I

It’s a tiny wildflower native to the harsh, dry desert soil that only appears when conditions are right, blooming briefly before disappearing again into seed without apology.

The story she wanted to tell has no beginning and no end, only unfinished yesterdays.

Spotify unexpectedly switched songs and Bad Bunny’s hit made her put on mascara a little faster. That night in late May.

They lay on the bed, covered only by shimmering city lights and the 4:48 a.m. sunrise spilling through tiny gaps in sheer white net curtain.

Like newborns, they laughed, intertwining legs, innocently tracing lines, writing the first paragraphs onto each other’s bodies — she with her fingertips, he with his palms.

I like the light, I want to see your eyes.

I prefer it in the dark but don’t worry, I can see you perfectly like that, he lied.

He saw what lived beyond the green in her eyes.

I’ll do it wrong anyway. How could I take care of her? But God, I wish I could stay.

I really have to go, you won’t be sad?

Of course not, she smiled while his warm hand slowly slipped off her waist and the door closed.

Sunday morning drifted into two hours of sleep. She woke before the alarm to quickly finish tucking in the remaining clothes scattered on the floor into a cabin suitcase.

Your Uber driver will be at the pick-up point in five minutes. Last check. One more glance at the view. Warsaw looks so different at night. Nothing left behind.

She stepped outside the block and the whole sky was filled with millions of white puffs, drifting effortlessly through the warm, thick morning air.

Summer snow.

Tiny poplar seeds tangled in long silky threads, hoping to find just enough fertile ground between concrete.

II

The desert doesn’t ask the flower to bloom. The desert never mistakes what’s beneath the cracked earth for absence. The desert holds.

Seen a month ago.

I am the ocean or I’m nothing. I’m nothing and I am the other side of the night sky. I can put a whole world into one goodbye, and create a galaxy from a single city night.

Modern love taught us silence but turned us into poets.

Modern love made us wear layers on layers until we’ve forgotten how to light a fire.

Modern love taught us to protect ourselves from things that never happened. Wait three days, then decide you don’t care. Don’t say you miss them. Raise your standards. Post a story from your dinner for one. Starve your tenderness with distance.

Empty heart is better than too much.

It was one of those late evenings in June, lightning danced above the Alps, pale blue clearings opening between indigo clouds. The birds tucked themselves into tall Swiss pines. Yellow warblers, the app said. P. said the other day that she can hear what they say.

Warm gusts of wind fluttered her silk mini dress and swiped crumbs of protein waffles she left for the birds. Fingertips energetically clicked across the laptop keyboard, hypnotising thoughts into sentences. Sun kissed hands, kissed hard but this year just once.

The thunder is getting closer, but the storm will pass sideways over the mountains.

Seashells from a beach in the south of France rested on the windowsill, reminding her how to turn people into tender stories, even the unread, the unseen, the unfinished.

She watered a pot of light pink mandevillas outside for a third time.

The evening star twinkled in between the midnight blue.

A soft exhale.

Sent.

III

The remarkable thing is that this flower survives through floral mimicry. It only needs enough visits from solitary desert bees to reproduce. Bare minimum is enough. What you see, what you’re lucky enough to smell on a scorching, dry afternoon, is only a brief chapter of its extraordinary life.

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And I danced, no clothes, black lace bra on the floor, a table for one, reserved. It’s all waiting theeeere for you, it’s all waiting theeeeere fills my throat, bittersweet like espresso martini just before—or right after.

“Just for one?” the waiter asked in an overcrowded Italian restaurant.

Yes, I say, while a queue lines up behind me. My table waits in the middle, in front of the pillar made of tall mirrors. I put my handbag on an empty chair. My hair perfectly done, M.M. style, new perfume, a glass of red. I wait for my order.

Something opens. A strange dizziness rises in my head. Invisible strings pull me above the crowd, higher, higher.

I dissolve under the ceiling, and I can see everything: the hands, the tears, the laughter, the nights, the names, the faces, the places. Forty years of me whirling inside me, spinning like celestial bodies, like a mesmerising Sufi dervish in endless motion.

I’m naked but nobody is looking.

Translucent.

Come, come.

Come back.

A new message pops on the screen.

Honestly? I shrugged.

How dare you, I thought.

Come with me to my hotel room, I wanted.

But better let me know the best place to dance in this city.

Take a chance on me.

I haven’t felt a man’s touch for almost a year.

“Another glass of Primitivo?” the waitress asked, looking at a large group of late evening guests entering the crowded restaurant.

Non, merci, l’addiction s’il vous plaît.

I reached for my handbag.

Sudden goosebumps rose deep under my skin. The air turned musky. Silence in my chest.

Wild.

The restaurant disappeared.

A wolf.

I stare into her eyes.

Green.

Wait.

Wait.

Can you smell it — the flower that blooms without rain?

You can bloom without tears.

IV

It spends far more of its existence waiting than flowering. It survives as a seed even for years. The seed waits through drought, heat, failed seasons, predators, or worse, people mining the land. And one day the desert blooms. The flower appears almost overnight. Within weeks, it has flowered, produced seed, and vanished again into its underground permanence.

They come in her dreams, gods, and those she hasn’t seen, but only in early summer, when the nights are the shortest.

It’s been many months since the current inside her went quiet. Maybe it’s the tightness in her womb. Maybe it’s the heaviness of July. The strange exhaustion of a season that asks everything to be alive, but once she closed her eyes she spiralled into deep sleep, snoozing the alarm fifteen times, unsure which reality she woke up to.

“You are the key,” a WhatsApp message from P. appeared on the screen.

Hekate came to my dream to say that you have something I need, she read, not knowing what to think of it. The silver thread felt tangled somewhere between her eyelids and her future, hidden in a place she thought she could no longer reach.

This summer, she said.

Summer lived inside her, an endless continuity of sunlight that travelled billions of years to reach her, it remained here, in her flushed cheeks, her neck, her breasts. Committed.

Women like her don’t turn back.

But they can return before dusk, standing barefoot on dew-drenched grass under a new moon, watching from a distance, only to check if the crossing point between our world and other lives is still there.

She would hold a torch for anyone who wanted to go, even if she loved them.

Last night, the familiar sound of the water fountain slipping through the open window, owls hooting their melodies, the soft tapping of deer hooves crossing the street. Pons. Almost wilderness, almost home.

And the night sky.

The night sky there was so low.

She never saw the stars so close, as if they wanted to come nearer to her ears and whisper: we are here. There is no forever, only endless choices. Make love, lover girl.

Between cities. Between worlds. Between them.

Make love.

But she couldn’t touch anybody. Only the sea.

I was naked but I couldn’t.

The powdery warmth of ambrette, touched with magnolia and violet, settled between her breasts, night after night, in her king-size bed.

When she packed, she gave almost everything away.

But some things can only belong to us.

V

This flower doesn’t really come back. Each spring, when conditions allow, an entirely new one emerges from seeds left by the previous generation. The landscape looks familiar, but the flower is never the one that bloomed before.

“What is your plan for the future?” S. asked her on the way back from a late shift. What would you like?

Fluffy clouds above them turned salmon pink. Almost no wind. The sounds of another World Cup football match spilled from a local bar. Her pace quickened, careful not to place the thin heels of her braided sandals between the cobblestones. Let’s get a drink.

In the morning, the balcony was still cool, a brief relief from the European heatwave lingering for weeks, unusual this high in the Alps. Wearing nothing but a short silk lilac night top, black drip coffee in her hands, squinted eyes still adjusting to the brightness of the daylight while she leaned over the railing and watched the golfers below.

Their quiet focus, their patience, their attention. Slow and almost ritualistic, they waited for the exact fraction of a second when the strike became possible.

That morning the building was unusually quiet, as though all the neighbours slipped away on tiptoes before sunrise, without making coffee, without slamming a single door.

So quiet she reached for the phone to see what date it was. A pile of novels left outside, stories bookmarked on different pages, interrupted mid-sentence. What happened to the wealthy man in Greece, what crossed the cemetery keeper’s mind.

Wednesday, 29th July.

But how come?

One more minute in the sun.

On her way to the bathroom to get ready for work, she accidentally knocked over a water glass. While picking up the tiny diamonds scattered across the floor, she saw three suitcases tucked beneath the single bed.

In two months summer will end.

She inhaled.

Today travelled through the layers of her lungs, settling somewhere between the ribs until there was nowhere else to go.

A five-minute shower in the dark with only a tiny candle light.

Somewhere, between the scent of maciejka and potatoes from the fire, Dad tells another unfunny joke and we all laugh.

Somewhere in me, I still feel the warmth of evening asphalt beneath my body.

They already know me by the colour of my eyes.

Today, the light of a star that no longer exists dries my wet hair into soft waves.

.

.

.

.

.

~ Thank you so much for being part of my stories. Asia

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SNOW, BARE SKIN

The snowflakes burst into flickering lights as they fell onto her eyelashes — tiny galaxies, she thought, looking up through the phone camera, watching what she didn’t yet know was the beginning of a snowstorm.

There is the highest risk of avalanche, a guest at the spa said as if declaring an unwanted pause, forced into stillness by trillions of conscious, hexagon-shaped structures in their inevitable migration toward the ground.

.

What if everything in this world just simply obeys a mathematical order? she wondered as she traced her firmly pressed fingers along both sides of the guest’s spine, leaving quickly surfacing red lines.

They reminded her of a network of rivers carving their way through red sandstone rocks of Great Canyon she once saw from a plane to Arizona.

UNTOUCHED, SAND

So maybe see you soon? Or maybe see you stargazing in the desert, she said reproachfully, the last words tightened somewhere in her throat.

It wasn’t about him leaving, and leaving forever, but about how people in her life announced their future.

I’m leaving, they’d say with a mischievous smile, dividing unrealised stories in milliseconds, splitting realities like lightening cuts midnight-blue sky in half.

Almost midnight.

.

They kept finding each other in the most unpredictable corners of town. Sometimes by coincidence, sometimes not.

Once he saw her passing next to his building and pretended to struggle to open the front door, patting his pockets for keys a little longer just to turn around and say hi.

Another evening, the moment she glanced toward the window, laughing over an espresso martini with her friend at a bar, she caught glimmer in his light brown eyes already looking at her from across the street.

There were many unfinished moments like these, held for a fraction long enough to sense the edge of something both of them wanted, but once entered it would not leave them untouched.

You should come on Saturday, she heard over the soft crunch of her furry snow boots on fresh snow. A familiar warmth suddenly rose from her feet as she turned back to look at him one more time, and for the first time all winter, she didn’t feel the cold.

TIMELESS

Alpine towns like the one she currently lives in are marked by ski stations and conversations about someone leaving or staying.

The metallic click of ski boots in the café and the flashing notification light pulled her out of writing.

Ice blue whirlwinds on golden brown, oval-shaped geometric figures shimmered on the lock screen.

There Is No Beginning And No End.

She liked that painting.

She liked how people saw a vulva or a seed in it, and nervously lowering their eyes, coral rising to their cheeks, they would whisper that they didn’t really know anything about art. She liked their shyness.

But maybe she liked even more what it made her see deep in them.

Raw purity.

.

She never measured her life by before and after, yet she had a strange ability to appear in different countries, to exist in between — sometimes almost simultaneously.

Timelines overlapped, melting like French butter on warm sourdough, crystals of sea salt dissolving into it like moments in her life slipping into one another.

It was hard to notice when she no longer belonged somewhere, or when she suddenly bought a pink velvet sofa. As if somehow it had all been decided before she was born.

Her fingers hovered above the phone, and tapped on the new email.

MOTHERS OF DAUGHTERS

Feathers woven into braids fluttering in the late summer wind brushed wet cheeks of the eleven year’s old self. A row of tipis shimmered in the horizon at the edge of her sight slowed her heartbeat.

She went lost between dimensions of Atlantis and heavy tears dripped on the red, dusty ground, but not for having found the safety of the fire.

She realised that a part of her will always be moving. A part of her will always be away.

And her mother will always be waiting, as she was then in the vision from another life, sitting there by the campfire.

Some mothers simply observe. We think they are distant, but like golden eagles they hover above, wings spread across time, they watch the currents of our life — the small shifts, the hidden edges, mistakes we cannot name — they see without touching, without speaking, without needing to intervene.

I WANT TO SUBMIT

Maybe you don’t belong anywhere because you are the bridge between worlds?

Fuck that shit.

Trucks ploughing tons of snow outside pulled her back into the heat of her own body.

Sometimes she caught herself not recognising it, as if a piece of her had left and a fraction of someone else’s entered, lured by the promise of home.

A bridge?

I want to be all the way in.

Choiceless, full of care — not just for myself, she whispered, rhythmically moving her palms slick with grape scented lotion —nourishing, anti-aging — letting her hands drift slowly across the soft hollow of her lower belly.

She had’t felt a man’s touch for almost a year.

I want to submit, she fantasised.

I want to be told what to do.

I want to be disciplined —

held in place by the quiet authority of routine.

I want to be reduced to an equation – predictable, dictated by half-term holidays, committed to family dinners at in-laws on Sundays, and afternoons anchored by do you need anything from the shop texts.

I want you to keep turning winters into summers in me, year after year. I want to stay longer than just one day. There’s a horizon wherever we go, in the end.

.

She thought she wanted roots, but her mother didn’t teach her how to keep a hearth burning. She taught her how to be free.

TO THE OCEAN

“ To them, the journey is the destination. Should they find gold at the end of the rainbow, they would leave it there and seek another, choosing freedom over the burden of the pot. I haven’t thought once of Oregon, no dreams of the ocean or snow-covered mountains. I only dream of the journey. That is all. No gold for me. Just the rainbow.” 1

When are you coming back?

For years the question followed her each time she returned to her home country — until some old friends and cousins disappeared into planning their children’s First Communions, while others simply stopped asking.

What does it mean, to come back? How could she come back if she never truly left?

.

There was a family story told in fragments about her great-grandfather Tomasz and his twenty years younger wife Małgorzata, whose restless hunger for life was said to have poisoned her heart — and perhaps everyone around her.

Something happened there, in New York, but to this day no one knows why they returned before the transatlantic Kościuszko had even cooled at the harbour.

Maybe they didn’t know what to do. Maybe they felt homesick between murmurs of languages they could never understand. Maybe they saw sunrises blocked by concrete towers so different from the vast fields of grain and giant bushes of white hollyhocks that grew by the front door of their wooden house by the forest.

But she knew this much: people who crossed oceans in 1930s would never give up.

You don’t leave in order to come back.

AGAIN

The sound of birds and passing luxury cars drifted through the open window of the second floor apartment she lived in. The late morning sun stood higher, right above forests of Swiss pines.

Three weeks to spring, she thought, sitting on the floor with a fuchsia makeup pouch open in her lap, getting ready for work.

The milky texture of Le Rub SPF50 sank slowly into her skin while a quiet, sudden longing gathered beneath her eyes. Sunlight struck the mirror, turned them light green, and the afternoon air filled with the scent of jasmine. 2

*

I will miss you too.

*

The red lines on the guest’s skin will fade by morning, but the touch will remain forever, like the way she was there that Saturday night.

2.17 AM.

Eyes open in the dark.

One hand traces the lace edge of her lilac silk night top, the other reaches for the phone.

I would like to come back.

Sent.

The screen fills with the red sands of the Mojave desert.

Thank You for being here.

Thank you for connecting to my words.

Thank you for being part of my stories.

And thank you for being my poetry.

Asia

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“I hope you find your place and be happy”
but I’m not looking, and —
I am happy

I tossed the phone away  
facing forward  — carrying home 
in one small suitcase

no backup plan  
white poppy dress, unfinished 

poems in Notes  
my blonde hair tangled in  
the soft wind blowing on a train to Lausanne 

I can 
still smell 
the sweet fragrance 
of stormy twilights 
on my fingers

        the way summer made me feel —  
        how yesterday and forever merged in me  

as I watched the sun slowly sink  
from the top of Bürgenstock hill 

it wasn’t just a fling  

a glance in the mirror of the eyeshadow palette  
golden brown dust dropped on my face  

shimmered  
with reflections of the sun’s rays  


The Wheel of Fortune fell out of my deck 

        don’t hold on to yourself  
        don’t hold on to anything  

I breathe freely in my own skin  
wrapped in today and jasmine

feet firmly on the ground —
in high heels



~ Asia Bochenek

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I’ll try to tell you a story—maybe a few stories folded into one—because when I’m on my own for more than five days, I tend to talk fast, like I want to catch up with the world, let it know I’m still here.

I love having all the windows wide open in summer.

This way my internal cosmos merges with the sky, and the sky sees everything. I’m in constant exchange with the Earth—I give her myself, and she gives me all she has: the insects, the oxygen, the gold-streaked light, the owls hooting deep in the forest, and the humming of the river flowing toward the end of the world, reminding me there’s life beyond these mountains.

Drip, drip, drip—my skin transforms the lingering heat into saltwater.

I trail my fingers across my chest to sweep damp strands of hair from my neck, and I love it. I love the sweat. I know, not many of you do, but then memories of my other lives in sandstone canyons of Wadi Rum wrap me like silk.

I can’t sleep. Should I leave the shutters open to invite the faintest breeze so I can breathe, or trust the darkness to soothe me? She usually does. But something pulls me out of bed.

I know what that is. I remember.

I slip my feet into worn red espadrilles, and grab the linen beach towel with fringes tangled like our paths, the cats start to play as I step outside. The air is warm, thick and bittersweet as maple syrup.

It’s Perseids night.

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June 2025 was a fever dream: sugar-coated in love and sand—or maybe just lust—but the kind that feels like a holiday. Exactly right. Adventurous. Fast. Its vivid lines etched forever in sky-blue ink, yet easy to forget.

July stole my time but returned it tenfold. If I’d known that my only task was to let afternoons dissolve into slow naps with a cat’s paw curled into my palm and a half-written to-do list blinking in Notes—I would have done just that. No guilt. No chasing goals that were never meant to be mine.

And August? It mirrored the quietness of my life in its midnight sky. I watched the natural world that never sleeps: days trading light with nights, nights bleeding into dawns, no beginning, no end—just one long wave of timelessness.

The Higher Self once said that New Earth feels like not much is happening, yet everything happens at the same time. That’s exactly how it felt. Presence, not quite—but existence.

The Perseids fell above me, streaking light across the sky like spells—so beautiful. There’s something about meteor shower nights.

The first time I watched them a decade ago, I drove my old Citroën to Port Meadow in the middle of the night—the only place in Oxford where you could really see the cloudless sky. I was with my then-partner, wrapped in sleeping bags, half asleep, half in love. We thought we just watched travelling stars, but we didn’t know we were looking into millions of light years back in time.

Where is the past if I can see it before my eyes, I thought, lying on the warm asphalt at 11:34 p.m. My stargazing spot this year was the tiny upward path between the bin collection point for our village and tiny vineyards. The heat held me close like it wanted to whisper don’t go anywhere. Not yet.

It was just me and the cats. They loved our evening rituals. While I looked up, they looked down, hunting mice and cicadas. What a shame, I thought, that they can’t see the stars, but we all know they saw more than I ever could.

I reached for my phone to open SkyView app, but pause to stroke Kouki’s warm fur curled against my chest. Every opportunity to touch life felt sacred to me these days. Shupi’s tail brushed my leg—a soft signal from Earth as the sky called me higher. Arcturus burned above my house like a guardian. I tilted my head toward Lyra and closed my eyes. Was it the same night when I was afraid to stand on the edge of forever? ( it’s ending, but it’s not the end)

I don’t remember. The midnights of this summer melted into one so fast. Did everything happen that night, or did I simply lose time?

I let my mind wander between constellations until it slipped into other worlds.

There’s that heavy feeling of being stuck between things, wanting to be present but not quite knowing what to feel. Some parts of us are quietly dying, others are being born.

We can cross billions of timelines in a single second, did you know? We can slip into different versions of ourselves without warning. The frequency shift happens first in the soul, then consciousness turns into thought, and the body catches up last. Who am I?

What once sparked inspiration suddenly turns sour. The phone lands on the table with a soft thud, only to be picked up again moments later, fingers searching for something unnamed, as if on a quest that keeps disappearing.

The outside noise, the internal chaos, the unknown—it all presses in, heavy as fog. A hunger builds for something—anything that could fill the empty space within, but it feels like there is no space to fill. Even the smallest task, like washing a cup left in the sink for two days, becomes as difficult as mining a deep cave at the centre of the Earth.

Have I gone mad? Or is it the candy-scented wildflowers that bloom only at night, making me dizzy?

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That night, in the stillness of summer 2025, I felt alive, yet suspended—like standing in a parallel life that belonged to another version of me, and still, entirely mine.

I felt whole. I refused to constantly want, dream, and manifest all that I was not. I surrendered. Not because I’m 40 and traded hope for acceptance—no.

Some may say, why do you give up just before the “deadline,” just before the “too old. The last chance to become a mother. The last chance to find love—try harder, settle down, build a career, own something more than just a laptop and your paintings.

And it was then, during those asphalt summer nights, I chose to live the story of this lifetime.

What the future holds—I don’t know. Maybe miracles. Maybe babies with green eyes. Maybe journeys through ancient temples, and books written under foreign skies. Love that feels like destiny. A life of service to humanity. More dinners for one. A home filled with laughter and cats, or no home at all. Maybe all of this—or something I can’t even name.

My story belongs to me, but I belong to my soul.

You know, sometimes I dread meeting people from the past.

Their question—“How have you been?”—makes me want to tell them everything: about the past-life memories stirred by the hay-scented air at the end of summer; the wild mushroom-picking mornings in the nearby forests; the line from a Western that made me cry and write until dawn.

The Tuesdays when my best friend shows up unexpected with glasses of Prosecco and we trace life’s next turns through a web of perfect synchronicities. God, the vast abundance of beauty, even with an overdrawn bank account.

But then I stop. There’s nothing we’d call news in our society these days if there is no wedding, no grand jobs, exciting career, visible money or, at least, Instagram fame. What about simple existence? Since when did pure living stop being enough? Why don’t we call this a life anymore? Can we root ourselves in what is already here—what is destined for us, and let that be complete?

00:24 a.m.—my phone, tangled in the folds of my long floral summer dress, suddenly unlocked the app as if it wanted to reveal a secret portal. I looked down and couldn’t believe it: a field of stars stretched beneath my feet. Pleiades hovered low, Sirius shone from the other side of the Earth—every direction flooded with light, a map written in the sky.

We were at the centre of the universe, the cats and I, on the warm asphalt in my French village, surrounded by galaxies. I stared into that ancient glow, wondering if everything I see is behind us, where do I look to trace the future?

And then I knew: the future was in me, quietly pulsing through my veins, lighting up my cells, my heart, my mind like a secret constellation—the only map I’d ever need.

~~ Asia

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Shupi loves them, I thought, passing through the two lines of vineyards embraced by bushes of wild pink roses. every time she returned from a lazy, afternoon nap in their house, her fur carried the scent of early autumn—spicy, warm, almost bittersweet. some people say cats have the power to heal our deepest wounds, even walk between the worlds because they believe before they see, and I feel that’s true.

the world was soft that night. chemtrails stretched across the midnight-blue sky like pale Milky Ways scattered between other universes. the world was quiet. here, you never know from which mountain the moon will rise, and that evening it slipped between two peaks like a secret. I’m not an omen girl but that night it felt like something wanted to be found.

“almost full moon,” she said, sending her daughter off to prepare for the first days of school. “still a week or so, I think,” I replied, as the moon veiled itself in mist. the forests were green. we sat still. I turned my phone face down on the grass keep looking above.

after a few moments I found myself breathing in her rhythm— long, deep but finite. in and out, stretching to see how much life the body can hold inside. inhale brought wonder, exhale carried the heaviness of how.

in and out.

until it became through. until it merged with the heart, and heart merged with the truth. you could see hundreds of future lives tangled in air, yet only a few breaths were enough to know: this one. the one we are living now is the most important one of all.

“auch…le moustique!” she chuckled, slapping her arm. “it’s still summer, ha ha, enjoy!” we laughed so hard. the calm wind smelled faintly of hay and time. I watched how another evening eased into night; she knew she could die.

The conversation between us has no beginning and no end.

Still carrying the dry sweetness of late summer grass and gravity of that night, I felt the pull to linger in my stargazing spot. Shupi’s tail brushed against my leg, a soft signal from Earth as the stars called me higher. Arcturus burned above my apartment like a watchtower—always there. I remember they once said the conversation between us has no beginning and no end. I tilted my head back toward Lyra and shut my eyes. With the power of thought I merged every cell of my body with the cosmos, reaching for the scattered fragments of my Soul stored in distant nebulas, asked intelligence encrypted in light. But the answer didn’t come.

I don’t think they know.

I don’t think they understand how to be on Earth.

The roots, the womb, the muscles, the pain.

A head full of unanswered questions, chasing love everywhere, finding no acceptance.

The constant search for home.

The loss.

Fear.

The summer rain, the scent of violets, frozen fingers in winter, the fire.

Salted caramel.

They don’t know how to participate. How to exchange energy through breath. How to feel blood pulsing in the veins. How to wait and wonder. How to feel. How to end.

But you who’s reading these words—you do.

You hold the code in your marrow.

You are.

You are both question and answer.

You are the experience.

Present, and timeless.

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The edge of forever.

The moonlight followed me home. I closed the shutters and drifted into sleep with Shupi curled beside me like a little protector. Sometimes in the night my hand reaches for her just to check if she’s breathing. Maybe it’s instinct, or maybe it’s my fear of standing close to the edge of forever. I’m here, exhale brought me back to sleep, and everything continued.

It’s still summer.

Maybe it’s ending, but it’s not the end—just another breath in eternity.

Asia

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The best version of me.

Exactly how I liked it.

The lover. The healer. The muse. The grief I wanted to lift off his chest and transmute—because I knew how. I had done that for centuries, in different realities, under different moons, in different bodies.

We laughed so hard when I tripped on the beach, tangled in his oversized trousers. The sun rose pink above the Mediterranean sea when he wrapped his jacket around my shaking shoulders—the salt still clinging to my wet hair—and said: “I want to give you the best of me.”

No. Please. I want the truth. I want all of you. Show me the real you.

So he did.

And I swallowed it like a good girl. The bitter to my sweet. The medicine for my naïveté.

I knew things.

I knew the reality. A message from my Higher Self arrived in a dream but I ignored it, the same way I ignored what I saw in the depths of his eyes—hazelnut, then dark brown, shifting like storm clouds depending on the light.

I was older, I was wise, I was a woman but with a little girl’s heart. And he knew that. He saw stories of “too much” and “not enough” scattered across my body like a constellation—a map to myself, visible only to those who can see in the dark.

Oh, and he could.
They all could.

He never asked for my truth. They never really ask much of me. Maybe it was ignorance. Or maybe it was a green light to just be—without wanting, without performing, without trying to fit.

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I remember New Year’s Eve 2018. The Negev desert.

A violin from the next room merged with the soft wind, while inside my head the noise rose like a sandstorm. He was cooking dinner, the sky pink with tiny orange clouds, the smell of za’atar drifting from the kitchen, and I wanted so badly to feel like a wife.

But I was only a lover, afraid to admit to the daydream I carried on the plane to Jerusalem, a city more sacred than any of my desires. Afraid to say what I wanted, afraid to see how they saw me. Why not me? I know it was winter, but I always had this tendency to look for the smallest signs of spring.

I’ve always seen something familiar in their eyes. A golden cord connecting me to something in the stars—a home, a family, past life? It always started with a familiar blinding light I wanted to hold onto for as long as I could. So I lived with hope that maybe...I thought, maybe I had more time to prove my worth. Maybe if I left the door open, the scent of me would guide them back to me and they realise what they’ve lost.

all I wanted was a future / but you didn’t even give me yesterday

Years later, something T. said while we sat in a bar in an Alpine town at midnight. Snow falling, drunk on wine, when his sad “I have so much love to give” struck my heart like a confession left out in the cold, his eyes glazed, already elsewhere—already gone.

I thought the same—I gave and gave in silence, and wondered why so little returned. But the truth is I wasn’t giving love, not like I believed. Because love isn’t anyone’s to give. Love doesn’t need to belong.

(…)

what do you want, tell me
I couldn’t say
drifted away in tipsy silence
shielding behind the coolness of a London girl

all I wanted was a future
but you didn’t even give me yesterday

wordlessly
we tried so hard
to play with light

but the darkness stripped us
naked
incomplete
naive

empty-handed,
but with so much to give

(…)

Two years ago, a day before my flight to Italy for my 39th birthday, I held a plane ticket in one hand and a phone with thirteen missed calls in the other. Silence, louder than anything my body wanted to hear.

He held a mirror up to my face, both hands gripping the frame. Can’t you see?Why did you choose to trust me more than you trust yourself?

I had to disappear so you could see how you turn your back on your life. How you reach for my hand, my gaze—the home in me—while you’ve been living in a shed woven from insecurities.

I’m sorry. I had to do what hurts.

I had to leave you hanging, so you would understand. So you could turn these unspoken words between us into poetry. So you could see yourself as art, not as another shiny object in my life.

I had to not care, never choose you, run away—until your tears washed away the sugar-coated fantasy of who you thought you had to be for me. I had to stand you up so you could see the games you played with yourself.

For years.

I sang with Lana—“let me love you like a woman, let me hold you like a baby”.

Let me tend your wounds like no one tended mine.
Let me fuck you like a cute Sabrina-pop-star.
Let me understand you more your mother ever would.
Let me see the real you your ex didn’t want to.
Let me hold your pain. Let me prove I’m strong like a modern girl-boss. I can handle the silence, the 3 a.m. panic attacks in solitude - I can handle you.
I’ll show you how a relationship supposed to feel.

All inclusive.

I’ll give you a free trial. An invitation to subscribe.

The full package.

Why I accepted everything in them but couldn’t accepted it all in myself?

Why did I see the world in somebody else but couldn’t see that I was the Universe?

So he texted less, I channeled more - modern romance I wrote in a poem 2020’s heartbreak, and I think I know why.

Each rejection sent me deeper into the truth of me.

With every breadcrumb you scattered on my path I discovered layers and layers of gold in me. Each time you left me on read, I heard the clear sounds of my own thoughts. The farther you drifted, the closer I came to my soul. My body turned into a portal—my fingertips moving across my skin, slowly as my breath rose and fell like ocean waves—tenderly, made me see my parallel lives where you weren’t near.

Every rejection stripped away what I thought I had to be in order to be loved.

You treated me like holiday, you wanted to have fun like there is no tomorrow—and it was then in the hot tub under the stars when I touched infinity of time.

To those who always knew they’d leave. To those who wanted so hard to break my heart before they had a chance to love me—fuck you, and thank you.

(…)

but I’m going to continue

loving —

you

the world

and everything in it

why? you ask me

look at me

can you see the emerald green around my heart?

it reminds me that

soft things cannot be broken

and I am safer when I am softer —

in this world made of steel, I just bounce back

Love.

Yours, Asia

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to show you that time cannot be lost

a Renaissance woman

who can draw distant star constellations

and read the history of you

with her eyes closed

alive in between everything

on Sundays

in the midnight taxi rides

in the moments when something ends

when you know, when you forget

she fills the room

a hot bath with five drops of bergamot

steam covers the mirrors

her wet fingertips smudge the pages

of Convoluted Universe

she sets the book on the floor

sinks

deeper

her fingers trace down her thighs

to the womb—marking the map

of this lifetime

worshiping no one

but the divine in herself

she’s not gone, not even close

she’s right here

if you truly saw who she was

you’d never be the same again

the moment you touch her

you belong

the way she belongs to life

but don’t be afraid–

she only brings change

and all that you ever wanted

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There is something new we’ve been building for a while and I want to invite you to be a part of.

A DREAM WOMEN - VENUS HOUSE.

A modern arthouse where self-expression meets higher consciousness.

A community of women like you - artists, healers, change makers – la vie est belle lovers.

Dream Women - VENUS HOUSE

is a collective studio - a monthly online membership.

We meet on Zoom + Telegram to make art, activate high-frequency energy, have deep conversations, and remember who, and what, we truly are.

Rooted in self-worth.

Guided by the Higher Self.

You are invited.

You can be in your quiet mystic winter, or a creative summer storm.

You can be all of it.

Come as you are today.

No rush, just blooming.

We are open for you to join us.

Asia + The Dream Women from the VENUS HOUSE

Join Dream Women–VENUS HOUSE Collective

the way river meets my body

run my fingers over the pieces of me

and apologise for calling them my own

sink deeper into the caves of stone

thank every lover – everyone

for their role in unraveling–

carving me like Michelangelo

free from matter

with nothing

but an ethereal mist around my soft spine

can I be in the first breath of air

the scent of the first violets

between the words

in light years

in awe

that everything that was meant

to stay

stayed even closer

THREE HOMES.

I’m currently moving between my homes across three countries. The one I made for myself just for the summer that somehow held me for four years. The one by the North Sea, where my family is–still whole, still together, not yet scattered across galaxies.

And the one I’m flying to now, just me and my dad with homemade sandwiches in the bag and quiet resistance. We’re going back to clean up my childhood home, our abandoned family house–decades of our life.

Will I still find blue wildflower petals pressed between book pages like old memories? The peach tree outside my window should be blooming right now. Will I hear a loud slam of the front door and the way the afternoon light shines through the fluttering white lace curtains?

LETTING GOOD MEMORIES GO.

I always say: to really travel light through life, we have to let go of the good memories too. The only "I love yous" we ever heard, the laughter still echoing in childhood bedrooms, the warmth locked between dusty photos. All memories can hold us back and prevent us from trusting that we are more than we think.

Every moment lives forever in the etheric field. Every time we revisit a memory it transforms into something else, creating another reality with pulsating strings of light and possibilities. Maybe some things didn’t even happen the way we think? But we can change how we look at everything- we can play with time, we can change perspectives and listen to the other side.

We can forget.

FUCK IT. I WANT TO GET EMOTIONAL.

But honestly, right now? Fuck it. I don’t want to be wise. I don’t want to be spiritual. I want to be a child again just one more time. I want to open the attic and go through my notebooks and handwritten letters from people I no longer know. I want to read very, very bad poetry and see what moved me in my younger years.

I want to get emotional when I see what’s not there. I want to laugh when I hear my teenage voice on the old school cassette tapes. I want to feel sad when I realise that I don’t remember. I want to shout to my dad from the other room ‘wow, look at this!', and send photos to my brother and sister in law on the WhatsApp chat. I want to get sentimental. I want to cry. I want to be honest with my aunt and say that what they did twenty years ago wasn’t fair and it broke our hearts.

NOTHING IS EVER TRULY LOST.

And after that, I’ll sit in our old family garden with my dad, open bottles of cold Perła and look at the past one more time. Or the future. Or perhaps both, at the same time. Because as you may already know - everything happens in the now. And nothing is ever truly lost.

Asia

P.S. when I met my inner girl for the first time…

my inner girl ~ time travelling home

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highway du Soleil

July heatwave, and I

forever love affair

le temps est bon, le ciel est bleu

I sing out loud

amused

by the shades of cool violet

my tenderness

fire and honey

sweet–sticky hands on

the wheel

negotiating terms

and conditions of this delightful

naivety

god, was that even me?

a year later on my run

gasping for air

vision blurred by tears

the evening star appears

I stop

breathing in

lost and found parts of me

don’t you see I took it all away so you

can touch life with your bare skin?

like on that road trip with nothing

but trust and lavender in your hair

remember why you came here

–you can’t do it wrong

I’ll make you wild again

I will bring you back

just ask

I wrote this poem some time after my solo road trip to the French lavender fields. I drove 500km in an old borrowed car with no air-con, and a portable speaker on the passenger seat. to meet a man. you see, women like me can cross the world just like that when when they know there is something beyond what they think they want.

just like that, as I like to say, is an equivalent to being guided. because when something is fated no matter how painful, or emotional, or miraculous it never seems like you had to do much for it to happen.

it only seems like hard work when we want something specific and want it now, weave hundred restrictions in between claims in our mind. and from infinite possibilities our soul is left with one, or this or that, not necessary what’s best for us.

back then, I was unaware that my soul contains multiple me.

or rather, that one of the splintered fractions of the whole is experiencing life from my perspective.

it feels like soul is more like a collective.

and even more I dare to say-your soul and my soul are one. but who truly knows how it works. I was never a theory girl and what I think now may completely change next year.

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what matters is the constant conversation with our Higher Self. the eternal dialogue that never begins and never ends. the countless rendezvous under the moonlight. the daily voice notes in between doing dishes and orgasms, forever saved in the magnetic fields.

soul-the Higher Self talks to us through our thoughts.

in words and language we understand.

mostly in peace.

but it also sends us notifications in forms of unexpected bills. lovers who turn away just before we get a chance to prove that we’re worthy of them. your worst enemy now-best friend in past life. synchronicities and magic. accidents. the lucky events. the annoying Instagram influencer who steals that hour which supposed to be yours.

the soul speaks through the pressure in the body, the illness and pain—we will, surely, listen then.

our wants, our vibration, our internal state.

the Higher Self is not really higher. it’s merged. connected with the other fractions and the Source of the whole Universe by silver threads. we are like fireflies, flickering with information in every direction. always guiding. always reminding each other that we are the Light on Earth itself.

it’s a relationship.

a connection that wants to be maintained.

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have you ever thought that maybe you are the one guiding the other parts of you that exist simultaneously? have you ever thought that maybe they are calling you from the past, or the future, or other dimensions to chat, to find out how you’re getting on, to ask for healing, for information, to connect?

maybe your own soul is the community you’ve been looking for?

time doesn’t exist for that conscious part of us having a blast in the stars. so we can go ahead and long for the lover who doesn’t love us back for another three years. we can choose to hide in the corners of our own life for as long as we please. no problem. we can stay small for another 20 years. you can realise that you want something else and completely change your life in your 70s. even so, it’s your choice.

there is never pressure to perform. our Higher Self don’t really care if you’re doing Pilates every day, writing a bestselling book or a book that won’t sell at all. you can work in a coffee shop, or in finance on Wall Street, change jobs every two months, or just write poetry - as long as you’re doing what you came there to do. which in most cases is not very much.

we think that life purpose is something we need to achieve, and that’s a trap number one. only a few of us have an actual assignment to start wars, set up communities, be famous, be hated, shake up the world, be followed by masses, refine the theory of everything, build AI machines. the rest have a mission to be.

but wait, what? I want to have it all, and I want it now. I want to be unique. I want my life to look like curated Instagram feed. manifest everything. but, do you?

do you want to breastfeed your first baby and make out with your summer romance on a hot asphalt road under the stars?

put roots down and watch the same view from the balcony of your home but still be on the road?

sometimes it takes a whole year to say goodbye. and there is no space for anything else.

a whole season can be about solitary nights, not marriage. you can be in your lover era. become celibate. have a baby. feel secure with money in the bank. feel rich and full of freedom that only nothingness can give.

there is time to quit and there is time to wait.

there is time for different experiences.

to drink wine in the lavender haze with best friends, disappear to create or go back home to hold your grandmother’s hand for a few weeks before she passes away.

don’t get me wrong, I still believe that anything is possible and we can create anything we want. even live many lives in one. we are probably doing all these things in parallel realms, anyway, but for now, the real question is: do we really need it all at the same time?

can our own presence be enough, for once? this is what Higher Self teaches us. that we are whole with and without. and that having truly is irrelevant.

so talk to this part of yourself that has a full view—of you, of the infinite, of every single possibility. bask your body in the sun. relax your mind from all this unnecessary stress and thoughts that you are too late.

you can’t do your life wrong.

your Higher Self cannot disappear. it’s not your father, not a lover, or a fleeting dream. it’s you. it’s always been you.

your soul won’t tell you what to do unless you ask. even if you’re about to fuck up or fall in love with another unavailable man. your soul will only interfere if you are lightyears away from living your purpose. but even then—all detours are allowed.

we have free will. it’s true. but some things we previously agreed to. some things must happen, like death. sometimes it’s not even about us but it’s somebody else’s choice that affects us. some things drag like January blues but often we can pivot overnight, we can change the course of our timeline completely.

just like that.

all is fair when it comes to your life.

remember who you are.

that you are your Higher Self.

ask. play. choose. decide.

Asia

Thank you SO much for reading BETWEEN HER AND TIME.

You have no idea how much you mean to me. Let me know that you’re here.

I’d love to connect!

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MEET YOUR HIGHER SELF

even if… she says / as she sets off on one of her many journeys / following the invisible / like butterflies fly from flower to flower–she moves between constellations / always feeling / with eyes closed / this way she is never lost

MUSE: jasmine-scented evenings in the Swiss Alps

I never envisioned myself as a writer. It was never my dream, never my ambition. I never imagined reading my own words one day. It all came to me, late. And poetry? I didn’t look for it—until She found me.

In between short 5 a.m. walks to work and summer evening thunderstorms. She lingered between solitary housekeeping shifts and my fingertips refreshing my phone hundred fifty times a day.

It was the time of my Blue Banisters era when Venus veiled the future in thick mist, but at the same time, parallel realities cracked open wide. In between Dolores Cannon’s teachings on how to communicate with multidimensional beings and sipping rosé in Lausanne, my perception of life, and my own self, twisted like pretzels.

I danced with purposelessness of every day tasks and watched comets shooting across the sky above the Alps—all at once.

That season, in between gym and afternoon naps, I also discovered that I could send telepathic waves—calling in an old lover I never expected to see again, only for him to arrive and strip me of fantasies under a Pisces blue moon.

He gave me the bare minimum a man could give to a woman but more than enough to spark a memory in my heart that some things are not meant to have beginnings and endings.

Poetry was born in boredom and time in between– when everything was still possible, when uncertainty felt strangely safe.

I worked in a seasonal job in 5* Resort but there wasn’t much to do so I slowly pushed the trolley, with cleaning products and my notebooks tucked in between bin bags, like a lost soul, along the labyrinths of grey corridors, until I felt Her.

I felt Her in the memory of yesterday, of what was truly alive in me – in the simplicity of jasmine-scented evenings.

The words came to me, like a vow not to lose my wonder, not to give up. A promise that the extensions of me I looked for lights years away from here were in the mundane of my own everyday.

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In between my chipped nails, missed calls and ‘what am I doing with my life’ thoughts while watching sunsets above lake Lucerne. It was then when I was able to see the raw poetry of who I was and who I was not.

I could hear my own frequency in the flutter of a moth's wings as it tried so hard to fly through the thick Alpine air, filled with saudade and suspension that only the 4 p.m. in the summer can bring.

When you don’t know what to write start from feeling your heartbeat, and when you feel that it’s safe there, expand your awareness but just a meter. And observe what your soul wants to say through the magnetic waves in between your world and your fingers –– a writing advice to myself.

I quit the job after three months, returned home, and sat by the open window in the September sun–still hot this time of year in the South of France, and tried to write memoir.

But sentences refused to take form. Everything spilled out as a section of few words instead, and all I could write about was the last six months. I didn’t realise how deep and raw it all was. Three days and three nights, She didn’t leave my side.

I closed eternity of that time in fifty poem drafts just like that.

I love this story because I only went to the Swiss Alps for some extra cash, nothing else but what I received was poetry, a new way of communicating with the world, and clarity that my heart cannot be broken by anything or anyone.

The draft is still in edit, but I’m getting there. I’m someone who knows that sometimes things take longer. And what is long in eternity of things, anyway?

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Now, I want to take you back for a plot twist to the version of me that doesn’t exist anymore. The 28 years old ‘change the world with rage and a Vogue cigarette’ self who one day welcomed an unexpected guest.

MUSE: She Can Paint Millions of Light Years with a Single Brush Stroke

I never intended to paint. I never learned how to create. I made two drawing at secondary school and that was it. Being a Culture Studies graduate I spent years on exploring other people’s creative minds rather than expressing my own soul to the extend, that even when my then-boyfriend painted a portrait of me in pearls, it never-ever occurred to me that maybe, it could be me, one day.

Until She came with a gust of wind.

She wasn’t born from quiet boredom and slow time in between. This Muse kicked down the door to my reality like a best friend who doesn’t knock. The kind who heads straight for the fridge, pulls out some leftovers to eat, slouches on the sofa, shoes on the table, and starts talking about a plan for a new adventure that, obviously, you are already part of.

I didn’t want more money but I wanted to care so I had just quit my 9-5 sales job and spent my days reading books in the local park, volunteered at the local survivors of sexual violence centre, and captured sunsets over Oxford through my camera lens. My life was suffused with blissful space and etherial Nuit De Cellophane scent.

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But I was also sassy and full of rage—not just for myself, but for all the women abused by the hands of their men, the politics, social issues, the conflicts and wars around the world. I wanted to do something useful, work for NGOs, change the world, go on a mission–and I did, but everything I wanted back then had nothing to do with creativity.

On that day I was doing my nails, bright red to match my lipstick, when a sudden blast of wind knocked over my boyfriend’s art supplies. The one’s with whom I shared soul but not forever, and who, years earlier when we smoked in a pouring rain, had told me that what I felt my whole life was longing.

So when She came I snapped, irritated, with my drying red nails I went to the room to clean up the mess, and pick up the brushes delicately, one by one, pinky raised like a lady picking up porcelain. Then I paused, looked at the brush, touched it and I felt the pull. A blast.

Intuition.

Timelines shifted.

I just knew. I just saw. An adventure I wasn’t invited to because I was part of it all along without even knowing that I was.

When my boyfriend came home, I greeted him with a dinner abandoned half-way, smiling proudly like an artists who just had a day with her muse, and a canvas filled with meadows from my childhood home.

He smiled, he liked that very much. He liked that I saw what he’d always seen in me but never said. The time had come for her.

That night I had a dream that a single brushstroke contains millions of light years, and that one day I will paint the history of my soul.

But for that I needed to go to France. For some things to happen we need the stars to align. For Many Journeys to incarnate I had to heal many scars, travel just to come back, to finally feel that…

MUSE: “I’m only going for two weeks, but can stay a year’ kind of girl

You are the only one who fulfilled her dream, it stuck with me what my old friends once said. A dream? Yes, to travel, to live in different places. Oh…I didn’t remember. Wasn’t it a strange dream to have for someone who only went on holiday twice and took her first flight at almost 21?

But even then I, somehow, always knew that there is nowhere to rush. The movement Muse was embodied in my soul for centuries, like a blueprint, a natural part of me. But, how did I end up living in France?

I sat in London Fields in my local park on my yoga mat, inhaling–dreaming of Guatemala or Costa Rica—somewhere exotic, far away. On the exhales–all I wanted was to get out of the city after the first lockdown and live in the forest, doesn’t matter where but alone, and in silence.

I always follow the voice within and the next week, I was on the Eurostar to Paris. Suitcase full of paints and €800 in my pocket—€600 already spent on rent. A friend’s apartment was empty for a month and I couldn’t say no to that, since tropical forests I envisioned stayed in the dreamland.

But I loved this timeline.

When my glamorous Asia in Paris season of croissants, wine, painting while making love and loving while painting, came to an end another friend called: come visit me in the countryside. You remember the place-the mountains covered in chestnut forests, the light, the champagne, the synchronicities?

Two weeks turned into seven months.

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And then I went back to London just to pack my life up once more. A very long story short: I spent an entire year by the river every day to cleanse my old life, strip labels of all the girls that I was, mourn lost friends I never saw again, and made friends with deer that live in the forest.

I locked myself away to meditate, and paint, and dance through solitary nights, talking to the Divine over glasses of wine.

Every time someone asks me why I stayed, confused more than myself why I live in the tiny village without speaking French, no men to date, no opportunities – I smile and say – a soulmate. And my Higher Self.

In that season of my life I was in my total feminine flow, I learned how to surrender, and I learned how to stay.

It was the first time I was about to live truly alone. I didn’t even know how to have a home. What kind of rugs did I like? Cutlery? A mattress on the floor it’s enough. When I hesitated to repaint the awful violet-pink walls because ‘what’s the point, I’ll probably move somewhere else’, my best friend-the soulmate, looked at me with that out of the question stare.

Make it home, she said. Even if it’s just for the summer–make it yours.

And months turned into years.

And yes, a few times the road pulled me back, of course. The Swiss Alps, England again, Bavarian forests and other places I went just for some time, and stayed longer because it was never a plan.

But every time I came back here, I saw more and more deer on my path.

Even though I felt misplaced, like a seashell in the forest the ground was so soft and made me fall asleep every night.

And for the first time, I felt that maybe this is how home feels like?

For today.

And safety of home, and today, was exactly what I needed to be able to create.

I do wonder, sometimes, like yesterday with my best friend over a delicious croissant and terrible coffee in boulangerie—why do some things happen just like that and others seem to be…delayed?

Looking back I realise that I was rarely put in a position where I had to choose.

Life rarely gave me the ultimatum: this or that. There was rarely a plan, a goal, a childhood dream.

I never sought anything I now have. Not poetry. Not painting. Not spiritual path. Not moving to England, or Switzerland, the French countryside. Not riding motorbikes. Not being single. Not to reinvent myself, die and be born hundred times. Not millions of other things that happened in my life seemingly effortlessly.

What I did, I always followed my intuition even if I didn’t like what it said.

With doubts and a sigh I followed anyway.

Energy speaks in frequency, not necessarily in words.

The Higher Self speaks through knowing, through magnetic pull to the unknown. I not only listen but I let it carry me all the way through today, and tomorrow.

Timelines change with the speed of light.

Time is speeding up – have you’ve noticed?

Have you noticed that what we perceived as forever is no longer relevant?

What we wanted for ourselves no longer makes sense?

And even though we say that we’re scared, we really are ready for change.

But it makes me wonder, why some things happen just like that and other things we put on our vision board year after year, like my wish to be a mother and a wife, why some things still remain unanswered?

Maybe the secret is to stop wanting and chasing, and know that what is meant for us will never pass us by?

Or maybe we should be more playful with destiny – go dance, love all the way, eat tangerines and let the juice drip on our naked body, create magic with our fingertips, and trust in divine timing of everything?

What do you think?

Asia

I also wanted to say, for those dream women and men in moments of transition. Those of you feeling the pull to create, to change, to complete the manuscript— trust me—your Higher Self knows what's next.

If you’d like to access it I invite you to the THE MORNING STAR HOUR my signature 1:1 session designed for artists, healers, and visionaries seeking clear direction from the Higher Self. To move from self doubt and double guessing yourself to ‘this is my way’ and ‘I know exactly what to do’.

I will help you access your infinite wisdom and show you how to trust yourself (always). See more information here or even better, message me to chat. Et voilà.

I remember my dad talking about different dimensions, but we all laughed and didn’t think much of it.

Once, I saw a book about yoga and a small black spot drawn on the wall in our hallway that supposed to adjust states of awareness. I overheard a few things about new age stuff and how Catholic dogma restricted our minds. That was pretty much it of my spiritual education as a child.

But I loved going to church. I was obsessed, as kids now would say. I loved the sacredness. The rites, the ecstasy, the holy sense of belonging. Intoxicated by the scent of frankincense and myrrh, I let the hand of god reach me through the sad worship songs I loved the most. I felt them to the core but the enchantment tenderly dissolved when, around the age of ten, it dawned on me that I had inherited a great sin, and that there is one truth and one truth only, or hell.

When the illusions faded and a quiet revolution began in my mind, I was left with an unexplainable feeling that there must be something else but didn’t know what and whether it even existed.

Drawn to mystical depths everywhere I went, trying to figure out what this existence was all about. I felt embarrassed in front of a class as I was the only one to answer to find purpose when our university philosophy tutor asked: what’s the most important thing to you in life?

He seemed to like what I said but with a mischievous smile replied that it might not be possible to find one. And moved on to the next person who said family, like everyone, leaving me with a red flush creeping across my cheeks, and certainty.

I was already on my own quest for the Holy Grail and it wasn’t about the purpose—until one day I finally understood. Until every cell in my body made sense.

Oxford, UK.

Fifteen years later.

Seamlessly integrated.

Ankle-length heeled Chelsea boots pressing on the pedals of my retro bike to the melodic fado in my ears. A draped skirt fluttering in the wind. A tight black turtleneck jacket—perfectly fitted, like I thought I was fit for gloomy English weather.

Blending into the fog of the city at dawn like in The Mists Of Avalon, ready to fulfil my destiny. I pushed loose strands of my black hair from my face while gripping the handlebars with cold hands covered in long crochet mittens. Red lips, a notebook of ancient secrets hidden in my bag alongside thin Vogue cigarettes - so chic, heading to a job I hated.

A normality in that season of my life. An expected state of affairs for many, actually.

Your average twenty-something girl with a boyfriend and a proper job. Possessions once crammed into a small suitcase, now unpacked into a real house, a bit mouldy but that’s normal–a life figured out.

You should be happy.

But she sat on the sofa, staring unfocused through the window at her boyfriend’s motorbikes parked outside she’d later ride. Unhurried. Saudade. A tightness in her stomach and aching in her heart, she reached for her phone.

She craved something. Not just something sweet but the sweetest. The essence. The nectar.

I feel like I’m not here.

I messaged a friend who understood things beyond human perception and thought maybe she knew what to do.

I feel like I’m missing something.

Or something is missing in me.

"There’s something you could try," she said.

Smiling wistfully, I got ready for the appointment I had booked for the same day, fast like I was going on a blind date. Little did I know that I was preparing for an initiation. For the information I was ready to know.

But years before that moment, I stood in the pouring rain, smoking with my boyfriend outside his temporary home, talking about what we really wanted from life and what’s truly in our hearts. He said he felt a longing. As English wasn’t my mother tongue I didn’t know what the word meant but I liked how it sounded. I liked the way it moved through the air with smoke and hope.

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He explained it was a deep desire for something missing, or even unattainable. And I knew right then that he can read my mind and he was my soulmate—and I also knew that not forever.

He was my biggest cheerleader when I was afraid to even say the word soul in a pub in front of our friends. He was the one who took me on the back of his motorbike to that first appointment, where I finally saw what I meant to see, and many more after that.

My ride-or-die until I became the woman who asked for what she deserved. I accepted that he gave everything I wanted to somebody else. Leaving me with what I learned—and never unlearned—how to never lie to myself. Maybe he mixed up his dreams and illusions in a way I didn’t see.

Or maybe it was simply his destiny.

Like on that day, thirteen years ago, my destiny was to find out what I was.

To know that I wasn’t just a girl running through a thick fog, but a woman who could see the truth with her eyes closed.

Lying on a treatment bed, I saw swirling nebulae—pink, green, violet.

Cosmic currents ran through my body, shaking me into a frequency higher and higher until, suddenly, I felt waves of unconditional love I had never felt before.

That was me.

My consciousness. My home.

A shimmering silver thread connecting me to my soul–restored.

I didn’t even know it was possible to not expect anything—just presence. The only time I felt this way was when I told my dad I loved him for the first time in my life - with words, not assumptions, which opened horizons everywhere I looked and aligned me with the frequency of nothing to prove.

For years, I searched for it—in nostalgic sailors’ songs, in the sound of my flamenco shoes tapping in the rhythm of bulerías, in stories of lost civilisations–in the beyond, the across, the not here.

Oh, didn't I also look for it in the men I fell in love with at first sight, because I saw the same melancholy in their unavailable eyes?

I dreamed of quests, I read sacred texts, I followed roads to nowhere.

But no–it wasn’t there.

My saudade contained the past and the future at the same time.

It balanced between nostalgia and pleasure.

Almost, but not quite.

Not desiring the desired.

But desire for what can never be lost.

A feeling I could live with forever.

I searched many past lives just to see that the Light I longed for was right here.

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Now I know that nothing was ever missing in me but hidden by my Higher Self. The piece I longed for was the relatedness to my soul—and it came when I was finally ready to hold the truth about who I was in this Universe.

And I know it’s just a fraction. But that chic girl cycling to work–with secret knowledge untold and throat chakra blocked –she knew things before they even existed.

Saudade state of mind.

Her voice is coming back. She is remembering. She is seeing what she once saw in the stars on that summer night, sitting on the stairs of her grandparents’ house, surrounded by wild, blooming burgundy-red roses on each side.

My home exists in star constellations and ancient civilisations, and this lifetime on Earth. I exist in many forms in parallel worlds–

so there is nothing to long for, anymore.

I contain it all.

We contain in all.

Everything that needs to be revealed will come—when the time is right.

There is nowhere to rush.

There is no need to search, for anything.

We can only happen in the now.

And the now is infinite so maybe you too are happening in pink-green-violet nebulae, in particles of wind, and in your body here on Earth, at the same time?

With saudade in our hearts.

Asia

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Explore My Universe

COMPARISON.

As people, artists, creators and spiritual beings - we all feel it.

We’ll explore:

• Why a little bit of jealousy is actually a great sign

• Shifting focus from the Self to Source, collective consciousness and New Earth

• How to stay true to yourself in the world where everyone is an artist, healer, writer, visionary

• Why we should stop trying so hard to be unique (a wink)

• You might never know the way you’re already inspiring others

• And the question no. 1 that heals everything is: do you love it?

BTW, I just compared you to the star.

P.S. I would love to know who inspires you.

Share profiles of the poets, writers, thinkers, artist, healers, makers, visionaries, guides for the new ways - including yours.

Asia

The one question that shifts everything: do YOU love it yourself?

The Morning Star Creative Hour

The VENUS HOUSE Collective

La Dolce Vita And A Heavy Heart

At age three, I was already famous for running away—wandering alone through our small town with a snotty nose and wonder in my eyes. Why can’t I just explore like I did in the stars? I’d think when another stranger brought me back home to my mum.

At five, I felt a heaviness in my heart. Nothing sad, just my tiny body already sensing the weight of my soul’s path. But the lightness of wildflowers in my hand made it fine.

So I soon continued my little la dolce vita childhood, daydreaming on long summer days, eating strawberries with sugar and cream while turning another page of Dzieci z Bullerbyn.

My childhood home, abandoned for 20 years, is suddenly up for sale.

It’s a long story why my family left, and never went back, one by one. But my inner girl’s life is still there, waiting for me to return to her notebooks—for only the third time in all these years.

It makes sense. My numerology year is six, and 2025 is the year to close things, close chapters, leave past in the past.

Travelling Light

I always knew I’d leave.

Not because I dreamed of faraway places. I just knew. There was no question about that, no debate. It was so deeply embedded in me that I forgot it was unusual—until my high school friends, reunited later on Zoom, said I was the only one who truly fulfilled her dreams. When my university tutor asked which master’s program I had chosen after passing my final exams, I replied, “My first-ever flight leaves tomorrow at 8 a.m. I’ll think about it when I’m back.

I never did.

And I had a suspicion already that I might not belong anywhere. A great quality to have if you’re a time traveller. We tend to settle only in our souls.

And if you knew how many suitcases full of stuff I’ve left behind in different places around the world, just like that. I learned how to travel light.

Fragments Of Time

When I go back in time, I see our small orchard with fruit trees. The noise of football match coming from the TV. Kajzerki with freshly picked tomatoes still warm from the sun. June thunderstorms. The smell of burning autumn leaves. Rosary mass.

The world watched the Berlin Wall fall while I watched the first snow settle on my pear tree, sliding my small feet between the iron ribs of a radiator—warming up to growing up, very slowly.

I have always lived at my own pace, started many things late.

When I think about time compressed inside me, it feels like I’ve carried a hundred lifetimes. Maybe that’s why I knew there was no rush. I write stories on the windowsill now, just like I did back then. Only now in my quiet place in the French wilderness.

The Soul’s Silver Thread

Before I tell you about the girl in this story–the one at five, I want to say that the soul doesn’t like shrinking into a body.

If you ever feel confined in this tiny spaceship, your temporary home–it’s because you are. And that’s normal.

But even if we feel small, inadequate, misplaced, we are always connected to where we come from-attached by a silver, invisible line pulsing through us, all the way back to Source.

This life? It’s only a fraction of our Higher Self we experience here on Earth.

She Will Always Be Me

The girl—five years old, a middle child—was excluded from her brothers’ gang but completely fine creating her own quiet world. Nothing extraordinary.

She balanced the scale from not enough to too much quite well, with bubblegum Donald in her hair. Except crying—she cried a lot, every day, for no reason at all.

She carried something in her heart. Not sadness. Just a whisper of the deep work she came here to do. I found out when I travelled back to meet her in one of my meditations.

I’ll never forget the way she turned her tiny head, uneven fringe falling into her green eyes. She looked up at me, grinned—showing the same wonky tooth I still have—and said, "At last, you came."

Scratching her belly through the fabric of a secondhand sweater inherited from her brother, gripping a tiny bouquet of wildflowers in her fist. A blue petal flew away with the wind. She looked at it, worried that she lost it forever–I wanted to hug her so bad.

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She handed a cornflower to me when I told her stories—about where I’d been, that I lived in France now, that I painted artworks she’d love. That I’d walked barefoot on the sand and collected seashells. That I can hear the whispers of the trees on my daily walks. And that I’m loved.

She nodded, mouth slightly open, eyes wide—the way children look at you when they don’t fully understand but like what you’re saying. Tears filled my eyes because I wanted to comfort her. But it was her comforting me.

Even though childhood feels like a past life for me, her future is still unclear, and from her point–she will always be me.

She will always be me.

She will always grow to be me.

I let it land.

My inner girl.

She will wear Gucci Bloom, ride motorbikes from England to Africa, and fall in love so many times.

She’ll mostly be shy, sometimes sassy as f*ck and get into trouble but always find a way out.

But I will never taste sugar with strawberries on her fingertips. Or drop a blue petal the way she just did. Or dry flowers in The Children of Bullerbyn after reading it hundreds of times.

Time Travellers

That day, I saw in her what I sometimes forget to see in myself—so many stories, so many lifetimes, contained in the one soul we share.

I couldn’t stop wondering: How did she know I’d come?

Time-traveling to the past is meant to be impossible. But there she was. Waiting for me. Like Stephen Hawking, waiting for his "Miss Universe" at the party he threw for time travellers. Except this time, someone showed up.

I came.

I don’t know how, but maybe I know why.

She wanted to hear stories from a life she had yet to live. To feel reassured that the deep healing would turn into lightness of being. That even though she would struggle to express her depth for years to come, she was safe.

She’s safe where she is.

She’s safe where she’s going.

And I’m safe with her.

Stripping Off Identities Like A Mini Dress After A Night Out

At 15, my high school self took her Sagittarius thirst for wisdom seriously and traveled 20km beyond her small town by bus, every day, for four years.

Unsure. Stressed. But knowing it felt right–she aimed high. Even though she barely remembers the two first years of school because she was depressed.

A happy village girl–once surrounded by a cloud of yellow butterflies–replaced with insecurities. Blending into the grey walls, becoming that girl no one wanted to share a room with on a school trip.

I was lost, holding too many identities of who I should be in me, with no space for anything else. I couldn’t express how I looked at life and what I thought deep down.

Irrelevant. In hiding. Unrefined.

I slowly accepted, that maybe I wasn’t like the cool kids, that maybe I was fine being an unidentified object flying around talking to the stars, with butterflies above my head and secret knowledge in my heart.

Myself.

Now, I love stripping those identities away—like I used to strip off a mini dress after dancing all night in a club. Tired. Drunk on silence. Falling naked into my bed—comfortable in not knowing who I was but knowing exactly what I was.

Love.

Deep down—we know that this life is just another cosmic play.

I saw one today–the butterfly.

And thought of my inner girl.

And I must say that I have a slight suspicion it wasn’t just her waiting for me.

It was me, waiting to receive that wildflower and remember: from now on, I will take her with me everywhere.

I think maybe I know what happened back then.

We merged.

Timelines became parallel.

And we are both safe.

One soul, forever.

Asia

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Energy can shift in seconds. Every hour is a different story. And you are NOT blocked but you’re just not….

what?

Find out in this episode.

In my Universe some things prefer to be said rather than written.

Et voilà!

Oh,

and forgot to add the story when I talked about honouring the current energies in our own lives. That it was then, when I sat down to continue writing my memoir but ended up with a poetry collection I didn’t even know I had in me.

I never wanted to write poetry until it just written itself through me during those three days, when I wanted to create something else.

But it was the time when I came back from Switzerland and I wanted to write about what was still alive, like the Jasmine-scented evenings in the Swiss Alps. A connection we felt in the coldest day of July that I knew will end and I’d wait; comets crossing the sky, different dimensions, blue beings in time and space and me wrapped in all of this, watching sunsets from Bürgenstock hill, feeling closer to myself than ever before.

So yes, enjoy!

And share below what you do when you really, really want to create but nothing is coming through.

I’m so curious!

Asia

And here is a wonderful article from a painter from Layers Of Creativity: Stuck in a Creative Block? Here’s What Helped Me with her tips how she overcame a year long creative block. An overwhelming feeling of peace and a virtual hug guaranteed.

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A few years ago, when I unexpectedly moved from a big city life in London to a remote French countryside, I found myself in solitude with nowhere to run but the deep, unknown forest. Of my psyche. I made—and later ripped apart—a list of everything I thought needed fixing. One by one, I’d check them off, lets’s take the self-sabotage thing off once and for all, shall we? A hardcore healing mode.

Clip-clip–it’s lunar eclipse, a perfect time to release it all, and I’d be… what?

Ready? Whole?

Finally worthy of peace? A fully upgraded human, running on enlightened operating system, free from triggers, free from self-doubt, and 3 a.m. existential crises?

Maybe then I’d finally fall into place.

The scattered pieces of what I thought I was and should be to fit in. Deserving a life like those mentors from the internet. The ones with ‘a formula’ for million-dollar businesses and a line of the off-track souls waiting for their next manifestation tip, only to be told they’ve been doing life all wrong, again.

The train to your first-class life is leaving. Are you ready to invest? Prove that you love yourself? Or be left behind, in shame, like the rest. Ka-ching! The doors are closing, one hour left. It’s OK, girl, maybe you don’t value yourself just yet, but don’t worry, Queen—it’s not the right time? You’ll be ready when you decide to step up.

My heart shrinks I don’t know why. Hustle for life that isn’t even mine? But as an energy healer not afraid of depths I go all in. And so it begins:

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Why did that email make me feel so weird? Am I overreacting? Maybe it’s a childhood wound? Let’s go back to what my mum said to me in 1999. Am I still carrying that energy? Maybe it’s why I keep choosing the wrong people. But wait, did I choose wrong, or am I self-sabotaging? Is this just my attachment style coming up? Which one is it, should I do a test again.

Actually, I should meditate instead. Let me find a YouTube meditation to release insecurities I watched twenty five times, clearly not enough if I still feel heaviness in my heart. And fear that maybe it’s never for me. I know why they ghosted me–the goddess energy feminine flow will increase my self-worth, immediately. Yes, I need to love myself more…

…

But it’s gorgeous outside and I really feel like going for a long walk.

Exhausted.

With heavy head, I go.

Would You Rather Stand on the Cliff and Let the Wind Take It All?

Early summer, just before noon. I told my energy healer about the list while walking through the wild heather near my home. My secret paradise, you climb up the mountain into a stretch of land where no one ever goes but I love to sunbathe, look at the blue sky, and write.

As soon as I told her, kind of proud that I found a map of my own inner quest to wholeness, and I worked so hard, I sat down and looked at it with disbelief. Embarrassed. That I built a cage for myself with no way out.

Would you rather stand on the cliff and ask the wind to take it all?

Electric current running through my chest. I would like nothing more.

But it felt like cheating, like lying to my good old friends who’s been with me for years. I must be loyal to myself. Can it be that easy? Can I just fake it until I make it, and try to see myself complete, just as I am, even today?

Why would we want to glue ourselves back together with the past?

Floating through the list like it's an ocean (that would be nice, but let's be honest, it's more like a swamp). Have you ever felt like you want to reach for detached pieces so bad but can’t grasp them? You know they don’t fit you anymore but you want them back. The desire to control what comes in and goes out is so strong, otherwise they’ll sink, drift away, and then what?

Please, wait.

Pause…

Breathe with me.

This is enough.

Breathe.

Bare soil beneath me, heather in my hands.

There is no list. We don’t need a map.

Everything we need to see in us will reveal itself, in time. Through life. Through the moments that pull us open. As highly intellectual beings that we are our mind is our power when we let Higher Self through.

It’s an ongoing practice to be aware of our emotions, triggers and inner states. To look at ourselves with honesty. To understand that the patters we have can be changed.

Without identifying our entire being to what we said in an argument with a friend. Or because we responded in the same, maybe not so fair way, that led to tears and shutting down again. Maybe we were intense and emotional because of hidden fears we are still unable to explain. And that’s OK.

None of this defines us.

It’s a practice to stay open and be willing to shift, look at healing not as a task but a changing state that happens in the background of our life.

Healing isn’t a straight line—it’s a spiral, a dance between layers. Some attachments dissolve instantly. Others take years. Sometimes we think we let go but it returns, to see what we’re still holding on to. Then we go live our extraordinary human lives and create more (energy) on the way.

There is no finish line.

Peace isn’t waiting for us after we fix ourselves, but accept.

For who we are today.

We are already whole in our constant becoming.

Chaotic. Untamed. Never the same.

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But actually, no, I do. I love to celebrate.

Anything, in general. La vie est belle has been my motto for years, and yes, I love sipping Pic Saint-Loup and immersing myself in the beauty of the day, even in winter.

I was terrified of spending another winter in my little home in the valley in the French wilderness. Mostly because I remember the winter three years ago—the cold, the short days stretched into solitude, hours of meditation, and emotional release all day long.

But, looking at the seemingly the same mountain view from my bedroom window I’m not the same anymore. A woman, not a girl. And I’m glad I went through the hard, off-road version of healing myself so I can show others how to stop swimming in the lake of outdated emotions and not to get too attached to the past.

I thought maybe Bali. Anywhere but the UK. I was thinking of going somewhere with a community, an ocean view where I could wear summer dresses and feel the fragrance of my warm, sun-kissed skin at night. But, like most things in my life, I was guided to stay. And face myself.

I’m 40!

(should I highlight it with a Heading text?)

Everyone is shocked when I say it. Including me. I still get ID’d—especially when I don’t wear makeup and look like I do now, in my oversized sky-blue joggers covered in acrylic paint, rouge tendre colour chipped off my nails, and a little too long bright green jumper with white hearts on it.

But there is one thing that I truly tried.

They say we only age as much as we remember.

They say we only age as much as we remember.

So why don’t we release our memories?

The secret art of letting go includes letting go of the positive experiences and the old versions of ourselves, no matter how glamorous they were. My mum asked me recently if I ever get sentimental about my childhood, our old house in the Polish countryside we’d left long ago. When I try to recall it I feel lightness, that’s all.

And when I look at myself from twenty years ago—or even a week ago—I don’t recognise who I was. I have no attachments to emotions associated to events, people, details, places they seem like beyond the veil.

It feels like a past life.

I experienced it, and it was enough. There is nothing I’d like to go back to, not a single moment to experience again. Maybe because I know that I have access to it all? When you guide souls through past lives and talk to their Higher Selves for a living it gets natural in the end.

Sometimes I find myself daydreaming, but only about the present. I throw myself into endless hours of passion. As Bashar says, if you feel like only 15 minutes have passed and you feel like you've experienced 15 minutes of pure joy, then even if in "reality" it was 3 hours, you've only aged 15 minutes.

That’s how you become ageless, and that’s how living in the now becomes timeless.

But living in the now requires saying goodbye to who you were.

I’ve always had this ability to die and be reborn like a phoenix—Scorpio Sun obliges. I understand why people say, Remember where you come from. But I come from the stars.

I contain everything all at once. So in the past years, I’ve been learning how to let go of my identities—who I thought I should be, the girl I was yesterday: a starving artist, a lover not a wife, the friend’s therapist for free.

Maybe that’s why I was afraid of spending another winter in the same place. I wasn’t afraid of the cold. I was afraid of falling back into the web of the past I created. I was afraid of the old me.

Can dreams expire?

It’s funny how the Higher Self works

—it strips us of everything we think we are as soon as we get comfortable. It’s scary but so liberating to take the labels off and, for the first time, truly feel our own soul’s touch. The beat of our own heart and the surprise when we hear the true sound of our voice.

I have this strange fear of not changing—or changing too slow.

Recently, I found an old notebook with my vision board from a few years ago with a solid business plan. I had written a promise to myself: This is it. Now or never. You can do it. Just put in the work. But I didn’t.

It made me cringe that I still have the same unfulfilled dreams.

So I threw the notes away and decided to listen only to what comes to me when I get completely naked.

In the shower in the bathroom lit only by the tiny candlelight that I like to take on Fridays as my only ritual. I stand there, let the water rinse the ashes of yesterday.

And I wait. And if nothing comes?

Artist, woman, healer, and whatever else I’d call myself.

If we’re all complete beings who came here to just experience a few things—to grow, to love, to overcome fear, to shift into higher frequencies, eventually—does it really matter who we are from this perspective?

Living in my little village alone has taught me that I truly don’t need much to feel fulfilled.

A Tarot reader, who happens to be my sister in law, told me when I wanted to know whether I should leave to another country again, It’s all about your inner state.

Your inner state is your power. You are the change.

Regardless of where I am I am a home to myself.

And the more I live, the more I believe that I am enough.

Yes, I could have been in one of those places in the world. I could have been exhibiting my work at Art Basel Miami. I could have…

But I don’t.

I am. Here. For a reason.

Zero plans–a blank canvas.

When I look at my year ahead now, I have zero solid plans. Not a single wedding invitation. Not a single retreat scheduled. Not a single collaboration signed. Not a single trip booked. Not a single date. Not a single project. Yet.

And I think I know why my Higher Self wants me to experience it all.

After years of juggling multiple careers, living in London, booking five trips abroad in advance as my normal, I’m just… here. In my little village, writing, painting, getting ready for a long walk in the mountains.

Free.

And I’m trying hard not to be scared of being stuck.

Remember: it’s all in your mind. Abundance is right here, within you.

This is not a setback. The Universe is collapsing time and giving you all the time in the world to create.

So I do.

I deleted my new vision board from my phone. I had written Surrender to the Divine as my motto for 2025 but still added all the things I don’t have and want.

I realised—I don’t have to live like I’m missing something. I can live like I already have it all. I know, we hear that all the time, internet cliché, but it’s true. As long as we let our inner self vibrate.

I’ll cook my Valentine’s dinner and treat myself like I would treat my lover. Slowly move my fingers across my lips and with slight disbelief say, I’m so happy to have you. Move in with me.

Maybe I’ll watch Love Is Blind. Maybe I’ll leave a voice note for my best friend saying, Guess what? I checked the dating app again.

Because time doesn’t exist.

And it’s never too late.

Tomorrow is my painting day.

And we all find a way to each other, anyway.

Like all roads lead to Rome.

Birthday breakdown. And a wink from the Universe.

I spent my 40th birthday in Rome with my best friend, looking at my life through the windows of Ubers and the bottom of Prosecco glasses.

Everywhere we went, people seemed to see in us something they never knew they needed.

A young Uber driver, playing his rap music loud for the first time, looked us in the eyes and said he’d never felt so seen an inspired.

A heartbroken waiter, an older man with a wound so deep it made him care for us like we were his long-lost daughters. He served us Cacio e Pepe with bittersweet eyes and when we asked, What happened? he never answered. But just the simple question and our presence was his medicine, somehow.

And then there was me and my birthday gift.

In the final minutes of my actual birthday I suddenly burst into tears. And even though I wanted to celebrate for five days straight and told myself that one night it’s not the end, something cracked open and I couldn’t help myself.

A security man in the club saw me crying and called his friend Fabrizio, a man with a wide-open heart who kept his restaurant open just for us. Two women, releasing 40 past years into wine and tears at 1 a.m. Stylishly dressed, the staff probably assumed I was crying over a love affair.

When I finally raised my head and looked around, I saw everyone sat around holding space, accepting me exactly as I was: messy, wild, untamed–in moments of deep pain, a bit ashamed of the breakdown.

Ashamed that I wanted to feel connected, helped, and that was exactly what I received, the best birthday gift from the Universe.

I still don’t know what I truly cried about that night but when Fabrizio invited us back to the club the next day and I tried to apologise, he said:

"I know. You’re just the kind of woman who shows what’s in her heart."

And I liked that.

Without fear of being too much, I danced and danced to classic Italian songs. E vola, vola, si sa, sempre più in alto si va.

And to my surprise, only fifteen minutes passed.

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