Tired of performing,
tired of cosplaying as somebody I am not.

I got so caught up in performing
that I forgot the real me was better.

I thought the world went cold.
Hard.
Stiff.

The light in people’s eyes had gone out.

But they hadn’t.

I just stopped seeing it.

The world is cruel,
no crueler than it’s ever been.

All I am is too good
at seeing the bad.

Today, I saw a spider.

I hate spiders.
I’m terrified of them.

And my first thought was
I should kill it.

Because that’s what everyone else does.

Everyone kills the spiders.

So if I wanted to fit in,
if I wanted to be normal,
I had to kill the spider too.

I had to keep playing the part
I’d been playing for so long.

But I didn’t.

I picked it up
and put it outside.

And I felt like a little kid.

Just standing there,
watching this stupid little spider
crawl away.

And that’s when I realized,

it was me.

I had gotten so used to performing
that I didn’t even know
when I was doing it anymore.

I thought being myself
was the problem.

So I became someone else.

Someone who didn’t care as much.
Someone who didn’t feel as much.
Someone who could look at the world
and only see what was wrong with it.

I stopped loving the world.

Or maybe
I just stopped looking for the things
that made it worth loving.

I remembered the person
who blew the stop sign.

The person who was rude to the cashier.

The person who made my day worse
for absolutely no reason.

But I forgot about
the stranger who swerved to miss a squirrel.

The little old lady
who waits to say good morning.

The person who holds the door
even when they’re already halfway through it.

The little things.

The things nobody really talks about
because they’re not big enough
to remember.

But maybe they’re the things
I’m supposed to remember.

I still see the bad things.

I probably always will.

But I’m trying to see the other things too.

I’m trying to remember
that the world isn’t only
the worst thing someone did today.

And maybe I don’t have to kill the spider
just because everyone else would.

Maybe I don’t have to be normal.

Maybe I don’t have to perform anymore.

Maybe I can just be me.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me - where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

Like holy water in shaking hands.
Like trying to pray with a throat full of salt.

Some days I tell myself
God did not want me there.
That maybe mercy looks like absence.
That maybe love sometimes means
being spared the image you’d never unsee.

Other days,
I sit with the question like it’s scripture,

Why wasn’t I there?

Why, when the only woman
whose presence ever made me feel safe
was leaving this earth,
was I somewhere else
breathing easy air?

I replay it.
Hospitals hum in my imagination.
Fluorescent lights flicker above a bed
that should have held me too.

And I know,
I know myself well enough to admit
I would have begged.
I would have bargained.
I would have mistaken machines for miracles.

I would have asked God to wait.
To reconsider.
To rewrite the ending.

Not for her.
For me.

That’s the part no one says out loud,
grief is selfish in its first language.

I would have prolonged her dying
because I was not ready
to practice living without her.

And maybe God knew that.

Maybe mercy wasn’t in saving her body
but in sparing me
from watching it fail.

Still…
the questions come like smoke rings,
slow, circular, impossible to hold.

It’s funny the way memory ambushes you.

How a perfectly ordinary sunny day
can split open.

The light too golden.
The air too soft.
The world moving as if nothing sacred
has ever been taken from it.

And suddenly I see her hands.
Hear her laugh tucked inside the wind.
Feel safety like a phantom limb.

Grief and religion together are strange companions.

One asks,
“Why would God take her?”

The other whispers,
“What if He didn’t take,
what if He received?”

I don’t always know which voice is right.

Some days faith feels like betrayal.
Some days doubt feels like blasphemy.
Most days I sit somewhere in between,
holding both.

Because loving her
and loving God
sometimes feel like conversations
that don’t face each other.

But I am learning this:

Presence is not measured
only by who was in the room
when the monitors went quiet.

Sometimes love is measured
by who still shows up
in the middle of a random Tuesday
when the sun is shining too bright
and your chest tightens
for no reason at all.

Grief and religion together are strange.

But maybe both are just proof
that something holy
once held you,

and that you are still
trying to understand
why it had to let go.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

The leaves curled in on themselves,
turned pale and brittle,
fell away one by one
without ceremony.

I kept watering it anyway.
Out of habit.
Out of hope.
Out of not knowing how to stop caring
for something that had grown quietly beside me.

For a while, it was just stems.
Just soil.
Just the outline of something
that used to be alive.

I thought it was over.
I thought I had waited too long.

And then one morning,
there was green again.

Small.
Tender.
Almost uncertain.
Like it was asking if it was allowed
to exist again.

The old leaves were gone.
Every familiar part had withered.
But what came back
was fuller,
brighter,
unapologetically alive.

It bloomed twice as beautiful
as it ever had before.

I realized people are like this.
Lives are like this.
Seasons, love, grief, faith,
they all ask parts of us to die
so something else can move.

We call it loss.
We call it endings.
We call it breaking.

But sometimes it is just pruning.
Sometimes it is survival.
Sometimes it is the quiet decision
that the old way cannot keep going
and still stay alive.

Some versions of you
have to wither.
Some rooms have to empty.
Some relationships have to fall quiet
so new light can reach the soil.

Growth is not always green and gentle.
Sometimes it looks like collapse.
Sometimes it looks like silence.
Sometimes it looks like everything falling away
until you barely recognize what remains.

But if you keep showing up,
if you keep watering what feels dead,
you might wake up to something alive again.

Different.
Stronger.
Unfamiliar.
And somehow more you
than before.

The Chinese evergreen did not apologize for dying.
It did not mourn its old leaves.
It simply grew.

I am trying to learn from it

.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

Not aging,
not moving forward,
not slipping into the kind of future
I have to live in without you.

Sometimes,
I pretend I’m frozen too.
Held in place by memory,
by a house that still knows our footsteps,
by walls that once listened to us breathe.

I imagine we’re still there,
on that old couch
that sank in the middle
where we used to sit too close
and not close enough at the same time.

The lights are dim.
That soft yellow that only shows up after 2 a.m.,
when the world forgets itself
and everything feels briefly honest.

In that dream,
nothing has changed.
No one has left.
Time is kind.
Time is paused.

It is easier that way.
To believe we are suspended
like dust in a quiet room
that no one has opened a window in.

Until I realize
I cannot get back to that room.
That the couch is somewhere else now.
That the light has burned out.
That the house learned how to forget us.

I am still here,
walking forward with the weight of a past
that refuses to follow me properly.

And you,
you are not frozen.
You are not waiting.
You are not sitting under yellow light at 2 a.m.

You are gone,
And I am the only one
still pretending time is gentle.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

I always thought ,
what a creepy job to do,
and maybe the people who did it
were even creepier.

But I know better now.

Today I stopped my car for a squirrel.
Tiny thing, barely there anymore,
body folded awkwardly on the asphalt.
I moved him to the grass,
out of the way of tires and noise and rush,
and I thought,
he deserves to rest too.
No more headlights,
no more wheels,
no more hurt.

That’s when it hit me.

Maybe the world needs morticians,
the soft-hearted ones, the quiet ones,
the ones who still believe
that kindness doesn’t stop at the last breath.
The ones who brush the hair
of someone they never knew,
straighten a collar,
whisper “you were here,”
and mean it.

Maybe they are the guardians,
the final ones.
The last hands to hold you
when no one else can.
The ones who make sure
your face looks peaceful,
that your body is treated
like something once sacred,
because it was.

Maybe that’s love too,
the kind that never gets spoken about.

So I take it back,
the part of me that once called them creepy.
Because now I think
there’s nothing stranger or holier
than offering tenderness
to something that can’t say thank you.

Everyone and everything deserves kindness,
even in death. I hope they were kind to you.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

maybe this is why I return to the thought of you,
in quiet hours when the world feels softer
the scent of coffee, the drift of smoke
the soft echo of that melody you carried,
these pieces linger like a half remembered hymn
and I walk through them carefully
knowing they are only rooms in a dream
yet stepping inside them anyway
as if some part of me believes
you might be waiting there still

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

In those days, winter did not feel cold.
The world would blur into stillness,
and I would think that time itself
had paused just to let us breathe.
Your voice moved like a candle flame,
steady and low,
and I believed that tenderness
could hold the entire season in place.

But seasons turn,
and people drift
the way snow drifts across empty streets.
Now the same silence that once felt holy
lingers like a ghost at my door.
The same hush that once felt sweet
presses against my ribs
with the weight of all we lost.

I let it drift without meaning.
I watch it gather on windowsills
and whisper to the night,
But I no longer follow its voice
back into what used to be.

Let the world grow quiet if it must.
Some memories can stay in winter,
untouched,
unopened,
left exactly where they settled
the last time we said goodbye.

So no, I don’t like the snow. I don’t like how it reminds me of someone I used to know.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

You think you’ll know what to do because of how you were raised, but then you meet a child who doesn’t respond to the things that shaped you. A child with their own feelings, their own fears, their own needs. A child who teaches you that parenting is not a hand-me-down skill, it’s something you learn moment by moment.

Every child needs a different kind of parent.
Some need gentle voices.
Some need firm guidance.
Some need room to breathe.
Some need someone to hold them tighter.
Some need extra patience for their storms.
Some need extra reassurance for their quietness.
Some need a parent who moves slowly.
Some need a parent who can keep up.
No two are the same. Not even siblings.

And yet we still hear it.
“Well my parents used to…”
As if repeating the past is the key to raising the present.
As if the love that worked before is guaranteed to work again.
As if every child arrives with the same manual.

But this child is not you.
This child is not growing in your childhood.
This child is not shaped by the world you were shaped by.

This child is their own story.
Their own rhythm.
Their own way of learning and loving and unraveling and rebuilding.

Parenting becomes less about what you thought you’d do and more about what this child pulls out of you.
More softness here.
More patience there.
More understanding in moments that would’ve once made you shut down.
More calm in places where your younger self might have crumbled.

It’s funny how children stretch you.
How they make you rethink everything.
How they teach you to apologize, to slow down, to listen differently, to choose differently.
How they make you grow in directions you didn’t even know you had the capacity to grow.

Parenthood is not about repeating the version of parenting you received.
It’s about becoming the version of parenting your child needs.

Your child teaches you that.
Every day.
In their own quiet way.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

But most of the time, it isn’t any of that.
Most of the time, failure is the quiet voice we’ve been ignoring,
the part of us tugging at our sleeve, whispering,
“hey… maybe not this way. maybe not this door. maybe not this version of you.”

We forget that a closed path isn’t always punishment.
Sometimes it’s redirection.
Sometimes it’s God turning our face gently and saying,
left, not right. trust Me.
Sometimes it’s life nudging us away from the very thing
that would have kept us small.

Because “no” doesn’t always mean
you’re incapable.
you’re unworthy.
you should’ve done better.

Sometimes “no” means
you’re asking for too little.
Sometimes it means
you’re bending yourself into shapes you were never meant to live in.
Sometimes it’s life whispering,
“no… you deserve better than what you’re trying so hard to hold on to.”

But we grow up thinking failure reflects our worth.
That if the job falls through,
if the person leaves,
if the plan collapses,
it must be because something is wrong with us.
Some flaw we missed.
Some lesson we didn’t learn quickly enough.

But what if failure isn’t a mirror at all?
What if it’s a map?
A small arrow pointing somewhere you wouldn’t have thought to look
if everything went “right.”

It’s strange how often the things that fall apart
are the ones we were meant to outgrow.
How the doors that refuse to open
are sometimes keeping us from rooms too small for our becoming.
How the dreams that disintegrate
make space for ones that fit the shape of who we’re becoming.

Worth doesn’t shatter when life shifts.
It isn’t tied to outcomes or timing.
It sits deeper than that,
beneath the fear, the pressure, the ache to prove ourselves.

Failure does not equal worth.
It never has.
You are not defined by the things that didn’t work out.
You’re defined by the way you keep going,
the way you keep listening for the soft turn
the way you’re willing to take a new path
even while grieving the one you thought was yours.

Sometimes, the only reason something didn’t work
is because life was trying, so gently,
to guide you home another way.

And one day, you’ll look back at the “no”
that broke your heart
and whisper,
thank you for turning me when I didn’t want to.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

It touches the places you’ve kept guarded,
the soft bruises time forgot to heal.
It warms the corners of you
that once froze over from trying too hard
to stay untouched.

Love doesn’t always arrive as a person.
Sometimes it’s the quiet after crying.
Sometimes it’s the way you start to forgive yourself
for all the things you thought you ruined.
It’s small,
almost invisible,
but it hums through you
like light through water.

It seeps into the silence,
melting what’s hardened,
coating what’s been left dry and brittle.
It fills the gaps between ribs,
where grief once slept,
and whispers, you can rest now.

You start to notice it
in the smallest things,
morning light leaning through the blinds,
a hand that lingers a little longer,
a breath that doesn’t shake as much.
Love reaches places
hate could never see,
past the sharp edges,
past the old scars that once told you
you were too much,
too broken,
too late.

And maybe that’s what love really is,
not a cure,
but a slow, steady unbreaking.
A warmth that teaches you
to trust softness again.
To stand in the glow
of your own becoming,
and call it holy.

Love seeps,
and suddenly,
you are whole
in all the places
you thought would always ache.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

We don’t sit with each other’s thoughts anymore.
We defend instead of listen.
We scroll instead of pause.
We build walls out of ‘I know better’
and forget that sometimes,
someone else might just know differently.

There’s a kind of beauty in listening,
not to respond,
but to understand where someone’s heart has been.
To see the world through a lens that isn’t your own.
To remember that every opinion
is stitched from a life you haven’t lived.

Maybe we don’t have to agree.
Maybe it’s enough to look at someone and say,
“I see how you got there.”
Maybe that’s what empathy really is,
not silence,
but stillness.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

For a long time, I believed they were the same. I thought that if I let go of the heaviness, I’d also be letting go of the wisdom. That if the ache didn’t stay sharp, I’d forget what it taught me. So I carried it. I let it sit in my chest, in my shoulders, in the quiet of my mind when the lights were off.

But lessons are not as fragile as I once thought. They don’t vanish when the grief softens. They don’t dissolve just because the tears stop. They stay, tucked into the small ways I’ve changed, how I am gentler with myself, how I pause before repeating an old mistake, how I’ve learned to love with more care.

The weight was never meant to be permanent. It was only ever the teacher, never the teaching. What mattered was not the heaviness, but the imprint it left behind.

So there comes a point when I have to set it down. To thank it for what it gave me, and to let it go. Because if I keep holding it, it doesn’t teach me anymore, it only keeps me tired.

I can remember without carrying.
I can keep the lesson, and lose the burden.
I can walk forward lighter, and still know where I’ve been.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

I’m afraid of the day
when the ones I once ran from sirens with,
hearts wild,
legs flying against the pavement,
begin to move slower,
their laughter caught behind aching bones,
their mornings heavy before they even begin.

I’m afraid of the day
when the ones who can remember every word
of every fight,
sharp as broken glass,
start forgetting their own punchlines,
losing their stories mid-sentence,
looking out at nothing
as if the memory is dangling
just beyond reach.

Time doesn’t ask before it takes.
It won’t pause long enough
for me to say, not them, not yet.
And I know I’ll be left
grasping at fragments,
trying to hold whole people
out of scraps of memory.

It terrifies me,
not my own aging,
but theirs.
The thought that one day,
I’ll sit among the ghosts of who we were,
watching pieces of my people
slip quietly away.

I can only hope
that when that day comes,
time will be merciful enough
to leave behind its traces:
the echoes of summer nights,
the rhythm of sneakers on pavement,
the taste of cheap beer,
the warmth of old nicknames
that still slip off the tongue.

Because even if time is a thief,
I pray it leaves me
enough to remember them whole.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

I would watch the light tremble,
catching the edges of my reflection,
softening the rough shapes
I had carried alone.
Ripples would stretch outward,
touching corners of my soul
I had thought unreachable,
reminding me that warmth
can find even the quietest places.

And in that golden hush,
I would remember
how it felt to be held in possibility,
to have longing answered
not with sound, but with presence,
not with words, but with the quiet insistence
that love, like the sun,
can return,
can bend itself back toward you
when you least expect it.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

Twenty minutes crawled by as we inched down the block, him charging, my dog howling, both of us caught in a standoff. Then an older man appeared, distracted the dog for a few seconds, enough for us to slip past before he disappeared back into his garage. This couple has watched me walk past every day for two years, and here they were, helping without a word, simply because the moment called for it.

Later, I drove back down. Something pulled me there, concern, curiosity, maybe stubbornness. Three kids, no older than eleven, were cornered by the same dog, terrified and frozen. I jumped out, yelled, scared the dog off, and stayed with strangers in the heat, waiting for the humane society. I thought: Why am I even here? I don’t know these kids. I’ve been moving since five this morning, and it’s hot as hell out here.

And then the thought hit me, bigger and heavier than the heat: Those aren’t just any kids. Someone loves them. God loves them. And they should be protected. And maybe this stretches further, maybe every stranger, every passerby, every person who bumps into your life carries the same sacred weight.

It’s a quiet sort of revelation. Every child, every adult, every human is a gift, a holy inheritance placed in your arms, even if you never know their name, their story, their heartbeat. To love them is to touch something sacred, to remember mercy in a world that often forgets it.

Even if God weren’t real, I would not regret it. Because in those small, sweaty, chaotic moments, pulling a dog away, calming a child, standing for someone who needed me, love was spent without measure, and it echoes. It returns. It matters.

So we walk. We howl. We yell. We hold space for strangers and children alike. We remember that they are God’s children. And maybe, just maybe, that is enough.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

There is nothing louder
than the world outside,
but here,
in this small space between us,
it all quiets.

I think of how rare it is,
to be alive at the same time as you,
to have our days overlap,
our lungs drawing from the same well
of invisible mercy.

Love takes many shapes.
Sometimes it looks like staying awake
just to listen,
not for words,
not for confessions,
but for the gentle proof of your existence.
Your breath as reminder.
Your breath as gift.

I have listened to you breathe in sorrow,
and I have listened to you breathe in joy.
Both were holy.
Both were love.

Perhaps this is what we are given,
not forever,
not always,
but these fleeting hours
where our air is shared,
where I am close enough
to carry the sound of you with me.

Oh, to share the same air,
what a quiet miracle.
What a way to be loved,
and to love in return.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

I showed up early, left late.
I spoke louder than I needed to, smiled wider than I felt.
I painted my worth in strokes so big they couldn’t be ignored,
yet every glance I caught in the mirror
felt like a question I didn’t have the answer for.

Was it for me? Or was it for them?
Was it to carve my name into the air so everyone would know
that I belonged, or to whisper it quietly to my own shadow,
hoping it would echo back?

Sometimes, I trace it back,
to when I was a child who thought she had to do everything right
just to be seen.
No one needed to tell me I wasn’t enough,
I felt it in the silence, in the way I was overlooked,
in the small gestures that never reached me.
Everything I gave, every effort I made,
never seemed to tip the scale, never seemed to matter.
Smiles vanished just as I reached for them,
praise faded before it landed.
And in the spaces between words,
a quiet truth settled in:
I was never enough, not then, not in that place.
So I learned early, almost by accident,
that belonging is something you must chase,
a space you must build for yourself,
carefully, tirelessly,
before anyone else even notices you exist.

So now, in my adult years, I chase it still.
But it’s not other people’s validation I’m chasing,
I’ve never been one to care much about what others think.
It’s about proving to myself that I belong,
that my seat is real,
that my presence is enough,
that I can occupy this space without apology.

I knew I belonged there,
because I was there.
The seat I took was mine before I even sat.
The space didn’t shrink when I entered,
no one leaned back in surprise,
no one whispered doubt behind my shoulders.

And yet, still, I burned.
Still, I poured my energy into proving a truth
that no one had ever denied.
It’s not bad, this striving, sometimes.
Sometimes it sharpens the edges you didn’t know you had.
Sometimes it makes you glow,
like embers in a dark room,
like the tip of a cigarette holding fire just before it fades.

And yet, still, I burned.

Still, I poured my energy into proving a truth

that no one had ever denied.

It’s not bad, this striving, sometimes.

Sometimes it sharpens the edges you didn’t know you had.

Sometimes it makes you glow,
like embers in a dark room,
like the tip of a cigarette holding fire just before it fades.
But most of the time, it’s exhaustion.
It’s emptying yourself into a cup no one asks for,
burning the sugar just to taste sweetness that isn’t yours.
It’s the cherry at the end of the cigarette,
hanging by a thread,
its smoke curling like the questions in your chest
that never seem to leave.

I had to ask myself,
am I proving it to them,
or am I proving it to the part of me
that still doesn’t believe I can sit here
without permission, without applause,
without burning everything down just to justify my existence?

And when I finally stop,
when I sit back and let the smoke curl around my hands,
I remember the child I was.
The one who felt unseen,
the one who thought her smallness was the problem.
I sit with her now, quietly,
and I tell her: you were always enough.
You are always enough.

The room never asked for the fire,
it never needed the proving.
It was only me, and maybe that’s okay.
Maybe proving yourself isn’t a requirement.
Maybe belonging just means showing up,
and letting yourself be here, quietly,
without the fire, without the effort,
without the cherry at the end,
just the slow, steady burn of knowing:
I am here,
and I have always been enough.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

It will feel heavy,
the remembering,
the almosts,
the parts of you that burned out quietly
without anyone noticing.

But there will also be mornings,
slow, forgiving mornings,
when the air is soft enough to remind you
that survival is not the end of the story.

You were not made only to endure.
You were made to laugh with your whole body,
to kiss until your lungs forget the weight of grief,
to rest without apology.

And even when you forget,
even when the world feels too sharp,
I hope you return to this truth:
you are not too late to begin again.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

They are the ones who sit with you in your silence,
who do not force light into your darkness
but instead hold the lantern steady
until your eyes adjust.

They know healing does not come with clocks or calendars.
They know the body remembers in waves,
and that sometimes the kindest thing to do
is to wait by the shore with you,
to keep watch while the tide comes back.

There is no rush in their presence.
Only a quiet promise:
you are not broken for being tired.
You are not less for needing a place to fall apart.
And here, with them, you may lay your burdens down.

What a pleasure it is,
to be that person,
to carry someone back to themselves,
not with force, but with gentleness.
To nurse them like a flame on the edge of going out,
breathing just enough warmth
to remind it how to burn.

These people are rare.
And if you have one, hold them close.
If you are one, remember,
you are a kind of home
the world cannot live without.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk

Maybe that’s why my summers aren’t the same,
because I’m still waiting on you to come back.
As if the season itself might carry you in on its shoulders,
as if the heavy air might hold the shape of you
the way it used to hold my laughter.

I keep searching for a summer deep in my past,
where plastic lawn chairs leaned into the grass,
our bare feet pressed against the warm earth,
and even the mosquitoes felt like proof
that we were alive in something endless.
The air was thick, yes,
but it was thick with joy,
with the smell of grills and sun-warmed skin,
with nights that unraveled slowly,
as if the moon wanted to linger in our hands.

I think of the summer
I rediscovered my favorite artist,
their voice falling over me like water,
like baptism, like the softest command:
“Stay.”
And I did,
wrapped in lyrics that felt like home,
that cracked me open just enough
to let a little light spill back in.

I think of the night I first saw the stars truly shine,
not as decoration,
but as revelation.
A thousand small witnesses blinking in the dark,
reminding me that even in the great wide silence,
I was not alone.

I keep waiting for the nights we’ll never get back,
the ones that hummed like electricity in the walls,
the ones where time folded itself over
just to give us another hour,
another laugh,
another breath in the sticky dark.

But memory can be cruel like that,
it teaches us to reach for rooms we cannot enter,
for people who will not walk back through the door,
for moments that dissolved before we knew their weight.

Still, I wait.
Not for the season to return,
but for the version of myself who lived there,
the one who believed in forever,
the one who thought the stars belonged to us,
the one who didn’t yet know
how fragile everything really was.

Healing, though,
healing is quieter than memory.
It does not rush.
It does not demand.
It simply sits beside me,
hands folded,
and asks only this:
to let the air cool around me,
to let the cicadas fade into silence,
to let what’s gone be gone.

September is not punishment.
It is permission.
A slow exhale after the burn.
A reminder that even in the aftermath,
life keeps showing up,
with gentler skies,
with softer nights,
with a chance to be remade.

And maybe the summers I am still searching for
were never meant to last forever.
Maybe they were only meant to carry me here,
to the porch where I sit now,
watching the light shift,
waiting for nothing,
learning at last
that even endings can be holy.

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Next time, when the night gets too quiet, you’ll know where to find me—where the stars lean in, the porch light flickers, and the smoke keeps our secrets. - Cigarette talk