Yesterday, I was gifted one of my favourite treats by a lovely stranger I will probably never see again. Music. A song.

Christopher Tin’s Sogno di Volare (“The Dream of Flying”) to be specific.

The song draws from Leonardo da Vinci’s celestial obsessions, a passion I share to an appalling degree. I was star-gazing when I listened to the orchestra describe, with such vivid passion, the strange fact that once you have been somewhere, you long for it as if it were home.

It is an anthem for mankind’s conquest of the skies, a jubilant ode to the great bird that would finally breach the heavens. Yet beneath its soaring crescendos lies a quiet intimate truth: the physics of flight are the physics of the human heart.

When applied to the vertiginous act of meeting another soul, one who irrevocably alters your internal atmosphere, the metaphor is not merely poetic, but existential. To meet someone profoundly is to taste a particular altitude; and once that altitude is reached, you cannot "unmeet" them, because you cannot unlearn the view from above. I have found this peril to persist as an ail in my life. One I currently am channeling into these little tidbits of verbose reflection on charismatic magnetism of certain male species.

Fictionalised Leonardo captured this irreversible transformation with devastating clarity:

“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”

This is the foundational law of my emotional aerodynamics. Before a significant meeting, you walk the earth with a horizontal gaze, fixated on the immediate terrain of your routines. Then, suddenly, you encounter someone who functions as a pair of wings. They lift you vertically, and the horizon curves. You see the full arc of your own existence from a vantage point you never knew existed. The ground is now a distant memory; the sky is the new reference. To unmeet this person would be to surgically remove that aerial perspective. To force your eyes back to the dirt. It is impossible. As Tin’s choir intones in the song’s opening creed:

Italian: Una volta che avrai spiccato il volo, deciderai. Sguardo verso il ciel saprai: lì a casa il cuore sentirai.

English: Once you have taken flight, you'll decide. Gaze towards the sky, you'll know that that is where your heart will feel at home.

But perhaps fixation and transformation are not quite the same thing. The fixation may eventually soften, even disappear; what does not disappear is the knowledge of the altitude. The person is not the destination, they revealed that you could fly higher. You cannot unmeet them because you cannot unknow what became possible in you in their presence.

Leonardo understood that this upward drive is not a passive daydream but a generative, creative force. He wrote:

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”

Meeting someone who truly ignites your psyche does not leave you inert. It galvanizes you. It awakens a version of yourself that was dormant, a self capable of deeper vulnerability, sharper joy, or quieter understanding. They are the revealer of a new you. Tin captures this alchemical transaction perfectly in one of the song’s most profound stanzas:

Italian: L'uomo verrà portato dalla sua creazione, come gli uccelli, verso il cielo.

English: Man will be lifted by his own creation, just like birds, towards the sky.

In the context of connection, you are the man, and the relationship itself is the creation. But here is the twist: that creation does not merely carry you upward; it carries you into yourself. The other person is the catapult, but the flight is uniquely your own. You cannot unmeet them because to do so would be to abandon the self that they helped you discover. They have become part of your personal firmament, a permanent constellation in your internal sky.

As Leonardo sagely noted, “Learning never exhausts the mind”—and the learning that occurs in the presence of another soul is infinite, layered, and utterly addictive.

The fixation, then, is the echo of a flight that changed your airspeed forever. It is the residual kinetic energy of a moment that had no warning. Tin’s lyrics evoke the sheer cosmological scale of this event:

Italian: Prenderà il primo volo verso il sole il grande uccello, sorvolando il grande Monte Ceceri, riempiendo l'universo di stupore e gloria.

English: The great bird will take his first flight toward the sun, sweeping over the great Mount Ceceri, filling the universe with wonder and glory.

When you meet someone who impacts you, they do not just enter your life; they fill your universe with wonder and glory. The "universe" here is your interior landscape: your thoughts, your memories, your future projections. They sweep over the "Mount Ceceri" of your guarded defenses. And in doing so, they rearrange the topography of your inner world. You cannot unmeet them because their flight path has left permanent thermal currents in your psyche. Even if they vanish physically, they remain as a dialect you now speak, a syntax in your internal monologue. You catch yourself laughing at a joke only they would have made, or feeling a pang of nostalgia in a color they once wore. They have been transcribed into your emotional DNA. Even when you simply meet and know them briefly.

Leonardo also warned against stagnation, writing: “Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind. So you must stretch yourselves to the very limits of human possibility. Anything less is a sin against both God and man.” A profound meeting stretches you to those limits. It forces you to expand, to hold the tension of absence and presence, of longing and gratitude. The fixation is not necessarily a weakness; it is the echo of having stretched yourself to the limits of human possibility in the company of another.

So what, finally, does it mean to carry this permanent altitude? It means accepting that some meetings are not events; they are incursions into eternity. You walk the earth afterward with your eyes turned skyward—not because you are impractical, but because you are honest. You have been there, and you will always long to return. Even when you must leave.

Tin’s song concludes with a single,almost orgasmic, exultant word, repeated like a liturgical amen: Gloria! — Glory! The final truth of meeting someone unforgettable.

The glory is not in holding them forever, you never could. The glory is in having been held in the thermals of their presence. The longing is the echo of the flight. The transformation is the proof of the height. And the inability to unmeet them is proof that some souls, like gravity itself, exert a force that does not diminish with distance, it merely transforms into the permanent ache of a remembered sky.

You cannot unmeet them. You can only learn to fly in a different wind, forever grateful for the altitude they once gave you, and forever changed by the horizon they revealed.

And that is enough for this whacky whimsical woman. The experience having been had. The altitude having been reached. The rest, apparently, is simply learning how to live at sea level again. And I am quite alright, sailing on gratitude until the next flight.

I know. I know. I sound embarrassing and desperate. But when do I not?

But immediately, I knew.

Not I thought you were attractive. Not I was intrigued. Not even I had a good feeling about you. Those would be sensible things to say, and I have never been particularly interested in being sensible when there is a perfectly good opportunity to ruin my emotional stability.

I mean that something in me went:

Oh.

This one.

Which is ridiculous.

Because what could I possibly have known?

I didn’t know how you behaved when you were angry. I didn’t know what you were like when you were broke, bored, jealous, sick or inconvenienced. I didn’t know whether you were kind when nobody was watching. I didn’t know how you handled disappointment. I didn’t know if you returned shopping trolleys. Frankly, I didn’t even know whether you were going to text me the next day.

And yet, somehow, my brain had already opened a folder.

YOU.

This is the problem with meeting someone you might love. Your heart is operating on information technology from the Stone Age while your imagination has fiber internet from satellites

You know three facts.

Your imagination knows forty-seven.

By the end of the evening, you have not only learned their favourite film. You have mentally assigned them a role in your future.

It is absurd.

It is also, unfortunately, very human.

Philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to work out what love is, and somehow none of them thought to begin with the real question:

Why does one person make us suddenly interested in our own future?

Plato had his theories. Kierkegaard had his existential dread. Sartre had his whole thing about freedom and other people being complicated.

And here I am, wondering why you looked at me a certain way and suddenly my nervous system started drafting a five-year plan.

Maybe this is not love.

Maybe love is what happens later, when the fantasy has been forced to meet the evidence.

Because in 24 hours, I couldn’t possibly love you.

I could love the version of you I encountered.

I could love the possibility.

I could love the feeling of being unusually seen by someone I had only just met.

I could love the strange little electric thought that maybe, just maybe, this person could become important.

I could love that we vibed and both noticed and orbited.

But that isn’t nothing.

In fact, maybe that’s how everything begins.

Before friendship, there is often curiosity.

Before intimacy, there is often recognition.

Before love, there is sometimes this tiny, irrational conviction:

I want to know you.

And that might be more frightening than love itself.

Because love says, I know you and I choose you.

This says:

I don’t know you at all, and I want to find out.

Which is a much bigger gamble.

Anyone can love a person after they’ve become familiar. There is evidence by then. There are shared jokes and routines and arguments about where to eat. You know their comfort meal. You know the face they make when they are flirting. You know which version of “I’m fine” means I’m fine and which means you should probably leave me alone before this becomes a murder documentary.

But to look at a stranger and think, I would like to know what happens here? That is pure uncertainty. And humans are terrible at uncertainty. We fill it. We decorate it. We give it meaning.

We make stories because an empty space makes us uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable af.

So perhaps that is what I was doing.

Making a story.

Maybe you were simply a person I met on an ordinary day, and I was the one who turned the encounter into a little private mythology.

Maybe the universe had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Maybe you were not another serendipitous affair.

Maybe there was no cosmic choreography. No invisible string. No grand design. No kismet.

Maybe you were just standing there.

And I was just there.

And for reasons I still cannot entirely explain, something in me paid attention.

I like that explanation almost more.

Because if fate did it, then I had no choice.

But if it was me?

If some strange combination of instinct, attraction, loneliness, curiosity, timing and whatever chemical circus is happening inside the human brain made me look at you and think you will matter?

Then perhaps that tells me something about myself.

Perhaps we don’t always fall in love with people.

Sometimes we fall towards them.

Falling in love sounds like an event. Something that happens to you.

Falling towards someone is more tentative.

You lean.

You wonder.

You wait to see if they lean too.

And sometimes they don’t. But heaven help us when they do.

Sometimes you discover that what felt like recognition was projection. Sometimes the person you thought would matter becomes a footnote. Sometimes the person you thought would stay becomes a lesson, which is an irritatingly poetic way of saying they broke your heart and left you with character development and a therapy bill.

But sometimes they do matter.

Sometimes the feeling survives contact with reality.

You discover the bad habits and the contradictions and the inconvenient truths. You find out that they are not the person your imagination invented.

And somehow, after knowing them more rather than less, you still want them.

That, to me, is much closer to love.

Not I saw you and knew everything.

But:

I saw you. I knew nothing. I wanted to know. And then I did.

And I stayed long enough to find out.

So no.

You can’t fall in love in 24 hours.

Probably.

But you can meet someone in 24 hours and have the deeply inconvenient experience of knowing that you want another 24.

And another.

And another.

Until one day you look back and realise that the moment you thought was the beginning of something was actually the beginning.

Not because you knew what would happen.

Because you didn’t. You just knew you wanted to find out.

Immediately I met you, I knew you would matter.

I just didn’t know yet what that would mean.

We’ll see…

I’m not attached.

Lol..I swear. I’m not.

It feels unnecessarily philosophical for a woman who’s just met a man.

But here we are. So of course, he is not just a hot man, he is intellectually jarring.

I met him less than twelve hours ago.

That’s such a stupid thing to write seriously. Twelve hours isn’t enough to know if someone’s kind. Definitely not enough to know if they’re emotionally available, secretly a nightmare, or the kind of person who says “I don’t really use my phone” while being online every two minutes.

Twelve hours should be nothing. And yet. We both noticed it.

That’s the dangerous part. Chemistry’s manageable when it’s one-sided. You can diagnose yourself with poor taste and go home. Tell your friends you imagined it. Reread the conversation until you find the one line that proves you’re delusional. And we all know, darling readers that I am delusional and critically analytical.

BUT mutual chemistry gives you another witness.

The conversation had something. It flowed from nonsense to something intimate, then back again, without anyone announcing the shift. Like conversation sometimes does when the person beside you isn’t just waiting for their turn to speak but noticing you have a lovely laugh. Listening.

Twelve hours felt smaller than twelve hours. Maybe we weren’t moving quickly. Maybe we were just experiencing time at different scales. Twelve hours for the calendar. Something else entirely for two people sitting next to each other.

Rovelli would probably have something complicated to say about this. About how time passes differently depending on where you are, how fast you are moving, what gravitational field you happen to be sitting in. I am no physicist, but I think he forgot to account for attraction. Because apparently there are also gravitational fields made of two people sitting too close together.

Time is strange. We treat it as objective because clocks are pushy. Watches even more ticky-time-bomby. They have numbers. They’re round. They tick with the smug confidence of things that believe they know something about you. They tell you when you’re late, when you’re early, when you’ve spent too long in bed, and apparently, when twelve hours is supposed to be enough time to know a person.

But clocks measure duration, not experience.

They can tell me that three hours passed.

They cannot tell me that those three hours disappeared.

But humans have never experienced time objectively. An hour waiting for a reply is a personal eternity. Three hours talking to someone you like disappears like streaking shooting star. Ten years in a marriage can leave two people wondering who the stranger in their bed is.

And then someone appears for an evening, and somehow you leave knowing you want to know them more. Not that you know them. That’s absurd. You have twelve hours. You have a fraction. But the fraction was interesting.

Rovelli writes that “it is entropy, not energy, that keeps stones on the ground and the world turning.”

I keep thinking about that. Entropy: the drift toward disorder. Why a broken glass doesn’t reassemble itself. Why my precious coffee cools. Why there’s an arrow from what happened to what might happen.

The physics of things not staying the same.

We’re terrified of it. We want the good conversation to stay good. We want attraction to become intimacy before it can disappoint us. We want to know if something will last before we enjoy that it exists. We try to calculate the future so the present can’t surprise us. I’m especially guilty. Give me a feeling and I’ll ask where it’s going. Give me chemistry and I’ll hunt for the expiration date. Give me something beautiful and I’ll start grieving the ending while it’s still happening. I am a mess. I have never claimed to be any less.

Probably not what Rovelli intended anyone to take from thermodynamics. Still. Maybe the problem isn’t that things change. Maybe it’s that we think change makes what came before less real. A sunset isn’t a failed sunrise because it ends. A song doesn’t lose beauty because it’s only four minutes. A meteor doesn’t need to become a planet before we look up. I do not have to be your lover to know that spending time with me can have a beautiful impact on your already magnificent life.

Maybe people are like that too. Some arrive for decades. Some for an evening. Some stay long enough to become a chapter. Some become a sentence you remember years later for no reason you can explain. Some haunt like ghosts despite having been a day worth of knowing. Duration isn’t necessarily the measure.

So yes. We both know things that burn fast can burn out. Intensity isn’t intimacy. Attraction isn’t compatibility. Talking till morning doesn’t mean you can survive each other’s bad habits, family drama, financial decisions, attachment styles, or the devastating revelation that one of you thinks pineapple belongs on pizza. (I think pineapple belongs on pizza and I am a sous chef, bite me.)

We know all this.

And still I don’t want to rush toward the ending just because endings exist. I don’t want to turn twelve hours into prophecy. Or decide this must become something because it feels good. Or decide it must become nothing because good things always end.

For now, it’s just something that happened. Two people met. Something struck. Flint against flint. They talked. They laughed. Something clicked. Both noticed. Both got curious. Both tried to fight it and eventually caved.

For a little while, two tiny pieces of the universe took up the same corner of it. And darling readers, it was phenomenal.

Rovelli says there’s no universal present. Somewhere this is already over. Somewhere we’re still laughing. I’ll take the one where we’re still laughing.

Maybe it burns. Maybe it becomes a fire. Maybe it becomes nothing more than a particularly lovely evening. Maybe it becomes trauma for character development. I don’t know.

The future, unlike the past, is still beautifully disordered. Full of things we can’t know yet. Full of entropy.

For once, I’d rather let it stay that way.

And if it burns?

At least we were warm.

Weddings are the only social event where everyone is expected to perform a feeling and call it real. The bride performs certainty. The groom performs readiness. The guests perform joy. And the bridesmaids, the bridesmaids perform all of it simultaneously, in heels, on an empty stomach, in a dress that was never really tailored to them.

I am never invited to be part of the bridal party. I assume it is because I am built with a big back, a giant stature, a regular plain face, and the graceful poise of a raccoon on steroids and opioids. I guess I do not meet the standard of beauty required, which is totally fine. I am okay with it. It isn’t news to anyone. Especially anyone who has met me irl. I am agreeable only when masking, which is almost always. But once that layer of pretense snaps from too much people time and the right amount of moonshine, it is done-zo.

Because I am not in the bridal parties, I tend to become the bridal party minder so I can hang out with my friends. Devastating, I know. But I am assertive and a problem solver and love to work a room. I think it is my strange reward. I have always been a watcher. A lurker. I am very forgettable. Not much on the eyes, so I get erased from many memories before a dent can be imprinted.

Ever heard of the bridesmaid’s smile? It is the facial embodiment of standing on the edge of someone else’s happy ending while wondering when your own chapter will start. A tight-lipped smile with some lipstick and gloss distracting from eyes that reveal spiraling cognitive dissonance.

Bridesmaids are always in a neat row like a majestic collection of exotic birds, all identical in chiffon, silk, or some other fabric chosen to flatter everyone and no one. Their hands are clasped in front of them. Their posture is perfectly proper. But their eyes betray them. As eyes are known to do. They scan the room. They wear down into a blank floor stare. They find a way to get lost in the crowd. And there it is: the flicker. A question unspoken: When will it be my turn? Or, for some, a quiet grief: I thought it would be me by now. And others: Why was my wedding not this exquisite and glam? Why doesn’t my man make more money.

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It is very apparent. The envy. The hope. The quiet despair. The realisation that maybe a wedding is not the dream it should be. Maybe I want to make as much money as the decor crew in five hours. It lurks beneath the surface, refusing to be extinguished. I watch us all perform happiness while wrestling with our own private disappointments. And I understand it. We are bloody human.

Isolation has become my favourite pastime, and it has changed me. I have accepted that no man will look at me and choose to know me, woo me, wow me, wed me. Not because I am not a catch.

I am. Hands to heaven. I am.

I just have no more will in me to let people in. Or to keep the door open for people who walked away and have not waddled back with their wieners in between chaffed thighs. I have no patience to pretend. I have no need to. I am who I am. I am annoyingly kind and too giving to fill a void from being seen as taking of too much self. I empty myself and purge to not take more room. It is a back breaker, that people pleasing nature of mine.

I need autonomy to grow. I also need a busy head like me to explore the universe and have a life that revolves not around me. Which means, I cannot afford a wrong choice. Lest I end up tethered to a pest. Imagine someone who thinks a budgeting is a poverty mindset, that a feeling is not real because it is not fact, that ignorance is a personality and accountability is an attack. Someone who gambles with what is not theirs to gamble. Someone who cannot read a room, cannot feel a room, cannot imagine that other people in the room are also human. And then, worst of all, someone who simply uses you. Quietly. Slowly. The kind of partner who drains you in an order so specific it should be studied: first your sense of reality, then your beauty, then your hope, then your money, then, if you stay long enough, your life. The cost of one wrong decision. One misjudgement. Imagine that!

I fear the fate of my own fortune if left to fuse with a fearlessly shameless sapien. Why not just have a dog and a garden of birds?

When I sit at the edges of these celebrations, these elaborate performances of love and commitment, I feel a strange mixture of longing and relief. I long for the certainty they seem to have. But I am relieved that I do not have to pretend to be certain when I am not even sure if I am a real human or in a simulation.

Bridesmaids will tell you the dress is uncomfortable. That the shoes are instruments of slow excruciating punishment for something they did to the bride when younger and forgot. That they spent more money than was reasonable to stand in a row and smile on cue. What they will not tell you, what they can barely tell themselves, is that what exhausts them is not the shoes or the dress or the cost. It is the role. Background character in someone else’s love story, by invitation.

I know this because I have felt it. Not as a bridesmaid, of course, but as a woman. Yes, I am a woman. There is a pulsating pressure to pair off. An expectation to want what everyone else seems to want. The quiet fear that something is wrong with you if you do not have it or do not necessarily need it.

The performance is exhausting. And no one notices, because everyone is quietly breaking in their own way.

I have so many reasons to never be partnered. The only reason I would wed is to consolidate and multiply financial stake in the world. Maybe conjugal visits that are safe and monogamous, but meh. Love? I can love anyone, and so I refuse to love only one. I have the whole world to spread my love to. I am a loving woman. I wonder if I am a loved woman.

Maybe that is why I am a minder. Because I love people and want to soothe the brutality of the day. These days, I refuse to wonder when it will be my turn, because I have decided that I want the house, the job, the family and friends, the community and the garden I tend to and the lawns I host at. I want to be loved by multiple people in specific ways and not just one person in every way. I do not know if I want to be a wife. I want to be loved, but wifed, I think maybe no. I would like to pass. Maybe

I ache for them. The bridesmaids. The women who are still waiting. The women who believe that standing close to someone else’s happiness will somehow make their own arrive faster. I want to pull them aside and tell them to stop waiting and just live.

As if I am not waiting, myself.

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Travelling is not enjoyable unless it involves birds and animals. I've been trying to see elephants for a while, and eventually I got to see one. Then, on the way back, I saw a herd… and another. Such opulance in abundance of miracles.

Such delusion in thinking it meant something because I believe in signs and patterns.

I don't know why this delighted me so much. Perhaps because there are some things you can want for a long time without knowing whether the wanting will ever become the having. Then suddenly, there they are. More than one. Enough to make the first sighting feel like a promise.

My heart has been weird for months.

Not necessarily bad. Not necessarily dwindling. Just weird enough that I notice it. Weird enough that, having previously had mini strokes, I occasionally remember that the body is not a democracy. It does what it wants. It can convene an emergency meeting without consulting you.

So I have become increasingly aware that I am, in some small and irritating way, a ticking time bomb.

This is not how I imagined thirty.

I imagined thirty would be sexy. Which, to be fair, it is. I am hot. I am confident. I am softer than I used to be, but somehow more certain of myself. I know what I like. I know what I don't like. I know how I want to be spoken to. I know what kind of person I want to be.

What I did not anticipate was how lonely I could be while being perfectly happy.

Imagine dying alone.

Not alone alone. My sisters would be there. My friends would be there. My family would probably organise something elaborate and cry beautifully and say things about me that would make me suspicious because I wouldn't be there to dispute them.

I mean romantically alone.

Unpartnered.

Unloved in that particular sense.

No shade to my family, friends and fans. I love you. I really do. But I also want to low-key be cuddled in a non-familial way, if you catch my drift.

I want someone whose hand on my waist means something. I want to be kissed because somebody cannot help themselves. I want to be intoxicatingly inappropriate with someone's son and discover what all those things I have spent years writing about actually feel like when they are happening to me.

You know what? Equal opportunity. Women can get it too.

Sometimes I wonder if I should have whored out in my twenties.

Not because I think I was wrong to be celibate. I don't even know if I regret it. Regret is such an officious little word. It implies there was a correct timeline and I wandered off it.

But I do sometimes wonder.

Maybe I should have had a roster. Maybe I should have had people I could call when I was lonely. Maybe I should have collected some terrible kisses, some excellent ones, some bodies, some stories, some regrettable decisions and at least one person whose name I would have to delete from my phone before somebody looked through it.

Instead, I have my sisters.

I love my sisters.

But sometimes I don't want another person who loves me because they have to.

I want a lover who is in love with me.

There is a difference.

And perhaps this is the thing nobody tells you about being thirty: you can become very good at being a person while still being very bad at being someone's person.

I am a chronic people pleaser. A sweetie patootie cutie. Happy to serve sub.

Where did all the doms go?

Does no one want to own and guide anymore?

I know. Intense ask.

Maybe I don't need moulding. Maybe I just need companionship that is sensually fulfilling and not another platonic friendship.

In fact, I don't want friends anymore.

I'm fully backed up.

I want someone I can lean against without having to explain why I am leaning. I want the kind of closeness that makes conversation unnecessary for a while.

I want to be held.

I want to be wanted.

I want someone to look at me and make me feel, briefly, that my body is not an administrative problem I have to manage.

Graphic?

Good.

Feel my discomfort with me.

It has been years of pent-up perfect poise and grace. A grace I know I barely exude because I am, objectively, frequently out of pocket. But let us pretend I am composed and dignified and not simply prudish.

I want to be bent over a balcony, staring at the stars and the sky and wondering what the person behind me is thinking.

There.

I've said it.

My knees won't be good forever. Nor will my back. Nor will my heart.

That is the irritating thing about having a body. It is simultaneously the place you live and the place from which you will eventually be evicted.

My arrhythmia sucks.

My ulcers feed on my bulimia and my fear of fattening up further, of swelling into some imagined elephantine version of myself.

I know.

I'm working on it.

But sometimes I think about how much of my life has been spent negotiating with this body. What it should eat. What it should weigh. What it should look like. What it should tolerate. What it should hide. What it should not want.

And now, suddenly, it wants.

It wants touch.

It wants warmth.

It wants another body.

It wants to be desired without having to earn the right to be desirable.

It wants to be young without being twenty-two again.

It wants to be reckless without becoming stupid.

It wants to experience things before the joints begin complaining and the heart begins keeping score.

Maybe that is what frightens me.

Not dying, exactly.

Not yet.

It's dying having been very careful.

Dying having mistaken restraint for a life.

Dying having written about desire so beautifully that I forgot I was allowed to have some.

There is something strange about being thirty and realising that time is no longer an abstract concept.

Twenty feels endless.

Twenty-five feels like a warning you ignore.

Thirty feels like someone has quietly started the countdown in another room.

And I am happy.

That is the annoying part.

I am happy.

I have things I love. I have people I love. I have work I care about. I have made a life that, in many ways, I am proud to inhabit.

And still.

I miss being held.

I miss being cuddled.

I miss being wanted in ways friendship cannot satisfy.

I miss a lover I have never had.

Maybe that is the particular cruelty of loneliness: sometimes you are not grieving a person.

Sometimes you are grieving an experience.

A hand that hasn't touched you.

A mouth that hasn't kissed you.

A body that hasn't learned yours.

A version of yourself that hasn't yet existed in somebody else's desire.

Thirty and happy and celibate

.

What a sentence.

What a life.

What a strange little body to carry through it.

I need sleep, sedatives and the other sin.

Actually, never mind.

I think I just need to be held.

I saw an elephant and immediately, I thought of you, Mr. Elephant.

Which is annoying because I know my place in your realm. I have known for years. Yet still somehow, fondness for you seeps through my soul and converts it to wishing you well.

There is not anything particularly wrong with thinking of you, sir. I have done it before. I do it often. More times than I care to admit. Usually disguised as something else.

A song: Harry Styles’ Adore You, Tems’ Crazy Tings, Kizz Daniel’s Lie. The latter is sadly logged in my brain because it is the first song you ever sent me. Stupid and childish? Perhaps. But music and I have a relationship that Apollo has blessed.

A joke. Ever since you saw me looking pregnant by the side of the road when I was actually sick as hell and overweight, I catch my reflection and fix my slouch. I also may have gotten ulcers because you made my eating disorders resurface with poor humour. I forgive you for that one. You asking for popcorn and me thinking you were hungry, only to realise you meant I was being dramatic as if we were in a movie. It took me 3 weeks to finally conclude that. Meanie beanie.

A particular kind of sentence. Someone saying something in a certain way. A stranger on the internet using a phrase that sounds suspiciously like something you once said.

The countries Singapore and Thailand. The cities Dubai, Nairobi and shockingly- Pallisa.

How have you single-handedly claimed dominance over my mind for all these years when we have barely even hugged?

Well. We hugged once. Onomo, remember? When you got stood up and I was right there. Excited and eager to see you despite us having had some corrupt fight over emails. Funny. I guess writing this is a way for me to purge you and actually finally close that door. Because I have clearly given it so much of my time

I should have had my hands on your thighs that evening you insisted on taking me home.

There. I said it.

This is what happens when I start writing about you. Somehow I become both sentimental and inappropriate within the same paragraph.

Why do you do that, anyway? Be rude to me, then be nice to me. Act like you like me but also like I irritate you. Perhaps that is what made me so awkward around you in the first place. You liked me before I knew what to do with the information, and instead of becoming charming and mysterious, I became strange. You called me strange, actually, which is fair.

But I have always wondered whether there was something underneath the irritation.

Actually, no.

I am sure I never cross your mind.

Which is probably another thing I tell myself because it is easier than admitting I still wonder.

I wrote a play about you.

That should probably be evidence enough that you have occupied far too much real estate in my imagination.

A whole play. Characters, scenes, arguments, jokes, dramatic revelations. I took whatever happened between us, whatever I imagined might have happened, whatever I wished had happened, and gave it a stage.

You were not the first person to see me as a writer, I’ve had other champions along the way, people who believed in my words before I did. But you were pivotal at that specific time, in that specific season. Continue to be. You bought me two books. You paid me for articles when I was still figuring out whether I had anything worth saying. You checked on me during my Creative Writing masters. Kept me company through my heavy wait time at the airport and laughed at me for almost missing my graduation ceremony despite having travelled for it. Small gestures, probably. A Thursday for you. For me, it all said: keep going. Someone thinks you have a future in this. Someone thinks you are not some strange lost cause.

And maybe that’s part of why writing that play felt necessary. Not just to process the romance, or the confusion, or the door that never quite opened. But to prove to myself that the person who saw something in me wasn’t wrong. To take that belief you loaned me and turn it into something that belonged to me.

Perhaps that is what writers do when they cannot have the person. We put them somewhere else. We make them fictional enough to control. And me and you both know, I will never have you.

Except you have never been entirely fictional to me.

You are Mr. Elephant because you once told me elephants are gentle giants. You are also Bicycle Boy because you rode to me that one time when I was very unwell and suicidal.

Mr. Elephant came from a small thing, a passing observation about gentle giants—but it lodged itself in me. Years later, I find myself in Gulu, where the elephant is the city’s emblem, and I saw an actual elephant near Karuma. The coincidence felt like a message. It wasn’t. But it sure felt like one.

Bicycle Boy is different. You didn’t stop on the road, not exactly. But you came by my road, on your way to see your mother, I think—and I got out of bed to say hey. I needed a boost. I needed reminding that the world was still turning and I was still in it. You gave me a quick stop, a few words, and went on your way. You probably don’t remember it as anything significant. But I do. I do not know if many people were stopping by to check that I stayed alive in that moment. I was so alone. Still am, but you showed me that strangers can be kind. And now, I am a kind stranger to many.

Those two versions of you live in me differently. Mr. Elephant is gentleness. It is what I wanted from you, what I projected onto you. Bicycle Boy is showing up… what you actually did, continuously in brief bursts, when I had stopped moving entirely.

I don’t know if you know what that means to me. Perhaps you never will. You helped me. You know that, right? I am still here in this dreary cold world, cause you spoke to me and urged me to dare to be more and dream beyond my caging depression. Among the list of humans who have actually helped me stay alive, and encouraged me to thrive, there is you.

And maybe that is why seeing the elephant felt different.

Because I remembered your favourite animal, and for one brief, embarrassingly romantic second, some part of me wanted to believe that it meant something. That maybe we could be friends for real this time, or the lingering space between that and strangers.

I saw the elephant. And I thought that perhaps, you were thinking of me too. Perhaps the universe had noticed that I was finally beginning to let go and decided to throw an elephant my way as a little cosmic nudge. Look. Not so fast. Hold on and be hopeful.
It would make a good story. Writers are particularly susceptible to things that make good stories. But I don’t believe that this was a sign. I think it was a reveal into who I am and how I feel.

An elephant is an elephant. You are you, and I am me. The universe, as far as I can tell, is not a particularly sophisticated matchmaker. It gives us traffic jams, power cuts, unexpected rain, kind strangers, bad timing and, apparently, elephants. We are the ones who turn these things into messages because we want the world to make sense and have some semblance of control and belief that the cosmos has some favouring to us and our idiosyncracies.

So no, seeing an elephant does not mean you were thinking of me. I wish. It does not mean you miss me, that our paths are about to cross again, or that I should wait for you. Or that maybe in some distant universe, we get more than a hug…

It simply means that I care about you more than I initially realised. And perhaps that is the part I have been avoiding. Because I have been holding on. Quietly, mostly. Reverently. But to a memory nonetheless.

I have not turned into the sort of woman who waits by her device for a man who has clearly misplaced her number… but I have kept a little door open. I have reached out, I have kind of checked in, cautiously because you did block me. I wrote about this in the play btw. We were fine. Electricity was gone. I was manic from the store, in a meeting, maybe more… By the time I woke up, you had removed me from your life with this nonchalant ease. That was unfair. But, I get it.

I am usually disposable. I have learnt to not take it personally.

Yet, I kept that door a little open. Just in case.

Just in case timing changes and the thing that almost happened gets another chance to happen properly. I know, I am a sad case when my feelings are involved.

I have wished you well from a distance. I continue to. I will never not wish you well. I have wondered about you. I have compared people to you without meaning to. I have spoken to strangers on the internet and, every so often, found myself thinking that someone sounds like you. I have gotten into entanglements with the illusion of you through them. Then, on meeting them, I realize they are not you. They often have your voice though. That guttural drawl that dispels common sense from grown women. Maybe just me.

It is a strange thing to meet someone new and discover that you are really checking whether they are someone old. It is unfair to the other person. It is a shameful thing before the quiet disappointment.

Which is perhaps the cruelest thing about trying to move on. Sometimes you do not miss the person as much as you miss the possibility of the person. You miss the version of the story that never got far enough to become ordinary.

The conversation that could have become something.

The almost.

The door that was open once, when I was too awkward to walk through it. Then when I grew some premium marshmallow balls, I simply arrived at it at the wrong time.

Or perhaps the door closed for reasons that had nothing to do with me at all.

Either way, a door does not become an invitation simply because you remember that it was once open. And I cannot spend forever standing outside it. And I am sure you do not want me to.

That is not romantic. Nor is that a viable fertile land for friendship to grow.

It is wasteful of my time and hopes and youth, as well as yours.

I think this is what detachment has to look like for me. It cannot mean deciding that I never cared, because I did. I do. I always will. I am sadly programmed that way. It cannot mean convincing myself that you meant nothing, because I wrote a play. And it certainly cannot mean turning you into a villain simply because a villain is easier to leave than a person you still wish well. And I wish you well, kind sir. I wish you so much goodness that the universe can offer your way.

I can care about you and still stop waiting for you. Stop searching for you. Stop my heart from leaping in hope that maybe this was kismet. I am a little too old for kismet and serendipity. I value intention and commitment and sticking around when its hard. I can remember you fondly without making every coincidence about you. I can hear someone say something that sounds like you and let them be themselves. I can see an elephant and think of you without wondering whether, somewhere in the world, you are thinking of me too. Or whether this was a sign to hold on. Because I know I do not cross your mind, even as an after thought anymore. Once, before, maybe. Now, not really. You have moved on through so many lovers and cities and countries and challenges and things you have overcome. I have not spoken to you in ages. That might be for the best because your voice has a way of edifying delusion into obsession. And we both know how we both get… we are two passionate people.

I wish you well without secretly attaching a return address to the wish. This I must do. For my sake. I have grown a bit selfish. Maybe that is what growing up is: learning that not every feeling requires an outcome.

Some people can matter enormously to us and still not belong in our lives in the way we once hoped they would. Some people help us survive a season without becoming the person who stays for the whole story. Some people leave fingerprints on us without ever holding our hands for very long. You did.

And some people become characters in plays we write years after we thought we had stopped thinking about them.

I suppose I am allowed to admit that I cared. Maybe I still… Of course, I still do. I am allowed to be grateful that you existed in my life, even if what existed between us never became what I wanted it to be. I am allowed to remember the bicycle, the elephant, the jokes, the irritation, the kindness, the one hug, the strange little almost-love of it all. The numerous times you got upset or irritated and cut off communication with me.

But I cannot spend forever waiting for a chance I may already have missed, or standing outside a door that you closed. Perhaps, I am realising that you did block me and never unblocked me. And I guess that was the sign I should have read.

Today I saw an elephant.

It made me think of you.

It did not mean you were thinking of me. It did not mean the universe was sending me a sign. It did not mean I should turn around and start walking back towards you.

It simply reminded me that I cared for you more than I realised. More than comfortable. I’m unsure fully why, but the musings above may indicate what I fail to comprehend.

And perhaps, finally, that is enough. I can care about you without keeping myself available for you. I can love the memory without living inside it. I can wish you well and keep going. I can accept that ours is an unfinished story, close the book, and let myself write something else.

If it was meant to be, it would be. If they want you, they know where you live, have your contact, email, and rental space in your head. They would reach out.

I care for you, I miss you, I wish you success, wealth, and good health, but I release you.

All my love and well wishes,
Always,
Alwedo.

Michelle Ivy Alwedo aka Shelly Qxy A.I, is a Ugandan poet and playwright. Her work examines intimacy, memory, slice-of-life ordinariness. She is the author of Still Blossoming, and 4 chapbooks, including her most recent baddie aka Perfectly Imperfect Portraits. Her play Mary Wants to Get Married is being read at the Kampala International Theatre Festival 2026 in November. It is a dramedy that the audience praises for great portrayal of characters. Subscribe!

Guys, carpool. Theroads being fixed and traffic cannot aggressively be the bane of our existence. Can we please give workmates and crushes and neighbours lifts?

I know, I know, you want to karaoke solo or call that fine shiii and vibe. But… for nature, can we take the L and just coexist and be community again?

How is there time for love… jk- improving my craft. How is there time for love in this dry economy when y’all are driving solo and bumping up traffic. Petition for society to be safe to ride in cars with strangers…

Car rides with stranger… sigh…

I wish I had the grace for bitterness, but I remain a sucker for memory; no matter what ails a human bond, love still insists on taking up space.

Bea is narrating to me the five accidents on the spot where I also fell. And now the boda guy vexed the trailer and the trailer knocked his brakes and saved them three boys.

The poor trailer driver. That could have been three lives. How do you live with that? Happy he was spared. Because how does one go on with ghosts of three trinitying around him.

I tell her of the three accidents I witnessed this week and how there were deaths.

I wonder if we pray for rain so that drought and famine deescalate or pray for sun while they fix the roads, so the mud does not end us all on good old Kamuli road.

We, as a country, get the leaders we deserve.

This last bit is a shout out to drivers blocking bike lanes out of petty envy: thank you for manually buffering our collective momentum. We deeply appreciate your service to the gridlock.

Line one: Wants a sandwich.
Line four: Has a billion thoughts in his head.
Line twelve: Announces he is currently choosing not to have sex, despite his newly acquired ability to “fuck easily” now that he has his own place.
Line sixteen: Blames his lack of an older father figure for the entire monologue.

To truly appreciate the art form of the unsolicited male soliloquy, one must dissect its structural beats. It is a very specific genre of literature, written exclusively in the Notes app format and delivered via iMessage/Whatsapp with zero self-awareness.

The text in question unfolded in five distinct, head-spinning acts:

• Act I: The Illusion of Normalcy. “Hey Ivy... It’s the same old same old... up for a sandwich.” A classic misdirection. He wants you to think he is grounded. A simple man with simple desires. A lover of deli meats.

• Act II: The Existential Overwhelm. “I have like a billion and one programs in my head with no order... books I have procrastinated for weeks... time is moving so fast and so slow.” The transition into tortured genius. He is busy. Not regular busy, but cosmically busy. He is absorbing the universe.

• Act III: The Unsolicited Libido Audit. “Honestly, I don’t want to have sex with anyone for awhile or maybe if I fall into proper temptations... I get horny, my hormones accelerate and drive me nuts.” The pivot that nobody requested. He feels compelled to inform me of his current relationship with his own arousal, as if I am the Registrar of his personal virtue.

• Act IV: The Flex. “I know I now have the capability, unlike back then when I was broke and no place of my own. Now I can fuck easily...” The subtle reminder that he pays his own rent now, and therefore, in his mind, casual sex is an abundant commodity he is generously choosing to decline.

• Act V: The Tragic Origin Story. “...some of us don’t get an older man figure to teach us a few life lessons as we grow... but we’re maturing.” The grand finale. The pivot to daddy issues. The emotional parachute deployed at the exact moment he realizes he has overshared.

Almost poetic, is it not? The trajectory of the 2026 dating pool when you’re in your thirties is watching a twenty-something boy move into his first solo apartment, realize he can buy his own groceries, and immediately assume he is trapped in an existential Russian novel with me as his muse bringing despair.

He wanted me to know four things:

1. He is hornier than God intended.

2. He has money now.

3. He needs a father, but unfortunately, he sent the application to my WhatsApp instead.

4. He is not having sex out of discipline but is also still figuring out how to bag and bed a baddie. (I am not said baddie. He already bagged me.)

I was sitting on my bedroom floor in an oversized t-shirt, cold leftover pizza in one hand, phone in the other, when the message landed. Midnight. No preliminary runway, no polite check-in, no casual “How’s your week?” Just the sudden, blinding glow of a screen illuminating my dark room with the terrifying noise of a 25-year-old man discovering his own consciousness in real-time. A long single block of text that men usually tell me they won’t read but continue to send 5 of due to their logical brains. Men I somehow still put up with. I need to do better but I digress.

I hadn’t asked for a thesis. I had asked if he was free for lunch next Thursday. Yet there I lay, chewing on a cold chicken stuffed crust, caught in the emotional splash zone of a guy who signed a lease three months ago and instantly decided his internal monologue belonged in a museum. And I was curator.

Here is the thing about dating younger men in your thirties: they are undeniably, outrageously hot. They have boundless energy, glowing skin, and a reckless enthusiasm that makes you briefly forget your own lower back pain. But their frontal lobes are still under construction. They are mid-renovation mentally, walking around with open scaffolding where their executive function should be. They are outrageously hot and have stamina of marathon runners. Especially if they are marathon runners.

When he was broke and living with three roommates in a studio that smelled perpetually of damp laundry, his restraint was enforced by circumstance. He wasn’t practicing celibacy; he just didn’t have a door that locked properly. But give that same man a studio apartment solo, a couch he bought with his own debit card, and a surplus of cash at the end of the month, and suddenly his restraint becomes a philosophical posture.

Suddenly, he isn’t just a guy managing his Thursday night. No, no, no. He is a man exercising “abundance and dominance.”

That age old unique, terrifying brand of modern male confidence required to text a woman a paragraph containing the phrase “Now I can fuck easily” followed seamlessly by a plea for emotional sympathy regarding his childhood, and how he does not want to sleep with you. It is the literary equivalent of someone throwing a brick through your living room window with a handwritten note attached that reads: “I am currently practicing self-discipline.”

The truly embarrassing part of this story, however, isn’t the text. The truly embarrassing part is what happened in my own brain immediately after I read it.

A normal, emotionally regulated adult with functional self-respect would have muted the thread, archived the chat, or typed a cold, HR-certified boundary.

Did I do that? Of course not. This is Alwedo we are speaking of here.

I took another bite, tapped into my innate, incurable terminal flaw, and immediately shifted into Fixer Mode. Problem solver, reporting for duty.
Because why simply archive a chaotic text when you can diagnose it, organize it, and offer a multi-step action plan like a project manager for lost souls? Instead of letting him flounder in his self-imposed tragic opera, I put on my invisible sparkly tiara, opened the draft, and started offering structural solutions to a problem he hadn’t actually asked me to solve.

I became the mentor, the life coach, the surrogate older figure he claimed to be missing… all over a text exchange that was originally supposed to be about a sandwich.

My standards never existed but even that non existence has fallen through the floorboards, burrowed through the earth’s crust, and built a fully furnished office in the molten core of the planet. A man can explicitly inform me that his sex drive is driving him nuts, brag about his theoretical body count, and drop his unhealed trauma at my feet, and my brain instantly goes: “Hold my pizza. I can fix his developing brain. Now, here is what we do…”

Am I a lighthouse for high-strung, chaotic men who treat text messages like an unmoderated therapy couch? Cause it seems they look at my name, see that profile picture and think, “Here is a woman who will solve my existential crisis at midnight.”

And the absolute worst part? I actually did. Because Ms. Michelle Ivy finds solutions and fixes things. Call me Olivia Pope and hand me a president and some fizzy.

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Hey hey, hope you are hanging in their with your head and hope high. xx

When I write, I usually begin with a feeling . Sometimes, it is half-cooked, often inconvenient, occasionally sublime.

The world does not hand me poems whole. It never has. Instead, it offers me textures: the oily sheen of fresh Nile perch on a saucepan’s surface, a bordeaux glass sweating on a bed rest, the startled silence after police and ambulance sirens. These are my palettes. My brushstrokes are verbs, smells, shadows, smudged memories and a bit of oversharing. Often, a bit of over sharing and verisimilitude,1

I think of myself as a portrait painter — not of faces, but of fleeting moments. The clatter after Beatu’s legendary goat pilau. The bitterness of antihistamines swallowed with leftover birthday cake. The breathless pause before a girl disappears into a river’s reflection. The sobbing of a widower as he drives back to an empty house. The guilt of an affair with the love of your life who only chooses you at midnight. These poems are studies — life drawn from life, colour-saturated, deliberately framed. If oil painters say they “chase the light,” I chase something more transient: the emotional residue of a moment after it passes.

I am, in essence, a memory worker.

To remember is to revise. To revise is to reframe. Writing poems lets me hold a moment long enough to press it onto the page, like a flower between book pages, flattened but preserved. (I miss flower archiving and pressing.)

As a child, I was obsessed with details. I eavesdropped. I peered through keyholes and cracked doors. I paid attention to what people wore, how they laughed, what they cooked, what they left behind. Perhaps I already understood, somehow, that everything carries the weight of a story. That a meal was more than food, that silence had accents, and that spaces remembered what people chose to forget.

And I wrote it down. Or rather, I absorbed it until I could no longer contain it. Not much has changed. Stories find me now. In whispers at BBQs, bus rides, dinner tables. Maybe it’s the reverence I give them. Or maybe it’s just this: I’m alive, among the living, where so much is always happening.

Years later, after many cities, jobs, and degrees, losses and love affairs, I still write the same way: from the gut. Not always glamorous, but close to true. Again, verisimilitude. What I feel becomes what I write. Sometimes that feeling arrives as longing, sometimes as rage, sometimes as laughter coated in mild guilt. Occasionally, it’s a dish I can no longer eat without thinking of someone who’s gone. Other times, it’s the absurdity of peace within a solo date night with pesto pork pizza and a K-drama queue.

I never write with the intention of being profound. Profundity, I find, is a side effect of honesty, not its goal.

Of Food, Company While You Eat, and Habit

Food appears a lot in my work, but not as ornament or exotic garnish. Sometimes, yeah- But food, for me, is a ritual of equal parts culture, survival, love and memory.

In my poem In Memory of Mother, I paint a scene of a memorial meal: steaming Nile perch, seasoned the way the speaker’s mom taught them, eaten once a year to honour her absence. Although the scene is based off someone I know, the sentiment is pure. In my home, food is more than sustenance. It is inheritance. It is mourning. It is healing. It is love served on a plate.

In the poem, the brother sucks the fish eye dry, like their father before him, like their mother once did. There is a choreography to grief, and to meals.

Before my mother passed, we did a Apples of Gold course by Watoto together with women in the community. It was magical. I learnt so much and have never looked back at kitchening. I have a horrible appetite most days. Cooking somewhat forces me to think about what my body needs.

People do not commemorate the dead because they cannot move on, but because ritual is one way of continuing. And poems are rituals too, aren’t they? Tiny, repeatable acts of remembering.

Similarly, Beatu’s Culinary Magic is not simply about delicious pilau. It is about hierarchy, legacy, and the implicit power of taste. Beatu is an artist, a provider of joy, a central character in our domestic drama in my real life. Her food silences rooms, humbles guests, and preserves our family’s rhythm. That she did this without needing to speak makes her magic all the more powerful.

The metallic screech of a serving spoon scraping stew from the saucepan is a soundtrack to my childhood (and adulthood), as primal as any lullaby.

In my work, food becomes a mnemonic device. It is not there to entertain, but to anchor. These are not just meals; they are memories plated in stanzas. These are images imprinted of people who are part myth, part human and who hopefully linger in the minds of readers.

Geographies of the Internal and External

I write often about place as well. The physical, emotional, and imagined. My poems travel through Limerick’s icy fog, the sultry midday haze of March in equinoxed Kampala, the gonja on dusty Kamuli road that a friend swears for, the artificial chill of a budget airline cabin en route to Dublin. Yet, while these external landscapes give my poems structure, the real terrain I am mapping is internal: grief marinated in ritual, loneliness sealed in Tupperware, memory stored in secondhand scents and second chances.

In T.K Maxx Christmas Temp, for instance, the external setting is almost unremarkable— Limerick in winter, buses, retail work, the silent decay of campus life during holidays. Yet beneath this bleak surface simmers a very specific solitude: the kind felt by the foreigner too broke to fly home, too tired to write, and too ashamed to admit that sometimes healing looks like Netflix and cheap pizza.

This is the kind of honesty I insist on. I will not romanticize my loneliness, but I will name it. I will give it texture. I will make space for it on the page. Because someone, somewhere, has felt that exact same ache. And if from my bedroom desk, I can scribble in my journal and birth a message they can see on the page and feel seen… I will overshare just for the possibility it will matter to someone. I am a sentimental.

Even in surreal or quiet moments, like Steamboat Quay, Apartment 17, place becomes a character. The river watches. The city hushes. Then suddenly there is the hullabaloo of chaos. Sirens, screams, emergency responders. A tragedy interrupts an ordinary dinner of friends. This is the contrast I return to again and again: how quickly mundanity can turn monumental. And how we, as poets, must learn to catch that shift in our language, to write it before it disappears again into silence.

Fun fact? Steamboat Quay, Apartment 17 is a true story from a workmate who I wrote and archived it for. It was the most horrifying thing she witnessed but also the most amusing at oddity of the mundane. (I love you Safia, I miss you. You live on my fridge and in my heart for as long as permit of life be.)

Portraits of People, With All Their Petty Complications

Sometimes I’m asked why I don’t write more political poems. My answer is this: the personal is political. I write about what people bring into their homes. Their minor arguments. Their birthday cakes. Their forgotten forks. Their floral gifts that become household burdens. The art of lying next to each other while crushing candies and scrolling social media.

Take Unwelcome Guests on a Sunday, where a seemingly generous gesture of a friend bringing potted flowers quickly becomes a metaphor for the emotional labour of hosting. The speaker isn’t ungrateful; he’s overwhelmed. He’s allergic to obligation. And he is painfully aware of how his lover, requires him to perform graciousness even when he’d rather be left alone.

This, too, is a portrait: not of a person, but of an experience. And that matters. Just as much as the grand poems about nationhood or justice. If we only write poems that perform grief or triumph in capital letters, we risk losing the quiet revolutions happening on Sunday afternoons, in kitchens, on balconies, in the inner monologues of women who smile politely while praying for solitude.

And actually, I do write political poems…

On Form, Feeling, and the False Binary of “Universal”

Some critics say poems should be “universal,” as if specificity is a flaw. I disagree. My poems are specific because my life is. My readers may not know what posho2 is, or mchuzi mix3, or Parkway Retail buses, but they will understand hunger, habit, waiting, loneliness. They will know grief even if they’ve never eaten fish eyes.

The so-called “universal” poem too often defaults to whiteness, to westernness, to sanitized, exportable emotions. I write poems that are unmistakably mine — whether rooted in Ugandan kitchens, London buses, and Irish streets, in childhood nostalgia and adult disillusionment, in K-dramas and Catholic funerals, in whatever mix of sacred and profane has shaped me.

And if you’ve ever, say, eaten leftover cake with your hands on a flight because your plastic fork was in the overhead bin — then congratulations, we’ve met. Welcome. You’re in the poem. This one is about you.

I don’t believe poetry needs to be complicated to be meaningful. Some of my favourite lines are painfully simple. A moment. A glance. A joke half-swallowed. A child polishing a plate with their tongue because the stew is just that good. The pride of being the maker of the meal being enjoyed.

Me as the Poet and Portrait Painter

So, yes, I return to this metaphor: the poet as portrait painter. Not of heroic busts or glamorous icons. But of life as it is lived — messy, mundane, magical.

Each poem in this collection is a portrait. Some painted in bold colour, others in whispered tones. Some captured in motion, others as still lives. I do not claim objectivity. These portraits are subjective, even biased — after all, I am painting what I feel, not merely what I see.

But they are real. They are honest. They are mine.

In an age of nonchalance, aura farming, and filtered feelings, poetry remains one of the last places where we can be unfiltered, uncool, and unbothered by algorithms.

A place to linger. A place to remember. A place to sit with discomfort, to laugh at absurdity, to grieve without tidying up after ourselves.

This is what I offer in this manuscript: a gallery of moments. A museum of memory. A love letter to the in-between.

Each line a brushstroke. Each poem a portrait.
Each memory a layered canvas of place, food, grief, joy, survival, and surprise.

Welcome. Take your time. Look closely. Something here will remind you of someone you once were, or someone you still are. Or someone you miss, love and desire.

I cannot believe people bought my chapbook. I am amazed and awed at what Michelle Ivy will go out and do on behalf of me and all versions of me aka just me. Perfectly Imperfect Portraits is a treasure of trove of beauty and slice-of-life magic in mundanity. Thank you.

As for the almost 350 subs like the goal in my journal states, merci beaucoup.

Life is a magical, mesmerizing, marvellous, magnificent, silly thing. And humans are fantastic. We all know death is on her way to us, and yet we still live. We laugh and rage and care when the milk spoils or bread moulds before we get a taste, yet with every second that passes we crawl closer to the end. We awe at a pink and purple sunset, or our team winning the World Cup, or the curl of a baby’s hand on a finger, or the efficiency of knowing-a-guy, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day.

How do we do it?

In pieces.

Not all at once. We stare down the abyss over breakfast; I’ve tried, it ruins the day but calms the mind. We look at it sideways, in blinks. We let ourselves forget, just for a stretch, that the clock is running. Then we remember, flinch, and keep going. That’s the rhythm. Forget. Remember. Flinch. Love anyway.

We do it by shrinking the frame. We don’t love them for a lifetime: that’s too heavy, too much pressure, I can barely commit to a single name. We love them for this walk, this meal, this dumb inside joke that makes us wheeze like asthmatic seals. We trade eternity for the immediate. We stop trying to hold the ocean and just cup the handful. It’s enough. It has to be. We are resourceful.

We do it because we’ve seen the other side. We’ve watched someone hold back: play it safe, stay cool, protect themselves… and we saw what it cost them. A life half-lived. A heart half-open. A death that started long before the body caught up. We saw that and said, Nope. Not me. Never me. I’d rather be a mess.

We do it through ritual. The goodnight text. The Sunday call. The way we remember how they like their dinner. These small, repeatable acts are how we say, I know this ends, but I’m choosing you again today. They’re how we build meaning in the face of all life’s meaninglessness; one stupid, sacred brick at a time.

And sometimes we do it by accident. By looking back.

I was cleaning out my inbox last week; procrastinating, obviously, when I stumbled on an email thread from five years ago. Someone I loved. Someone I still love, if I’m honest, though life has done what life does and pulled us in different directions. Which is fair because we have lives to lead. And as I scrolled, I realised something that hit me like a hot grits to the face.

I had never imagined the intimacy. It was not something I made up. It was real, it happened and it was not one sided. They liked me and I liked them….

I remembered the grand themes: the significance, the meaning, the point of us. I remembered the narrative arc, the poetry of it, the way I’d framed it in my head like a movie I’d one day tell people about. (It’s a play, but same thing) But I had not remembered the small, excruciating, ordinary intimacy of it.

The way they typed hehehe instead of haha. The way they asked questions like a stalker taking notes. The way they remembered I was often depressed and checked in with a dutifulness of a priest. The way they replied each email and this I convinced myself meant nothing but meant everything.

I sat there, in my chair, in my stupid pyjamas at 4am, and I felt it: the full weight of a love I’d already lost. And it hurt. It hurt a shit tonne. It hurt like a bruise you’d forgotten you had, burned freshly awake.

But here’s the thing.

I read those emails and thought, God, I was such a fool. I was so open. So earnest. So unguarded and ridiculous and absolutely certain that this… this email thread, this person, this moment… was going to last forever, or at least long enough.

And then I thought, I want to be that fool again.

Because loving is losing. That’s the deal. That’s the fine print we all pretend we didn’t read. Every person you love is a future wound. Every beautiful moment is a memory that will one day ache. Every “hehe” and little xoxx is a grenade set to go off in your chest when you least expect it, years later, in your pyjamas, reading old emails like a complete idiot.

And yet.

I still want to do it. I still want to be the fool. The big, dumb, soft-hearted fool who loves without calculating the cost, who sends the risky text, who says I love you first and I miss you, even when it’s not returned, who picks the green-peppers out of someone’s food because that’s just what you do when you love someone.

We move. We believe. We do our best. We love anyway.

Every day.

Like fools.

Because fools, they say, are the only ones who truly live. The ones who haven’t built bunkers around their hearts. The ones who still gasp at sunsets and cry at adverts and read old emails and feel the full, catastrophic weight of having loved and lost and loved again anyway.

I am one big fool. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The finale is the same for everyone. The only variable is the how of the in-between. So we marvel. We rage. We hold on tight and let go all in the same breath. Because the alternative —holding back, loving less to hurt less— is already a death. A living burial before the actual dirt piles over your casket.

So yes. Everyone you love is gonna die.

Love anyway. And love so hard it leaves no room for doubt. Love so that it fills your life with goodness and awe. Love. Love. Love. For it is what holds this cracked, crooked world together.

Love because it sure is one way to make the damn clock tick for us, instead of against us.

I have never had excellent sex.

There. I said it.

Except for Pranav. (Oh Lord!)

Pranav was an anomaly. There was wine, for one thing, which I think should be entered into evidence. There was a deal he had closed that day, which gave him the particular confidence of a man who has recently convinced other adults to give him money. There was us seeing ourselves across the road and knowing serendipity bit us. Because how do two online randos realise the other is really across the road. There was the fact that we never really understood each other, which somehow made the whole thing more exciting rather than less. There were mirrors.

Lord.

Mirrors.

Anyway.

Pranav aside, I have not spent my adult life wandering around in a post-coital haze wondering whether human beings were perhaps invented specifically so that two of them could discover each other’s bodies. I have had sex. I have enjoyed sex. I have also, on several occasions, lain perfectly still afterwards thinking, Well. That was certainly an activity.

So I am not, despite what some of my romantic decisions may suggest, chasing chemistry because I am addicted to extraordinary sex. In fact, abstinance has suited me well over the last years.

I am chasing chemistry because chemistry is fucking persuasive.

It is that feeling when somebody walks into a room and your body notices before your brain has finished filing the paperwork. It is a particular kind of attention. A joke that lands differently. A look held half a second too long. The strange ease of talking to someone you have no business being this comfortable with. The feeling that something is happening between you even when, technically, absolutely nothing is happening.

And I have historically been very impressed by this.

Perhaps too impressed.

Because I think I have spent a lot of time imagining that the man of my dreams is the man who makes me feel the most.

But I’m beginning to suspect that this is a terrible criterion.

I don’t want a man who makes me feel the most.

I want a man who complements me.

And there is a difference.

I want someone who is good at the things I am terrible at. Not necessarily spectacularly good. I am not asking for a Renaissance man who can repair a leaking tap while simultaneously filing my taxes and making a decent risotto. Although if one is available, obviously, send him immediately.

I mean the boring things.

If I am terrible at something, have a go at being good at it.

If I am overwhelmed, don’t also become overwhelmed in exactly the same direction.

If I am impulsive, perhaps you possess one functioning frontal lobe between us.

If I am emotional, don’t treat emotion as a natural disaster.

If I forget something, remember it.

If I am shit at planning, plan something.

If I am talking, listen.

And for heavens’ sake, communicate.

I don’t mean communicate in the contemporary dating sense, where a man says, “I’m big on communication,” and then disappears for fourteen hours because you asked a mildly uncomfortable question.

I mean actually communicate.

Tell me what happened.

Tell me what you think happened.

Tell me what you need.

Ask me what I meant before deciding what I meant.

Listen to my answer.

Then, crucially, learn something from it.

This is the part that seems increasingly revolutionary.

Listen and learn.

Not listen so you can prepare your defence.

Not listen while visibly preparing your closing arguments.

Not listen with the face of a medieval king whose precious pearls have just been snatched from his trembling little hands because somebody said, “I didn’t like the way you spoke to me.”

Please.

They are not pearls.

It is a conversation. Nobody is stealing your inheritance. Besides, I am sure your mother would want me wearing the pearls anyway.

I don’t want to be with a man who reacts to every piece of feedback like I’ve arrived at his house with a warrant and a small army. I want someone who can hear, That hurt me, and not immediately turn it into, Well, you hurt me once in 2019.

I want someone who can say, I didn’t mean to do that, but I understand why it hurt.

I want someone who can apologise without first producing a PowerPoint presentation on why I am technically also culpable.

I want someone who can change. Not become a completely different person. Not perform some grotesque personality transplant because his girlfriend has complained. Just learn. Adapt. As I am and will.

Oh. You don’t like that.

Oh. That’s important to you.

Oh. I didn’t know that.

Okay. I’ll try differently next time.

Imagine.

Imagine dating someone who treats new information as information. Data does not care about your feelings. It is just data. Use it as information and adapt.

This should not be erotic.

And yet here we are.

Because perhaps I have been approaching the man of my dreams from the wrong end.

I’ve been thinking about attraction. About whether I want him or he wants me. About whether he fascinates me. Whether I want to kiss him. Whether I think about him when I shouldn’t. In ways I definitely should not. Whether there is a little electric disturbance whenever he comes near me.

All of that matters.

I am not applying to become a nun. (Yet. Maybe after the army.)

But I also want to know what happens after the electricity. Because electricity is excellent until you need to keep the lights on.

I want a partner.

I mean that in the most embarrassingly sincere sense of the word. A person on my side. Someone whose strengths cover some of my weaknesses and whose weaknesses I can cover without resenting the weight of them. Someone who doesn’t need to be perfect but does need to be willing. Someone who can look at the places where I am clumsy and say, I’ve got this one.

And I want to be able to do the same for him.

This is perhaps less glamorous than chemistry. It is certainly less interesting to write about.

Nobody wants to read an essay called A Man Remembered To Buy The Thing I Forgot We Needed And I Felt Very Seen.

Except… me.

I want that man. I want the man who notices we’re running out of toilet paper.

I want the man who knows I am bad at replying when I am overwhelmingly depressed and doesn’t interpret it as a declaration of war.

I want the man who can tell when I am actually angry and when I am hungry and when I am being humourous and catty.

A man who can distinguish between I need space and I need you to come closer but not in an irritating way.

Actually, perhaps that last one is asking a lot. Fine. I want a man who asks.

I think this is what I mean when I say I want compatibility.

Not sameness.

God, no. No. No. No!

I don’t want a male version of myself wandering around my house. I already have one me and she’s amazing af but kinda exhausting.

I want someone with different strengths.

Someone who can steady me without diminishing me. Someone who can challenge me without constantly making me feel challenged. Someone who knows when to push and when to shut up. Someone who can say, “You’re being unreasonable,” without making me feel like a defective woman. Someone who can hear me say, “You’re being unreasonable,” without immediately behaving as though I have accused him of treason.

I want the ordinary intimacy of being known.

Not just sexually or romantically. Not just in those beautiful, concentrated moments when two people are looking at each other and pretending the rest of the world has been temporarily cancelled.

I want someone to know how I take my porridge.

I want to know what he sounds like when he is afraid.

I want to know which family story he has told too many times.

I want to know what he does when he’s scared.

I want him to know what I do when I’m terrified.

And when I tell him, I don’t want him to use that information as ammunition six months later because we had an argument about how I felt unseen.

I want safety. Safety is sexy.

Safety where you can be completely ridiculous with someone because you know they aren’t going anywhere just because you have had an ugly day.

The kind where you can say, That hurt me, and trust that the conversation is not about to become a referendum on your entire personality.

The kind where you can disagree and still remain on the same team.

Perhaps this is why unavailable men are so seductive.

You never get to the boring bits. You get the glances.

You get the tension.

You get the possibility.

You get to imagine what he would be like if he were fully yours without having to discover what he is actually like when the electricity has gone and someone has left a wet towel on the bed for the fourth time.

You can fill in the blanks. And I am very good at filling in blanks. I am a writer. This is a professional hazard. Give me an emotionally ambiguous man and I will produce his backstory by lunchtime.

He isn’t distant. He’s guarded.

He isn’t inconsistent. He’s overwhelmed.

He isn’t failing to communicate. He’s processing.

He isn’t unavailable. He’s afraid of intimacy.

He doesn’t know what he wants. He’s confused. He needs time. He has wounds. He has depth.

At some point you have to stop giving humans character development they have not earned.

This is perhaps the most difficult thing about growing up romantically: accepting that sometimes the story you have invented around someone is more interesting than the relationship they are actually offering. And I don’t want to do that anymore.

I don’t want to romanticise unavailable men. Even when they are hot. Gosh, a hot man can make me a sinner out of me. Lord!

But, I don’t want to confuse being difficult to reach with being worth reaching.

I don’t want to spend my life proving that I am special enough to make someone communicate.

I don’t want to be the woman who finally gets him to open up.

I want a man who has already opened the door.

I want him to come in. I want him to take his shoes off. I want him to ask what we’re eating. I want him to tell me when something is wrong before it becomes a three-week atmosphere. I want him to listen when I tell him something matters to me. I want to listen when he tells me something matters to him. I want us both to fuck things up sometimes, because we are human and unfortunately cannot be replaced by a more emotionally intelligent species. But I want us to learn. That’s the whole thing. Learn.

Not win. Not defend. Not punish. Not withdraw until the other person gets frightened enough to come looking for you. Learn.

I don’t want a perfect man. I want a responsive one.

I don’t want someone who never hurts me. I want someone who cares when he does.

I don’t want someone who agrees with me about everything.

I want someone who can disagree without treating disagreement as disrespect.

I don’t want someone who completes me. I complete me. I have many many bits of me.

I have always found that phrase vaguely insulting. I am not half a woman waiting for some man to arrive with the missing pieces in his pocket.

I want someone who complements me. Someone who brings what I don’t have. Someone who can say, I’ve got this, when I don’t. Someone who lets me say the same when he doesn’t. And yes, I still want chemistry. Obviously. I am not that dead inside. I want to look at him and think, Oh, you’re trouble. I want the jokes and the tension and the attraction and the stupid little moments where we catch each other looking. I want the wine. Perhaps not the deal he closed, specifically. That was Pranav’s thing. Bless his heart.

And perhaps, if the universe is feeling generous, I want the mirrors.

Lord.

The mirrors.

But I don’t want chemistry to be the only reason I stay.

I don’t want to spend another relationship asking whether someone wants me.

I want to know with no room left for doubt.

I want to want him too.

And then I want to find out what happens when the room stops spinning.

When the wine is finished.

When the mirrors are broken.

When nobody is being mysterious.

When one of us is upset and the other one doesn’t run for the emotional fire exit.

When someone says, You hurt me, and the other person doesn’t clutch his imaginary pearls.

When we have misunderstood each other and instead of turning the misunderstanding into a war, we sit down and try again.

When life is ordinary.

When it is Tuesday.

When we are tired.

When there is laundry.

When someone forgot the thing from the shop.

When one of us is being an idiot.

When both of us are.

I think that is where I want to find the man of my dreams.

Not in the fantasy. Not in the longing. Not in the locked door.

In the Tuesday.

Come be the man of my dreams. But please come with emotional availability, complementary skills and a willingness to listen. And if you could communicate without reacting like somebody has just snatched your precious pearls, that would be fantastic. I have had enough pearls. I prefer emeralds and rubies and sometimes, saphires.

I am 30.76 and I am happy to be alive.

It's a very specific number, isn't it? 30.76. Not quite 31, but definitely not the wide-eyed 30 I was six months ago, still blinking at the milestone like it might sting. I think I chose 30.76 because it feels honest. It's not a round number designed for a birthday cake or a social media post. It's just where I am. Three-quarters of the way through a year that has already taught me more than the five before it combined.

My friend came to stay last weekend.

She arrived with a suitcase full of clothes and a head full of stories from her recent travels. We sprawled on my couch, the one with the suspicious stain I keep meaning to clean, and she talked. About the mountains she climbed, the food she ate, the strangers who became friends over bottles of wine in cities I've only ever seen on TV.

We barely spoke of boys.

I noticed that, you know. I noticed it the way you notice the absence of a noise you've grown accustomed to. There was a time, not so long ago, really, when a weekend with a friend was a war council. We'd dissect every text message, parse every emoji, build entire narratives around a three-second delay in a reply. We'd sit on the floor with glasses of wine and ask each other, "But what does he *mean* by that?" as if men were ancient texts requiring translation.

But not this weekend.

This weekend, she told me about her career, about the promotion she's chasing, about the book she's finally publishing. And I told her about the new project at work, the one that terrifies me and excites me in equal measure. We laughed at our younger selves, the ones who thought a "big life" meant being chosen by someone else. She's married though. To some wonderful French man.

I loved that for us.

After she left, after the gate clanked shut and the house settled back into its familiar quiet… I jumped on a bike. I had a doggy bag in my tote, leftovers from the dinner I cooked that night. My mate was at Salute lounge in Bukoto, and I wanted to drop it off.

Planned and unplanned.

That's the thing I'm learning to love about my life now. The way it bends and folds in unexpected directions. I didn't plan to be darted across the city with a tupperware container of pork, chicken and potatoes and greens. I didn't plan to find myself laughing at a table in Bukoto with people who have become, somehow, the architecture of my days. But there I was. And their close friend was there too, someone I'd never met before, and we talked about nothing and the hours disappeared like my sanity when love is involved.

I realized something this week.

It happened when my friend hugged me. He holds me in this particular way, solid and grounding, like a doorframe you can lean against. And I realized—really *realized*—that I snuggle into him and smear my skin on his whenever he does. I do this with men taller than me that are platonic.

It's a strange thing to admit. I'm not sure it's something you're supposed to notice about yourself. But I do. I press my cheek against his shoulder and I don't pull away. I let myself be held in a way that is utterly, completely platonic. And he pats my back in true brotherly camaraderie, a steady rhythm that says, "I've got you, but only as a friend."

I'm unsure of whether this upsets him.

He hasn't mentioned anything. And perhaps that's the answer, isn't it? That he hasn't pulled away or made a joke or created distance. He just holds me, and I hold him back, and we both know what this is and what it isn't.

I want a big life.

A life full of people I love and people that love me. Not just adoring fans and acquaintances. Not the hollow validation of Instagram likes or the fleeting warmth of a stranger's attention. I want love. Big fulfilling loud and unpretentious love.

I used to think that meant a partner. One person. The love of my life. The one who would complete the picture, fill the empty space, be the answer to all the questions I didn't know how to ask.

But I'm 30.76 now.

And I've come to realize… slowly, the way you realize you've outgrown pants you used to love—that I'm not looking for the love of my life.

I'm looking for a big life. A community.

Full of people I love. And things I care about. And work that matters. And fun. And depth. And silliness. And birds and flowers and art.

The kind of life where you drop off leftover pasta to a friend and end up staying for hours. Where you let yourself be held by someone who will never be your boyfriend but will always be your person. Where you talk about careers and mountains and books, not because you're avoiding the topic of romance, but because you've realized there's so much more to talk about.

The kind of life where you get to be 30.76 and happy to be alive.

I don't think I am dismissing romance or love. I think I am expanding it. Dolly Alderton was saying, look, love is not just one thing. It's not just a wedding or a partnership or a fairytale. It's the friend who tells you her stories. It's the mate who saves you a seat at a table in Bukoto. It's the hug from a comrade, steady and true, where you can smear your skin on his and know you are safe.

That's what I want.

Big. Fulfilling. Loud. Unpretentious.

I want to be held. I want to hold back. I want to be the person who cycles across the city with a doggy bag, planned and unplanned.

I want to keep realizing things about myself. The messy, strange, beautiful things. Like how I snuggle into my friends. Like how I don't need a love story to feel full. Like how I am 30.76 and this might be the most alive I've ever been.

And I am glad I exist. Even though I can't wait to be dead.

We’ve all bought into the big AI promise, right?

The pitch is beautiful: AI is going to handle the grunt work. It’ll draft your awkward emails, write your code, summarise those painful 50-page PDFs, and magically hand you back your free time. The logic feels airtight. If a machine can do a week’s worth of work in twenty minutes, we should all be sitting on a beach by Friday afternoon, sipping something tropical.

But history is laughing at us from the corner.

Because every time humanity invents a tool that makes a resource hyper-efficient, we don't use it to rest. We just use it to create a mountain of new chores.

To understand why your future involves more digital noise and fewer beach days, we have to look back to 1865 and meet a delightfully cynical British economist named William Stanley Jevons.

The Steam Engine Glitch

Back in the 19th century, coal was the lifeblood of Britain, and steam engines were notoriously terrible at burning it efficiently. Then came James Watt, who designed a brilliant, highly efficient engine that got the job done using a fraction of the fuel.

Everyone celebrated. "Fantastic!" they thought. "Now the country will finally burn less coal."

Instead, the exact opposite happened. Because steam power was suddenly cheap and efficient, every single industry wanted a piece of the action. Factories sprouted like mushrooms. Trains multiplied. Cheap energy unlocked hundreds of new, bizarre uses for coal that no one had ever dreamed of before. Total coal consumption didn’t drop; it skyrocketed.

This is the Jevons Paradox: When you make a resource cheaper and more efficient, you don’t use less of it. You just find infinitely more ways to burn it.

Think about your dishwasher. It’s wildly more efficient than washing by hand. Did it give you hours of free time? No. It just raised the standard of cleanliness, so now you wash every single glass, prep bowl, and garlic press you touch, running the machine twice as much.

We don't use efficiency to relax. We use it to scale.

Right now, the Jevons Paradox is coming for the tech world.

For decades, software code was a rare, expensive, artisanal resource. Writing it required specialised humans who drank too much coffee and cost a lot of money. Because human hours are limited, the world has always been "code-constrained." There were thousands of software ideas that never got built simply because they weren't worth the massive cost of hiring a dev team.

Enter AI. Suddenly, generating code is practically free.

So, what happens next? Do we just build the same apps, lay off the programmers, and call it a day?

Not a chance. Instead, we are about to unlock a tidal wave of latent demand.

Think about the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg didn’t invent it so we could copy the existing books faster. His invention made printing so cheap that it accidentally invented the concept of daily newspapers, trashy romance novels, and comic books.

When code costs nothing, we won't just build faster apps. We will build hyper-specific, utterly ridiculous software. You’ll have a custom-coded app built solely to coordinate a single neighbourhood block party, or a script written exclusively to automate your cat's automatic feeder based on the weather in Zurich. The world will become absolutely flooded with software because the barrier to entry has vanished.

Burning the "Intelligence" Substrate

This goes way past coding. Intelligence itself is a "substrate". Ie, a foundational layer of society, just like electricity.

If AI makes processing, filtering, and organising information dirt cheap, we are going to apply it to everything. Your inbox will have an AI assistant talking to your boss's AI assistant, generating thousands of hyper-optimised emails that neither human will ever actually read.

But there’s a massive catch. Running these brilliant models requires mind-boggling amounts of electricity. Instead of reaching a peaceful plateau where we have "enough" intelligence, our hunger for data centres is threatening to break the physical world. We are trying to run infinite digital brainpower on a finite electrical grid.

Ultimately, the Jevons Paradox is a mirror held up to human nature. It reminds us that we don't have a "stop" button. Give us an abundant resource, and our brains will instantly invent a new horizon to chase.

As we slide into the AI age, our biggest problem isn't going to be figuring out how to make things faster or cheaper. The real challenge is going to be remembering how to say "this is enough." Otherwise, we’re just building a faster, shinier treadmill.

And running out of breath at the speed of light.

​

The URA tower is an aesthetic homage

to smokers like me:

as blue as oxygen-starved lungs

silver-grey ash, exhaled vapour.

​I gave up a few weeks ago,

It grew off on me.

Another disdained lover I let loose.

​If you lose your marbles,

ball a fist

and crack my jaw.

I’d rather choose life

than be killed

for measly morsels of affection

by another alcoholic,

pinned down,

choked hard,

realizing you’ve become your mother

breathless.

​It’s a long, claustrophobic traffic crawl

from Texas Lane to Ggaba Road.

But I hold it in__

past reception,

past the cameras,

into the office bathroom

where, finally,

I exhale
and wail.

“A psycho who is loyal is better than a womaniser who is loving.”

I said this over tea one afternoon. My cousin looked at me the way people look at someone who has just announced they season their watermelon with mayonnaise.

“That,” she said, with all the tenderness of a paramedic arriving too late, “is how women die.”

I laughed. She didn’t.

The unfortunate thing about saying something ridiculous is that people assume you haven’t thought about it. I had. Probably too much.

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time wondering where that particular flavour of romantic delusion came from.

Perhaps it was my mother’s fault.

She raised me on science fiction films where monsters were merely misunderstood men with excellent jawlines. Vampires who waited centuries for one woman. Werewolves who imprinted for life. Men who would burn entire kingdoms before forgetting an anniversary

Then as an adult, there was SPY×FAMILY, which somehow convinced me that professional assassins make dependable husbands so long as they communicate their schedules. I know, I know. I am a real softie.

Still, I stand by my statement.

Not literally.

If an actual psychopath is reading this, I have hobbies and people who would miss me. Please spare me? I have a weak heart and cry a lot. Be my friend maybe?

But philosophically?

Give me loyalty over charm. Probably even literally.

Loving people fall in love all the time. Loyal people stay. Perhaps that is the sentence I actually meant. Because loving and staying are not synonyms. Some people love you spectacularly for six months. Some love you between text messages. Some love you until someone newer walks into the room. Love, I’ve discovered, can be remarkably mobile. Loyalty seems heavier. Less interested in wandering.

Maybe that sounds like someone who has been ghosted one too many times. Maybe. Then again, a man has called me strange, difficult, probing, tester of boundaries and limits. etc

.

Or maybe it sounds like someone trying to build a philosophy from disappointment. The irony is that I refuse to date because I fear the violence that follows my kind of attraction. People hear that sentence and assume I think every man is violent. I do.

Okay, I don’t. I simply know every man is stronger than me. A handsome man with height over me is a strong man. A man with wits wiser than mine is a man wiith manipulation skills. A man with breath is scary because they have a strength I cannot possess.

A man with lungs? Suspicious.

I know that sounds unreasonable. Irrational even, but when is the last time you did not worry on the road at night? A wrong taxi. A drink spike at an office party.

I am 176 cm of anxiety held together by whimsy, good manners and a frightening ability to imagine worst-case scenarios.

People assume tall women feel safe. Or are strong. Maybe, but not me.

I apologise to everything after walking into it. People, walls, chairs, air. Violence has always lived at the edge of my imagination. As an ever present flinch. I fawn. My self protection is fawning. Can you imagine the luck?

Women are taught to calculate the possibility of violence.

How fast could he run? Would anyone hear me? Is my location shared with someone? Can I leave my drink unattended? What begins as caution eventually becomes instinct.

Risk assessment dressed in lipstick. Which is perhaps why I find my own dating preferences so pitiful. I claim I want certainty. But certainty, if taken to its logical conclusion, becomes something frightening. Imagine the man who never leaves. Never doubts.
Never looks at another woman.
Never forgets a birthday.
Never misses a detail.
Never allows anyone else to hurt you.
At first he sounds romantic. Then he insists on walking you everywhere because the streets are dangerous.
He answers your phone because people upset you.
He sends warning texts to your friends because they don’t appreciate you.
He quits your job for you because you always come home exhausted.
He reads your messages because transparency builds trust. He installs cameras because he worries.
He tracks your location because he loves you.
He has mistaken possession for protection.

And somewhere along the way, you have mistaken obedience for safety. That is the horror, isn’t it? The terrifying ease with which care can become control.

Monsters rarely introduce themselves as monsters. They introduce themselves as solutions. The older I get, the less convinced I am that I want a psycho who is loyal. I don’t want someone incapable of leaving. I want someone who chooses to stay.

There is a difference.

One requires obsession. The other requires freedom. Perhaps my cousin was right after all. Not because my statement would end in death.

Because it began in fear.

Fear of abandonment.
Fear of betrayal.
Fear that love is temporary and loyalty is not.
Maybe my terrible dating philosophy was never really about men.

Maybe it was an awkward way of saying that I wanted to feel safe.

The good news is that I no longer think safety lives inside another person.

It lives in knowing I can leave the moment love continuously asks me to shrink in order to keep it.

And if I ever again find myself saying, “A psycho who is loyal is better than a womaniser who is loving,” I hope someone orders me another cup of hot chocolate, waits for me to finish talking, and gently reminds me that the opposite of heartbreak is not captivity.

It is peace.