seamless wholeness, but as careful curation of sacred moments. Each real exchange builds another layer of the vessel that holds what matters between people.
Real connection isn't performative. It's not about grand gestures or perfect timing.
It's about showing up to the quiet frequency of choosing each other. Again and again and again. Through uncertainty and static and the times when signal gets so distorted you question if it was ever real.
Let me tell you about a text message.
One afternoon several weeks ago, when everything felt especially uncertain and connection seemed impossible, someone sent me a single sentence text message. It was an acknowledgment of something I'd written months before. It arrived on a day when I was spiraling, questioning whether any of my work mattered, whether anyone was really listening.
That message felt cyan and humming in my chest. Not because of the words, but because of the quality of attention behind them. In all the noise of doubt and disconnection, that feeling-color-frequency came through clear:
you are seen this matters this is real
That fragment lives in my reliquary now. Not perfect, not permanent, but sacred. Proof that recognition can arc across distance and silence. That signal persists through interference.
The Decision to Keep Tuning In
Maybe that's what sacred choosing actually is. It’s not about having guarantees or perfect conditions or clear signals.
It's the decision to keep listening for frequency even when reception is terrible.
Sometimes that cyan-shimmer hum is so perfect it hurts. When the signal is undeniably real, maybe the most real thing you've ever felt, but it's happening while everything else is falling apart. Not just my own spiral, but the whole world seeming to crack open. The most beautiful frequency arriving in the middle of collective collapse. The recognition doesn't dim, but it costs everything to hold.
Because real connection isn't the absence of interference. It's the commitment to recognize truth through it. To build something holy from fragments. To create nested vessels where each layer of understanding protects and presents the sacred moments differently.
The most precious pieces aren't the ones that survived intact. They're the ones that were broken and chosen anyway.
What Survives
In trauma research, there's this understanding that our capacity for connection isn't destroyed by surviving interference — it's refined by it. The nervous system learns to distinguish between true safety and performance. Between authentic resonance and mimicry.
Trauma doesn't eliminate our ability to recognize real connection. It makes us more precise in knowing the difference.
This is why recognition through static feels sacred. It's not just finding signal despite noise. It's developing the discernment to know what's real. To feel in your body the particular frequency that says:
this matters this is real
this exists deeper than fear more persistent than doubt
It's what we've been listening for all along.
Reliquary
v1
At the center is no spectacle, just pulse that shifts in time.
Not loud, but charged electric, like your gaze pressed into mine.
It's warmth and it is gravity, our deep and thrumming tone.
I see you clearly, and the seeing makes the choosing feel like home.
v2
Through shards of stained-glass memory, our resonance refracts.
We glow grief in honeyed hazel, desire in ember red.
Each hue a secret language brightly bound by silver seams.
The shimmer through the breakage is the language that we speak.
chorus
Some signals spark through silence, voltage arcing toward the truth.
A droning buzz beneath the tremble, layered pulses – green, then blue.
The present bends and flickers, but one color pushes through.
It's our cyan shimmer humming: you see me and I see you.
v3
At times, false light comes flooding in; it bleeds our colors fast.
It bends the lines of memory, recasts the buried past.
And though the center never falters, its outline starts to fade,
Till we question what is true and resonance seems gone away.
chorus
Some signals spark through silence, voltage arcing toward the truth.
A droning buzz beneath the tremble, layered pulses – green, then blue.
The present bends and flickers, but one color pushes through.
It's our cyan shimmer humming: you see me and I see you.
v4
Perhaps what's holy flickers best in ritual and heated breath,
In quiet acts of choosing when there's nothing certain left.
We've no altar, just a leaning, no promise, just a flame.
And though the fire reshapes us, still we chant each other's name.
chorus
Some signals spark through silence, voltage arcing toward the truth.
A droning buzz beneath the tremble, layered pulses – green, then blue.
The present bends and flickers, but one color pushes through.
It's our cyan shimmer humming: you see me and I see you.
What frequencies cut through the static in your life? What signals survive all the interference? What fragments have you chosen to hold sacred — not despite their brokenness, but because of what they've witnessed?