Project 717 — On Dismantle

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By: L.L., that damn rebel rouser

What is the purpose of dismantle?

The word itself is often disguised as utility: to take apart for storage, to move, to restore, to refinish, to later reassemble. These definitions assume consent, care, and an intact moral center. They imply that the object being dismantled will remain recognizable to itself when the process is complete.

But there is another kind of dismantling — one not named as such by those who enact it. This dismantle is extractive. It is done not to preserve the whole, but to salvage advantage. Not to restore, but to survive exposure. Not to honor the shared structure, but to remove responsibility from memory.

That is the dismantle I am writing from.

I was purposefully dismantled — not so that I could be rebuilt, but so that others could rebuild themselves. In the process, pieces were taken that were never solely theirs to claim. Memory. Labor. Love. Witness. Shared history mistaken for private property. These parts could not be cleanly removed without consequence, and so the reconstruction failed. The whole they attempted to form no longer functioned according to truth.

What they made of themselves became a Frankenstein.

And I — the one who retained memory — became the mad scientist by default.

Frankenstein is not a story about monstrous creation; it is a story about disavowed responsibility. The crime is not animation, but abandonment. The creator wants the product without the burden of relationship. When the thing lives, remembers, suffers — he turns away. That is what happens when people extract pieces of a shared life, animate themselves with it, and then recoil when the memory refuses to die.

The recollections I held were deemed too sentimental, too soft, too “useless” to matter — set aside like debris in the corner. But those recollections were not decorative. They were the crucible. They were the mandible.

A crucible is where truth is subjected to unbearable heat to see what endures. A mandible is what chews — what breaks experience down into something that can be metabolized, understood, carried forward. Memory did not sit neatly preserved. It worked. It transformed me. And it cost me.

Around those recollections lay the evidence of survival: dust, shavings, sweat, fog, shed hair, even skin. These were not metaphors for failure. They were the biological and psychic receipts of battle. Parts of me were lost not because they were weak, but because they were no longer suited to the terrain. Some identities are adaptive illusions — necessary once, dangerous later. Their usefulness expires with time.

This is where dismantle becomes ethical.

Dismantling is not always violence. Sometimes it is the only way to stop living inside a lie. But the distinction lies in who benefits, who consents, and who bears the cost.

When dismantling is done to erase accountability, it produces monsters.

When dismantling is endured in pursuit of truth, it produces witnesses.

There is a version of you that is no longer “correct” in the way you walk and talk after this. Trauma does not only wound — it desynchronizes. You continue speaking truth, but the room has rearranged itself around denial. You are not wrong; the architecture is.

I am the drip of ice cream that runs down your knuckles when you were briefly unafraid to be alive. That image matters because it holds joy without strategy. What follows it — the reluctance, the tightening in the body where guilt lives — is not pathology. It is conscience knocking.

“Excuse me,” it says.

“Don’t forget.”

You would not be here if certain choices had not been made. Harm rationalized. Fear disguised as necessity. Advancement purchased with silence or displacement. These truths do not negate survival — but they demand reckoning.

Project 717 exists in that space.

It is not confession for absolution. It is not accusation for spectacle. It is record. It is dismantle as testimony. It refuses the fantasy that we can rebuild ourselves with stolen parts and no accounting. It insists that shared pieces remain shared — even when the relationship that formed them is broken.

The purpose of dismantle, then, is not to lay waste.

It is to end illusion.

It is to separate what was shared from what was stolen.

To shed identities that once protected but now betray.

To let memory testify when forgetting would be easier.

To make rebuilding ethical — even if it must be slower, smaller, or solitary.

Some structures should never be reassembled as they were.

And some survivors are not meant to return to usefulness as defined by those who harmed them. Their usefulness is truth. Their inheritance is memory. Their labor is witness.

That is what remains after dismantle —

and that is enough to begin again.

I am.