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salutations jules' no.1: August 2025

  • Writer: yannick-robin eike mirko
    yannick-robin eike mirko
  • Aug 24, 2025
  • 3 min read

yannick-robin sits in a park in NYC and attempts to reach a dead Jules, and a living one, via a video diary.

cw: csa, estrangement, indigenous lateral violence


Salutations, Jules', plural. If the dead one's watching, I haven't seen you in almost two years.


If you're alive,


I haven't seen you in a year and a half.


Either way, miss you.


If you're wondering why I'm not in your life anymore, maybe when you're older, you can ask your mom. If you see this first, know that:


You, like me, are Taíno and I, like our ancestors,


Some of them, am Two Spirit.


And this is what your grandmother had to say about that:


Fall 2019

This is what your aunt had to say about that:


Spring 2024
Spring 2024

This is what your mom had to say about that:


Spring 2025

Your grandmother is also crazy in the head.


The story of how your mom came to be is based on lies. In Puerto Rico, where your family is from, where I'm from, when your grandmother was in her 20s, there was a law where if you were under 21 years old, whoever you wanted to get married with, had to get your parents to go to court with them to sign over you as property (because women unfortunately are seen as property). My mother, your grandmother saw that your grandfather, so your mother's dad, was not a good person. And when asked to sign her child off, she said no. So your grandmother took your great grandfather (my father) and behind my mom's back had him sign her off. And your (biological, maternal) grandparents were married without telling anyone. My mom, your great grandmother, packed her stuff--all her clothes she needed for work--and stood in the door frame of the house and thought about leaving. 


She went back in, but she stopped having a physical

relationship with her husband. And it ruined their marriage. My dad died. Your great-grandfather, Jules. And my mom regretted that she could never find the way to be physical with him again. Your grandmother, my estranged mother, your mother's mother, has never told anyone this. I don't even know if she knows that my mom knows because someone else told her.


And so, if you're wondering why in the pictures of your grandmother's marriage that she's divorced from now, why my mom in the pictures is wearing a t-shirt and like housework clothes.  That's why...she was betrayed. I found out a couple of years ago. I told your mom. I wonder what she did with the info. Maybe nothing.


I also found out last year back home that…


I wasn't the only one who was sexually harmed, by my estranged father. Your mother also and other family members saw and knew and did nothing. I tried to tell her before she did what she did, ("Yes-manning" me) and I didn't get to. So, I'm sorry if you end up in a room with your biological grandfather, because you aren't safe. 


And I can't help. I'm sorry.


I really tried.


The trees don't want me to share the truth.


Maybe I should go for now. Maybe this is where I stop. For now.


There's a lot more. I'm settling in with becoming deaf as an adult. I'm learning sign (poorly). I'm dancing and choreographing now, instead of acting. And I'm in a band. I make music now more than I did when I knew you.


You would hold on to the back of my wheelchair (Jasper) and I would go fast.


I wonder if you remember that. 


Feels good to let go. Maybe I'll keep talking with you like this. Maybe one day you'll see it. Maybe one day we'll know each other again.


If not and you're the dead one watching, miss you. Love you. If you're the living one,


I'm here.


If you need me, I didn't leave you.


Sorry.


I love you.


- y.r.

Comments

yannick-robin eike mirko [who communicates in Spanish, English, + ASL] is a Manhattan-based Biawaisa/Yamoká-hu/Maorocoti multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, writer, doula and disability justice activist with a rare disease. His work sits at the intersection of movement, access, queer and indigenous survival, death care, and institutional accountability, using the body as archive, protest, and living evidence.

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Her relationship with dance and movement has never been linear or purely technical. From Off-Broadway to online, their work has been shaped by access, interruption, advocacy, and forced stillness. Movement and progress, for yannick-robin, is not simply choreography or activism; it is testimony, how a marginalized body speaks when institutions fail to listen. 
 

In 2021, yannick-robin participated in Drawing Breath, a visual and embodied project by Risa Puno that centered marginalized voices during COVID, with yannick-robin representing disabled people. The work focused on breath, endurance, and visibility at a time when disabled lives were being openly treated as expendable. This project cemented their understanding of movement as political: presence itself became resistance.
 

In 2022, disability justice became inseparable from his professional life. He was the first physically disabled actor/musician [acoustic and electric guitar, accordion, glockenspiel, xylophone, tambourine] to play a physically disabled role written through an ableist lens and publicly fought the theatre and writers for accountability. This work was documented in his blog and a documentary, a social media movement, and ultimately led to his inclusion in the University of Minnesota’s Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, archiving his contributions to disability, gender, and labor justice in theatre (the most recent edition/collection of years awaiting entering the public access archive due to funding and completion of editing. Help fund the preservation of non-cis history here).
 

That same year, he worked on Mr. Holland’s Opus at Ogunquit Playhouse as an actor/musician [bugle, trumpet, drum kit], a fully captioned production where his lived experience as a non-cis deaf and physically disabled artist directly informed their performance rhythm, physical storytelling, and musicality. Also in 2022, she performed in the inaugural Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival on Theatre Row under the direction of L Morgan Lee, delivering work as an actor involving monologuing about wheelchair use, access failure, and systemic injustice, using their body not as metaphor, but as evidence. 
 

In 2024 after a year and some change prioritizing deathcare work, they returned to theatre at New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), contributing to the work of disabled choreographer Jerron Herman as an actor/dancer. They also released their multi-genre EP passing that year, which catalogs their multi-instrumental writing and use of music for processing as they fall deeper into grief, hearing loss and deafness, and a world of being misunderstood for not being cis.

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In 2025, yannick-robin worked on the developmental process for Jay Alan Zimmerman’s upcoming show Songs for Hands on a Thursday, following Jerron Herman’s recommendation. The project included a residency at New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab and a music workshop premiere, where yannick-robin served as both choreographer and dancer. The piece centered a Deaf father’s death and a CODA grappling with silence; yannick-robin’s role was to integrate sign language into choreography and bridge gaps between sound, access, and movement for d/Deaf performers.
 

Alongside his performance work, yannick-robin has been active in nonprofit and advocacy spaces since 2020. She worked for Imara Jones of TransLash Media, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, where they were nominated for a Webby Award as an associate and digital producer for The TransLash Podcast, contributed to The Anti-Trans Hate Machine series, and wrote obituaries for TGNC siblings lost to violence. He has written for TalkDeath on racial disparities and discrimination in death care and other deathcare and injustice related topics and now offers obituary writing, death doulaship, and bereavement counseling for TGNC decedents and their families, people with rare diseases, and disabled communities.


for commissions, death care, speaking engagements and more, press the contact button.
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yannick-robin eike mirko is represented by Arise Artists Agency

© 2026 yannick-robin eike mirko

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