If you read the first chapter, welcome back! The first chapter was about recognition: that rare, intoxicating feeling of meeting someone who seems to understand the parts of you everyone else has overlooked.

If you haven’t read Chapter One, begin there to have the best experience. I promise it’d be worth it.

Then come back:

The second chapter is about what can be hidden inside being chosen.

Jackson and Melanie are still close. Still tender with one another. Still speaking in the private language people build when they believe they have found someone exceptional.

But closeness has a shadow.

Sometimes devotion becomes surveillance. Sometimes reassurance becomes possession. Sometimes the words I choose you sound romantic only because no one has yet asked what, exactly, is being chosen.

This chapter lives in that space: the almost-imperceptible moment when affection begins to change shape.

This is where the story starts to reveal its teeth.

If my writing speaks to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue creating from a place of depth and truth. It may seem like a small gesture, but it sustains the quiet work behind every word you read here, and maybe something even bigger in the future.

Please help my dreams come true.

Because if I could write all day, every day, I’d do it with joy.

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This is a work of fiction, shaped by imagination, invention, and all the beautiful liberties fiction allows. Though its earliest roots were planted in real events, what grew from them belongs entirely to the realm of storytelling.

Two weeks after Jackson settled back in Australia, he and Melanie texted every day.

Jackson sent voice notes, sometimes being deliberately ridiculous to make Melanie laugh and sometimes singing until her tears dried.

One day, during a phone call, Melanie told Jackson that she had started dating a guy named Will.

“Wow, kiddo. You’re fast. When did this happen?”

Melanie answered him through her giggles.

“Seriously. How long has it been since I left?”

“Jack.”

“Mel.”

“It started before you left.”

Melanie waited for Jackson to say something, but when he didn’t, she continued.

“I met him a week before you left.”

Jackson stood up from his bed in the public student dorm where he was staying in Sydney. There was a bed. A desk. And a bit of space to take a few steps.

Which was more than enough since Jackson rarely had space for himself.

Melanie continued.

“We met at a pub. Actually, it was the karaoke night we went to together. Do you remember?”

“At Keys Bar?”

“Yes. You left early.”

Silence.

“Jackson?”

Melanie’s words dissolved before reaching Jackson as he sat at his desk and opened every social media account he had.

On Instagram, he was @TheCharmingDaffodilFarts. On X, he was @TheRipperRippesFarts. On Bluesky, he was @RippleBestFarts. Jackson also had a newsletter on Ghost called @TheFartChronicles.

He had no subscribers.

That didn’t stop Jackson from smirking whenever the numbers climbed on another post about whichever poor dorm mate he had chosen to publicly bash that week, most likely because they had woken up before him to take a shower. Jackson knew, for a fact, that his dorm mates had investigated his past, discovered Kinkyard, and were now plotting maliciously to make Jackson smell the way he used to. Therefore, it was only fair that Jackson called them out for what they were: evil, loveless, inhumane, cruel and merciless.

If he believed the occasion called for it, he would call them monsters, too.

The world must know.

Jackson was furious that the world didn’t know. More than that, he was furious at everyone who had somehow made it through life without being bullied.

There was too much evil in the world for anyone to remain that naïve.

Those who hadn’t been bullied needed to be.

How else would they learn the reality of life?

Jackson took that on as his mission.

To bully those who hadn’t been bullied.

Again, the world needed it.

Otherwise, there was too much evil and too little preparation for it.

Meanwhile, his dorm mates had started a petition asking Jackson to stop posting fart jokes on his social media.

Jackson did. But only because he had overheard his dorm mates discussing their plan to have him executed by hiring a serial killer from Arkansas if he continued posting.

None of his dorm mates had any apparent connection to Arkansas.

Jackson didn’t either.

That’s what proved it was real.

There was absolutely no connection to anything, and therefore no evidence for Jackson to find. Which, obviously, was exactly how these fartheads who were secretly plotting to take the life of someone whose only fault was spreading the truth had planned it.

After all, being an enemy to someone was better than being irrelevant.

Jackson’s online presence was his life. Besides, no one could really identify the man behind any of those usernames. Online, Jackson could hide the one thing everyone seemed to dodge in real life:

A person who desperately needed to belong.

Jackson considered desperation a weakness. People absolutely must not know how badly he needed them. How badly he needed their acceptance.

How badly he needed to know every detail about the people he allowed inside the walls of his castle.

The password was annoyingly difficult to crack:

Hello.

Say the magic word, and you were everything to Jackson.

Say you’re my person, and Jackson would go through every person on your socials trying to identify the mysterious karaoke guy you met one night while you were out with him.

A thought flickered somewhere in the back of his mind.

He didn’t offer it a spotlight.

Because no.

Melanie wasn’t a whore who could be close to everyone the way she was with him.

They were going to conquer the world together.

That was what Melanie had said to him.

Surely, she didn’t say it to anyone else.

Surely, Jackson was the only guy, or human, Melanie called my person.

“Sweetie, I need to take care of something. I’m going to call you back.”

After Jackson and Melanie hung up, Jackson spent hours staring at the ceiling until he suddenly reached for his phone and started looking at flights from Sydney to Utrecht.

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Keep going the best is yet to come.

A week later, Jackson flew to Utrecht on the cheapest flight he could find.

He planned to surprise Melanie on her way home from Utrecht University.

He memorised her class schedule.

He knew exactly where Melanie would stop before arriving home, where she would spend the most time, and what delays could happen when she became distracted by something as small as a leaf falling from a tree.

Melanie’s attention always tugged itself elsewhere.

Her brain moved faster and in more directions than others’. Melanie often made small mistakes, became forgetful, and left tasks unfinished. When she was little, someone could tell her something simple like, “Take the rubbish out, then finish your homework,” and the rustling rubbish bag would remind her of the kitchen, then yesterday’s meal, then the stove that cooked it, and finally the quiet wonder of how humans first discovered fire.

It was as if Melanie were dreaming while her eyes remained in the waking world.

Jackson hid behind a tree and waited for Melanie five hours longer than he should have.

His stomach growled.

He got cold.

His nose started dripping.

By the time he was thoroughly convinced he was about to get ill, he saw Melanie coming around the corner, sniffing her nose.

Melanie and the mysterious karaoke guy had fallen out that evening.

Frankly, they were never really a thing.

Their bodies were familiar with each other, but that was the only way the karaoke guy knew Melanie.

Through a body.

As a body.

Melanie had quietly waited for the day when he would, of course, finally see her and understand that they’d be so damn wonderful together.

That didn’t happen.

When Melanie saw Jackson, something stronger than surprise rose inside her.

Relief.

Melanie felt relieved.

Following a long, sobby hug, they started walking together.

“Why do you think no one ever chooses me?”

“For what?”

“In general. Mostly in love. But also... in general.”

“They’re intimidated.”

Melanie’s gaze lingered on Jackson’s face.

“You are worth loving, Melanie.”

Melanie paused.

“No one seems to agree.”

Jackson’s voice softened.

“I choose you.

The world will come around.”

Melanie thanked him over and over again.

Jackson flew back to Sydney two days later. He could no longer afford the hostel he had booked in Utrecht, and Melanie never invited him to stay with her, as Jackson had been so certain she would.

“I miss your face. I miss the way you change subjects halfway through a sentence. I miss the way you say, ‘I approve,’ whenever I botch my Deutsch.”

He texted Melanie shortly after his return.

Melanie had a habit of sharing every thought that crossed her mind, then apologising for taking up too much space. Before Jackson, people had often made Melanie believe that her presence required an apology.

Jackson encouraged her to take up space.

It didn’t take long for Melanie to believe that Jackson was interested in who she was until one morning, when she woke up to a message that quietly changed everything.

“Hey, sweetie. This might scare you away, but I have to say it.”

“I doubt you can scare me,” Melanie replied.

“Just hear me out first.”

“Okay.”

“I have never in my life met someone I wanted to hold through the good times and the bad.”

“I want to be there for you too, Jackson.”

“Kid, let me finish first.”

“Sorry. The floor is yours,” Melanie replied, giggling.

“You have touched me in ways I can never explain. I don’t want you to run away from me. I love you, Melanie. In a way I never thought I could love anyone.”

“You know I love you too, Jackson.

You’re my person.”

“The age difference is a hurdle, maybe, but it’s one I want to kick my leg over. If I had the chance, I would marry you tomorrow and never regret it.”

Melanie froze.

“I’ve imagined so much.

The mother you would make.

Brushing your hair back.

Kissing your forehead after a difficult day.”

“But…”

“Kid, I told you to wait.”

Melanie waited.

“You’re not too much, and you’re not too little.

You, my love, are perfect.

In every single way.

I will walk beside you through hell.

I love you.”

All Melanie could manage was the following:

“Thank you.”

“Anything else?”

Melanie scratched her head, searching for something that wouldn’t mislead Jackson while still sounding warm.

“You didn’t scare me.”

He did.

Melanie didn’t trust herself enough to say so.

Slowly, she began apologising more often.

“I realised I’m guarding my words,” Jackson texted one day.

Melanie stared at the screen, her eyes squeezed while Jackson sent another text.

“But even when I guard them, you still take them the wrong way.”

“I don’t,” Melanie replied immediately.

“You do. And I really don’t think that’s fair to me.”

“Jackson, where is this coming from?”

“You can think whatever you want about that. I wish you’d stop pushing me away.”

“I’m not,” Melanie repeated, without understanding that it did not matter what she said.

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Jackson continued.

“I’m not going to put up with having my words turned around. I’m sorry, but that’s something I won’t tolerate.”

Melanie stared at the screen.

“I didn’t treat you like an enemy,” she wrote. “I didn’t turn your words around.”

“I just think I deserve to be valued rather than treated like your enemy.”

“What made you think I treated you like an enemy?”

“I was under the impression that I had hurt your feelings again.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I just felt it.”

“Felt what?”

“Hurt.”

Melanie apologised without knowing for what.

Shortly afterwards, Jackson offered to help Melanie prepare the Excel sheet for an elective course she was taking as part of her master’s programme.

Jackson basically did all the work for her while Melanie watched him through the video call. She was grateful since the workload had been weighing on her for days.

When Jackson finished, Melanie couldn’t stop her tears from trailing down her cheeks.

“I feel very lonely, Jackson,” she said between crying hiccups.

Following a few minutes of crying in silence, Melanie continued.

“Do I push people away? You said so before too.”

Instead of answering Melanie’s question, Jackson said, “Come on, kid, let’s have some fun. What is your favourite song?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I want you to sing it.”

Jackson watched Melanie sing “Creep” by Radiohead.

When Melanie finished singing, she understood why he suggested it.

She felt as light as a feather, while her former worries felt like a distant dream.

Then she woke up to Jackson’s messages and could no longer ignore what she had been overlooking.

“Did you know you’re sexy as hell?

I’d really like to kiss those beautiful lips.

Put my hand on your cheek and feel you press into my palm.”

Melanie ignored his messages for a while.

When the clock hit the afternoon, Melanie received another message from Jackson.

“I just want you to know that I love you in more ways than just a friend.”

While Melanie kept typing and deleting, those three dots on the screen turned into something that finally made her question how certain she was about who Jackson truly was.

“I felt so much love and attraction to you as we were working on your Excel sheet.

I wanted nothing more than to make love to you.

To stare into your eyes as our bodies moved together.”

Melanie paced the same steps back and forth for longer than twenty minutes before replying to Jackson.

Eventually, she told him what he said was inappropriate.

When she did, Jackson’s mask dropped.

To be continued…

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If you’re new here, this is probably the best place to start:

Your words. Your voice. Our space.

While I organised Beyond the Page with Imi: The Open Mic Night for 26 August, I will be postponing to next Wednesday, September 2, so if you were considering and hadn’t signed up, this is your window.

Community has been one of the most unexpected yet deeply important and beautiful parts of building this little corner of the internet.

You have read my words, trusted me with yours, shown up for conversations, shared pieces of yourselves, and somehow turned what began as a place for me to write into a place where I feel at home now.

So next Wednesday, I want to give the mic to you. 🎙️

Poetry. Prose. Creative non-fiction. Fiction. Spoken word. Something polished. Something you wrote at 2 a.m. and have never had the courage to read aloud.

If it is yours, I want to hear it.

There will be 20 open-mic spots, with 3 minutes per reader, so as many voices as possible can have their moment.

20 voices. First come, first served.

Participation will be open exclusively to subscribers. Once the 20 places are filled, they’re filled. You can find the form below!

See you at the mic next Wednesday. 🎙️✨

---

If my writing speaks to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue creating from a place of depth and truth. It may seem like a small gesture, but it sustains the quiet work behind every word you read here, and maybe something even bigger in the future.

Please help my dreams come true.

Because if I could write all day, every day, I’d do it with joy.

Subscribe now

This is a work of fiction, shaped by imagination, invention, and all the beautiful liberties fiction allows. Though its earliest roots were planted in real events, what grew from them belongs entirely to the realm of storytelling.

Enjoy!

“There is nothing we can do, Miss. Especially since he is in Australia. Our jurisdiction ends at the Dutch border,” Officer Jefferson said.

“I am not looking for a lawsuit.”

Officer Jefferson arched an eyebrow.

“Can’t you just send him a letter?”

“A letter?”

Melanie nodded.

Officer Jefferson and his colleague, Officer Kat, looked at each other.

“Do you want us to send a letter to the other side of the world?”

Melanie shrugged.

“Jackson does it.”

“Do you want us to do what Jackson, the person you wanted to file a complaint against, has been doing to you?”

“I only need him to stop.”

Melanie’s voice cracked.

“Please, just one letter. I’m begging you.”

A rough breeze scattered all the letters Jackson had sent Melanie over the past four months. Melanie spent hours the night before, grouping them in categories and making each its own pile.

One pile was full of insults. Jackson would call Melanie a bigot, an asshole, a loser, and someone who sucked at everything. He would tell her that she was repulsive and deserved to go to hell, only to correct himself by stating that she was, in fact, the embodiment of hell itself.

The other pile consisted entirely of declarations of love. On those, Melanie would become Jackson’s queen because she was already going to conquer the world. She was better than everyone else, and most importantly, Melanie was absolutely not a burden because Jackson loved her and always would.

He even sent her a picture of himself once, wearing long, dark-red curls made from Melanie’s hair, which he had secretly collected from the floor while she was getting her hair cut and later had made into extensions.

Poor Melanie was unaware of Jackson collecting her hair from the floor piece by piece while she was telling him about a new recipe she had learned from Martha Stewart’s latest recipe book, Slow Cooker.

Only when Jackson sent her a photograph months later did Melanie understand what had been inside the brown paper bag that Jackson carried in his hand as they left the hairdresser.

The note beside it read:

“Even if I get hit by a car, I will die knowing that I carried a piece of you. You’d be in heaven with me, Mel.”

The worst part wasn’t even the hair. It was Jackson’s smile while he wore it.

It reminded Melanie of Joker from the Suicide Squad, and Melanie had zero interest in being his Harley Quinn.

After standing frozen in her studio flat, the photograph in one hand and the other braced against the bookshelf beside the kitchen counter, Melanie burned the picture and, after a three-hour drive, threw its ashes onto a pig farm.

The following week, Melanie went to a barber shop and had her hair shaved off.

“Miss.”

“What was her name?”

“I need to chec—”

Melanie shook her head and looked toward Officer Jackson.

“Melanie.”

“Are you okay, Melanie? You look pale.”

Melanie remained silent. She could hardly blink.

Shortly after, Officer Kat broke the silence.

“He is sending those letters because he knows you are reading them.”

“I know I shouldn’t.”

“Then why do you?”

Melanie slowly lifted her head, looking at Officer Jefferson straight in the eye.

“They are letters that are being delivered straight to my house.”

“Miss, we understand that it may’ve been difficult for y—”

“May have been difficult for me? May have been?!”

Officer Jefforson stood up.

“He’s a sad forty-seven-year-old man with nothing better to do than send those letters.”

“I didn’t know mood could justify harassment.”

“Miss,” Officer Kat said, “for your own sake, try ignoring them.”

“Does it even matter that he knows my address?”

It was Officer Jefforson’s turn to shrug.

“Who gave it to him?”

Melanie paused.

“My cat.”

The police stood and walked away from the Utrecht park, making their way toward their vehicle.

Melanie sat on the bench a while longer. Her shoulders sagged beneath a disappointment that had little to do with the police. A part of her knew that the police wouldn’t be able to stop Jackson from sending letters to her.

Yet she couldn’t help but call them at 3 am on Saturday in tears.

That was what disappointed her.

People kept telling her not to open his letters. They should have been thrown straight into the bin as soon as she pulled them from the letterbox.

Melanie agreed.

Yet she still read them.

More accurately, she couldn’t stop.

She told herself it was curiosity.

She was amused by whatever new nonsense Jackson had written.

Neither explanation was entirely false.

But beneath the curiosity was something much uglier.

Melanie wondered whether Jackson’s letters had become proof of everything she had already believed about herself.

That she was a loser who would never make it.

That she would end up alone.

That no one loved her.

That no one ever would.

All the while, Jackson had spent months telling Melanie she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

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He had been in love with Melanie from the moment he saw her four months earlier, when they met through mutual friends while studying at Utrecht University.

Despite being 47, Jackson was an exchange student from Sydney University. He couldn’t pursue a bachelor’s degree when he was younger because he couldn’t afford it, as his birth mother had sent him to Kinkyard Orphanage, formerly known as the Kinkyard Church, when he was six.

Without knowing what to expect, Jackson didn’t hate Kinkyard immediately. Before Madam Mousel—the head nun—took Jackson to the common room where he slept with thirty other kids, Jackson’s back had hardly known a proper mattress. At the age of three, Jackson was forced to sleep on the floor over a paper-thin sheet after his mother, Katalina, remarried a drunkard, Ricardo, who kicked Jackson out of bed and took his place beside his mother in their tiny cottage in a village far from Sydney.

With no one his age in a village where the average age was 52, Jackson often whispered in the dark, talking to his imaginary friends until Ricardo heard him and convinced his mother that Jackson was possessed. Six months later, Katalina walked Jackson to the village bus stop, where he took the bus to the closest stop to the Kinkyard Orphanage.

Jackson made his first real friend at Kinkyard when he and Fernando started playing chess over a tray with white and black buttons after bedtime, while the rest of the kids slept in the common room.

Before long, the nuns decided the orphanage needed repairs when a sickening mixture of rotting onions and dead rats began to spread through its corridors. They suspected its failing sewage pipes were carrying the stench, and soon after, they cut meals from three courses a day to two to raise funds for repairs.

Eight months later, the construction finished, but the smell remained.

Only when Fernando hugged Jackson on his first birthday at the orphanage did Fernando realize that the smell was Jackson’s.

Fernando looked at Jackson, his nostrils blocked with a plastic clothes peg, his stomach growling. Then shoved him away to run down the corridor and tell everyone that they had starved and struggled to breathe because of Jackson.

Everyone, and at some point, even Madam Mousel, started calling Jackson “Rattle.”

Jackson thought he found his salvation when a girl named Jasmine arrived at the orphanage and met Jackson before anyone else. They easily became friends since Jasmine carried the scent of daffodils everywhere she went and, because of it, couldn’t smell Jackson.

Until she started dating Fernando.

One day, Fernando saw Jasmine playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards with Jackson in the yard, and he pulled her away immediately.

“Stay away from her, Rattle. Don’t you dare rot my girlfriend with your curse.”

Jackson turned fiercely towards Madam Mousel, who was supervising the younger children’s football match in the yard and saw her covering her smile with her palm.

Jasmine never spoke to Jackson again.

From then on, every year on the 15th of February, Jackson would light a candle he stole from a stationery shop for his birthday and blow it out in the dark, wishing three things.

His first wish was for his smell to disappear.

And second was for Jasmine to break up with Fernando.

The third was only necessary if the first two failed: to time-travel to when he was eighteen.

Jackson’s smell remained. Jasmine announced her pregnancy the day after her eighteenth birthday. Jackson left the orphanage the day after his eighteenth birthday with a tiny backpack, carrying his eighteen years of life.

His life philosophy was on surviving the next five minutes for the following years of his life.

Then at 44, Jackson won a grant from an institution and started studying journalism at the University of Sydney. In his third year, he signed up for Erasmus and spent the spring term in Utrecht, where he met Melanie.

Melanie had already graduated from her bachelor’s at Utrecht University when she met Jackson during his Erasmus. At the time, Melanie was studying for her master’s in finance at the same university, and despite being a successful student, she hated everything about her degree.

She could have pursued a path in creative arts before her father, Joffrey, died. Yet, Melanie’s mother, Esther, had already mapped out Melanie’s future as taking over the family business after her father’s passing.

Melanie cursed her fate most fiercely during financial econometrics lectures for being the eldest and, of course, for losing her father.

That same year, 2017, Esther birthed her youngest, Samir, the only boy in the family, Even their neighbours knew Esther had never loved any of her children as much as she had loved Joffrey. No one saw Esther smiling after that horrendous car accident that got Joffrey killed while he was taking Melanie and her sister, Yolanda, to see Home Again at the cinema. Melanie quietly believed Esther hadn’t loved anyone since Joffrey died.

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A year later, Melanie moved out for college, leaving her family in Switzerland as she began her new life in Utrecht.

She made friends. Fast. Though they were mostly random guys discussing the weather as if they’d win the lottery if it didn’t rain tomorrow.

Until Jackson.

With Jackson, it was different.

At first, conversation came easily.

Before long, Melanie thought she had found a wonderful friend.

Someone who wanted to understand her and wasn’t afraid to show it.

A week after they met, Jackson said, “I’m going to check in on you periodically. Part of being a friend,” while they walked toward the university’s library together.

“That’s very thoughtful.”

While they started seeing each other more frequently, time passed quickly, and summer arrived in a blink of an eye.

Melanie could barely hold her tears when she thought Jackson was leaving. He felt like he was her person.

Melanie told Jackson that on the last day she saw him before he left.

“You know,” Jackson said, “no one has ever said that to me before.”

Melanie’s faint smile appeared through her tears.

“Then I will keep saying it until you are fed up with me.”

Jackson reached toward Melanie’s hand, pulling her closer for a hug.

They held each other tightly for longer than a minute. Then Jackson grabbed his small suitcase and walked toward the airport shuttle.

He turned around to wave at Melanie one last time, but Melanie had already left.

For a moment, Jackson was 18, walking away from the orphanage with his backpack again, when he turned around to wave at someone only to find no one there watching him leave from the window.

Jackson’s hands curled into fists.

He continued walking toward the shuttle.

To be continued…👇

Every read, share, and recommendation helps more than you might think.

If you’d like to support me but aren’t in a position to purchase a paid subscription, you can also:

♡ Support me through:

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Your words. Your voice. Our space.

On 26 August, I want this space to belong to your voices.

Community has been one of the most unexpected yet deeply important and beautiful parts of building this little corner of the internet.

You have read my words, trusted me with yours, shown up for conversations, shared pieces of yourselves, and somehow turned what began as a place for me to write into a place where I feel at home now.

So next Wednesday, I want to give the mic to you. 🎙️

Poetry. Prose. Creative non-fiction. Fiction. Spoken word. Something polished. Something you wrote at 2 a.m. and have never had the courage to read aloud.

If it is yours, I want to hear it.

There will be 20 open-mic spots, with 3 minutes per reader, so as many voices as possible can have their moment.

20 voices. First come, first served.

Participation will be open exclusively to subscribers. Once the 20 places are filled, they’re filled. You can find the form below!

See you at the mic next Wednesday. 🎙️✨

Sign Up to Open Mic

If you’re new here, this is probably the best place to start:

If I could spend my days writing, making songs and bringing these little worlds in my head to life, I would do it with joy. Becoming a paid subscriber is one of the loveliest ways to support my work and help me keep creating.

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The audio here is sung by me.

I also create custom songs and spoken pieces for my paid subscribers and upon request, I’m happy to sing.

I vaguely remember
how he left
my apartment.

He left while I waved from my bed
his gaze lowered to the floor,
a faint smile on his face
while I convinced myself
the hour was too early
for warmth.

What I remember
is how we looked into each other’s eyes
under the warm dim light
my head resting against his knee
as I asked him to speak
in Portuguese to me.

His words reached me
without a translation.

What if magic dissolves
with the first rays of sunlight
entering through our eyelids?

I met him
under daylight
with no makeup
outside of King’s Cross Station
looking at me
through no lens besides

how
I
like
to
be.

Believing what he sees
not what’s beating underneath.

What if he sees
the mess I can’t keep myself

from

being?

I told him I hugged a door
he hugged me
even more
pulling me closer
from a distance that was never there
but somehow kept us apart
like two parallels drawn on the same paper
never crossing paths
instead happening to each other.

I happen to everyone
but does everyone
happen
to me?

He felt like life,
like the breath
I held
and the permission
to finally exhale.

Can I say
I was happy
to allow him
inside
once the sour taste of disappointment
lingers on my palate?

For the first time,
someone laughed with me
when I told him
my diagnosis.

What if
the laughter
dissolves
when my body
pulls the strings
and I
take
the wrong step?

But even if that’s the case,
if he can fake those giggles
that make me melt
like milk chocolate
losing its shape,

I can harden.

Liquid doesn’t break
yet it loses shape.
What’s solid shatters
into a million pieces
no one is willing to collect.

but for one last time

I will

allow

myself

to

feel.

He’ll leave.
Everyone who said they wouldn’t
did.

Am I losing a battle
long before
it started?

Every read, share, and recommendation helps more than you might think.

If you’d like to support me but aren’t in a position to purchase a paid subscription, you can also:

♡ Support me through:

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♡ Become a free subscriber and join my community.

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Leave a comment

OR

Share

If you’re new here, this is probably the best place to start:

Which is what made it so awesome!

and I somehow travelled from ADHD and immigrant parents to capitalism, female rage, motherhood, spirituality, identity, writing, relationships, the animal kingdom and and whatever else our neurodivergent brains decided belonged in the conversation.

Basically, exactly what happens when you put two “soul sisters from across the pond” in the same Live and let them talk.

There was laughter, a little lag, me wandering around trying to find better lighting, my sister turning the lights off on me, and many moments where I completely forgot I was supposed to be hosting. 😂

Thank you Mila for being so wonderfully you, and thank you to everyone who joined in and made it feel less like an interview and more like a bunch of us sitting around talking about life.

I missed doing these. 🤍

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Each episode, I invite a paid subscriber to join me for a live, unfiltered conversation about the things that matter to them. We might talk about creativity, psychology, relationships, personal experiences, current projects, or simply follow the conversation wherever it naturally takes us.

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If my writing speaks to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue creating from a place of depth and truth. It may seem like a small gesture, but it sustains the quiet work behind every word you read here, and maybe something even bigger in the future.

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When you meet someone, what do you judge before you know enough to understand?

Before we meet a person as they are, we have already dressed them in the fabric of our inner world, woven from what we expect, fear, and already know.

We can drape them in admiration or wrap them in suspicion, but either way, our own reflection becomes entwined with the person we see, especially the parts of ourselves we keep in shadow.

The Shadow carries the parts of us we don’t want to see: our forbidden desires, quiet envies, the traits we judge in others but cannot admit in ourselves. We push it down, thinking it will disappear, but the Shadow is patient. If ignored, it walks ahead of us in disguise, showing up in the people we love and the enemies we choose.

What we judge in someone else often reveals much more about us than about them, leaving every connection as an invitation to greet the parts of ourselves we cast aside.

Yet often, when that invitation reveals something we do not like, we do not simply decline it. We reach for labels, leaving connection absent of presence, deprived of understanding.

The person becomes awkward, weird, obnoxious, intolerable, while beneath the cruel mask of judgment, we hide the very pieces of ourselves we cannot bear to recognise.

Yet why do we repress our nature, forcing ourselves into boxes that do not fit until the edges of our authenticity grow tired of being shaved down?

Because survival no longer looks like running from predators or building fires.

It looks like seeking to belong but settling for being accepted.

That longing to belong shaped me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. Born a decade after my sisters, I was furious with my mother for not giving birth to me earlier. I learned how to walk on my first birthday just to catch up to my sisters, yet my sisters kept me out of their club, convinced I would reveal their secrets, which felt monumental then, even if they were trivial in truth.

As a child, I could never lie. It seemed absurd to surrender my credibility in someone else’s eyes. Words have always been the core of my strength, so giving someone a reason to doubt me felt like the greatest rupture in my power.

Yet to prove my loyalty to my sisters, I had to betray myself.

As though belonging demanded the sacrifice of the very self seeking it.

As I grew older, my sisters constantly fought. I was expected to take sides while still showing up for both when they weren’t speaking. An extra five minutes with either of them could make me an outcast to the other.

Learning to read rooms and mediate the environment turned me into a people pleaser who felt responsible for everyone else’s emotions while rarely voicing my own.

By casting aside the parts of myself I did not want to own, I blurred the truths I was scared would hurt too much to touch:

What if I didn’t belong?

Or more accurately, what if I wasn’t convenient for others?

After moving to London, the bubble of expectation I had built around my so-called identity began to dissolve. Beyond the borders of my familiar hell, the performance began to fall away without ever being asked to leave.

Last summer, a close friend from home visited, and I asked him about the difference between the “home Imi” and the “London Imi.”

He said “home Imi” felt like a kite drifting in whichever direction another pulled, while “London Imi” felt like “just Imi.”

Just me.

I used to belong to the roles people needed me to be.

When everything that wasn’t mine was emptied, I finally had room for myself.

A self I no longer feel the need to define.

After 27 years of carrying a constructed identity like a badge, showing up for everyone as though it were a duty, for the first time, I felt free.

Free to be anything.

Free to be nothing.

Free to be everything.

No longer mistaking belonging for a door that could be opened by anyone but me.

For a while now, people have been telling me that I’ve changed as though it were an insult.

Why?

Because change is uncomfortable for systems built on expectations and sustained by predictability.

In a world of endless expectations, it is easy to mistake pressure for purpose.

Perhaps through true connection with ourselves, we begin to see the absence of a fixed identity not as something to overcome, but as a source of joy.

Let every day mark the birth of a new self.

Every breath is a beginning.

Every dawn, a farewell to who we no longer need to be.

Every morning, a choice of being.

Being is becoming.

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Anyone can watch, join the chat, ask questions, and be part of the conversation.

Don’t forget to tune in tomorrow, August 17 at 6 PM EST/ 11 PM BST alongside my co-host !

Then it followed me back to the page.

Some pieces know before we do that they haven’t said everything yet. More memory entered, the distance between “she” and “I” shifted, and somehow the story moved closer to what I was trying to tell in the first place.

Apparently, I had reached the ending before the story had.

So here is the version that came after the ending.

If this space has ever made you feel seen, steadied, or quietly accompanied, and you’re in a position to do so, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the loveliest ways to support my work and help me keep creating.

If I could spend my days writing, making songs and bringing these little worlds in my head to life, I would do it with joy.

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I turned the song into a short film, bringing its words, memories, and chaos to life

Verse 1

Down the fields
through the grey sky,
a girl travels
to Edinburgh.

The train arrives.

Medieval buildings
enter her sight,
looking toward Edinburgh Bridge
across Waverley Station.

Her glass, poured with red wine
without a gap.
It’s a gift,
an exception,
a celebration
of her arrival.

Two weeks pass.
Two empty bottles,
one wine,
one Baileys,
sit in her room.

She makes friends
fast,
soaks in the craft.

Sena smiles and says,
“People are saying
you’re the most talented.”

Drizzle turns into a storm,
catching her
sitting on the steps
of St Andrews Castle.

She rushes to find shelter
until the wind slows her down,
bringing life to the tip of her nose,
a glimpse of burning
when the sea salt touches her scars.

She surrenders to the rain
in front of a golf course.

A crying storm breaks through.

When her tears dry,
inspiration begins dripping.
The world disappears,
leaving her
with her ink
while she misses the last train,
stranded in St Andrews.

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I try.

Verse 2

Laura plays the piano,
pressing Do.
Something in her says no.

Not to the melody,
but to where she began to fall.

The music floods her body,
dissolves every thought
in its wake,
while she weeps
for her legs.

Too sore.
Too tired
to take another step
with her worn-out shoes,
laces tied around her ankles,
the arches of her feet
starting to give way.

Laura’s body sways.
The music continues to play.

She sinks deeper into herself,
leaning on the counter
of the library café.

It breaks.

She asks for help.

“It’s fine,” they say.
“It happens all the time.”

She fastens her pace,
leaving the crime scene,
while the air carries
the man’s words:

“It didn’t break
like this before.”

She puts her bag on the floor.
The tobacco spills.

Her hands,
familiar with garbage
after a winter
that turned her house
into a place to crash.

Nathalia stands before her,
asking for her pen,
long lost,
buried in yesterday
with tomorrow’s hopes.

She thinks of the earth,
remembers it like yesterday:
seeing the sea
flattened like a sheet,
untouched by her flesh
bringing filth
no one can know
unless they enter
where she lives.

Her walls are up,
high like the castle
of Edinburgh,
outward
and inward.

Not a hostage
or a prisoner.

As long as she looks like a princess
to the outside world,
no one cares to take a deeper look.

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I try.

Verse 3

She smells the haze,
running after a bicycle,
proud of her courage
that returns to her
another morning,
waking up to the regret
of munchies.

“Keep being you,
the world
needs more of it.”

Nathalia says
on the last day
at the ceilidh.

Yet tired from everything
that leaves me
with yet another apology.

Is being myself
simply paying
the cost of living?

I can’t afford
to pay the rent
rising
with each breath.

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I know how.

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OR

Share

If you’re new here, this is probably the best place to start:

Lately, I’ve been learning that the parts of myself I love most are often the hardest ones to live with.

Dedicated to every neurodivergent person who has ever loved who they are and still wondered why being themselves has to cost so much.

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Verse 1

Down the fields
through the cloudy sky,
a girl travels
to Edinburgh.

Before she departs,
her smile glows
inside the crowds.
Tears flow
when she’s alone
in her house.

The train arrives.

Medieval buildings
entering my sight
in the land of literature.

I sip my glass,
poured red wine
without a gap
on the first night.

It’s a gift,
an exception,
a celebration
of my arrival.

Two weeks pass.
Two empty bottles,
one wine,
one Bailey’s,
sit in my room.

I make friends
fast,
soak in the craft.
Sena smiles and says,
“People are saying
you’re the most talented.”

Compelled by my words,
arriving so suddenly
after a crying storm,
the world disappears,
leaving me
with my ink
while I miss the last train,
stranded in St Andrews.

My breath returns
with inspiration
while everything I touch
becomes a ruin.

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I try.

Verse 2

Laura plays the piano.
Her finger presses Do.
Something in me says no.

Not to the melody,
but to where I began to fall.

The music floods my body,
dissolves every thought
in its wake,
while I weep
for my legs.

Too sore.
Too tired
to take another step
that carries destruction.

Laura’s body sways
as she continues to play.
I sink deeper into myself,
leaning on the counter
of the library cafe.

It breaks.

I ask for help.

“It’s fine,” they say.
“It happens all the time.”

I fasten my pace,
leaving the crime scene,
while the air carries
the man’s words:

“It didn’t break
like this before.”

I put my bag on the floor.
The tobacco spills.

My hands,
familiar with garbage,
pick up the pieces of me.

Nathalia’s face appears,
asking for her pen,
long lost,
buried in yesterday
with tomorrow’s hopes.

Days pass.
I worry about the pen.

I’m the chaos,
not something
for other people to endure.

I remember the earth
like yesterday,
when I saw the sea
flattened like a sheet,
untouched by my flesh
bringing filth
no one can know
unless they enter
where I live.

My walls are up,
high like the castle
of Edinburgh,
outward
and inward.

Not a hostage
or a prisoner.

My being—chaos
overruled by mannerisms.

As long as I look like a princess
to the outside world,
all is well.

They like my energy
until I lose their pen too.

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I try.

Verse 3

A gloomy day in Edinburgh.
I see a tower, octagonal,
sharp like the edge
of a North Star.

I lost its trace.

I used to be funny.
People still laugh at me,
not at what I’m hiding,
but at the stories that come with it.

How does another story
make it any better
for a good storyteller
who has plenty?

Nothing feels true,
and nothing feels wrong.

I keep finding myself
locked out of my own door.

I smell the haze,
run after a bicycle,
proud of my courage
that returns to me
as another destruction.

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I try.

Verse 4

Nathalia says,
on the last day,

“Keep being you,
the world needs more of it.”

I’m tired from everything
that leaves me
with yet another apology.

Being myself
became costly.

Am I simply paying
the cost of living?

I searched for home
for far too long.

Now I carry it
everywhere I go,
yet I can’t afford
to pay the rent
rising with my breath.

Is
being
myself
the cost of living?

Chorus

They say she brings chaos.
I say I am the chaos.
Which one you choose,
I don’t mind.
People define my narrative
long before I know how.

Every read, share, and recommendation helps more than you might think.

If you’d like to support me but aren’t in a position to purchase a paid subscription, you can also:

♡ Support me through:

Buy Me a Coffee

♡ Become a free subscriber and join my community.

Subscribe now

♡ Leave a comment and join the conversation

Leave a comment

♡ Restack the post if it resonated with you.

Share

Some pieces know before we do that they haven’t said everything yet.

I turned the song into a short film, bringing its words, memories, and chaos to life

So here is the version that came after the ending:

We label ourselves, each other, and almost everything we create. Perhaps it helps us make sense of the world. It gives things a place to belong.

But what happens when something refuses to fit?

And that’s what our next community writing contest is all about. We want you to play with the boundaries we put around writing by:

Creativity is an experiment.

Unless we dare to explore beyond what we already know, we may never discover what else exists within us to create.

Structure matters. Knowing the rules matters. They give us something to build from.

But perhaps the rules are only where creativity begins, not where it has to end.

We draw lines between fiction, poetry, memoir and essay. But what happens when we let them cross those lines, exist alongside one another, and become something they couldn’t have been on their own?

What happens when we bend them?

What happens when fiction meets poetry?
When autobiography slips into fiction?
When an essay becomes poetic?
When memoir borrows from imagination?

Take two genres and put them together. Take three. Start in one and end in another.

Bend the genres. Mix them. Play with them.

Write fiction threaded with poetry.
Autobiographical fiction.
A poetic essay.
A prose poem.
Mix memoir and fiction.
Write a story through letters or diary entries.
Let an essay suddenly break into verse.
Bring in lists, fragments, scripts, dreams, photographs, footnotes, or anything else you can think of.

Make something we don’t quite know how to label yet.

Judges:

The judges for this contest are writers working across different forms and genres, each with a distinct approach to their craft.

— a poet with a remarkable instinct for rhythm and language, turning vivid imagery and unexpected details into verses that carry their own momentum.

— moving through gothic literature, folklore and mythic storytelling, creating worlds where darkness, imagination and the uncanny meet through a psychological scope.

— moving between poetry, nonfiction and fiction, bringing curiosity, insight and a quiet wisdom to everything she touches.

— blending prose into poetry and weaving psychology and philosophy through memoir, where lived experience becomes a way of asking bigger questions.

Submission Guidelines

To be considered, please make sure you are subscribed to all four judges.

All submissions should be emailed to: bendingenres@gmail.com

There are no separate genre categories. All submissions will be read by all four judges, and the winner will be chosen collectively. Every piece enters the same pool and is considered alongside every other submission.

Maximum word count: 1k

In your submission e-mail, please add one sentence introducing which genres you used.

Make sure to include your Substack handle.

Deadline:

31 August 2026, 11:59 PM (UK time)

The Prize

The winning piece won’t just win the contest. It will become the foundation of our Bending Genres collaboration.

The winning submission will remain as it is, while all four judges bring something of our own writing, genres and styles into the mix, building around and alongside it to create a larger collaborative piece.

The final work will be shared as a collaboration between the winner and all four judges.

Five writers. Different forms. One winning piece at the centre of it all.

Because what better way to end a contest about bending genres than to take the piece that bent them best and see what happens when five different voices meet inside it?

Subscribe now

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For a long time, I thought this was a story about a man leaving.

It wasn’t.

It was about all the moments that came long before him. The ones that taught me to apologise before speaking, to mistake being pleasant for being loved, and to believe that taking up less space made me easier to keep around.

This one is for anyone who has ever apologised for taking up space before they realised they already belonged.

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Please help me make my dream come true.

Because if I could do this all day every day, I’d do it with joy.

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During those cold winter nights in my flat in Notting Hill, I shivered beneath a broken window I had managed to destroy at the very beginning of winter and never quite fixed.

Around mid-January, the cold became unbearable when I found myself unable to think because every drop of energy in my body was used to preserve my body temperature.

I could’ve borne hypothermia or any illness that would’ve kept me in bed for days.

I couldn’t bear the solitude of my studio flat without my thoughts that had become my only companions.

One night, I even picked up my blow dryer, and held it beneath my blanket.

The warmth began low, spreading beneath my feet, climbing to my knees, chasing away the chill until comfort lingered for a while.

I was left overwhelmed by its comfort, for such balance rarely arrived during those months.

Just as my petty tears threatened to arrive I was saved by the bell when my friend called and invited me to the opening of a new cocktail club.

I walked over to my closet and tilted my head in thought when I was met by empty wood in an ugly colour. Then I found myself digging through the clothes that had become another layer of the floor until my black lace-up top with zig-zag stripes reached my hands.

Throwing the clothes I'd taken off back onto the pile on the floor, I walked toward the mirror to look at myself once more before I left my apartment.

“Almost perfect,” I murmured.

Reaching for my deep burgundy lipstick, I smacked my lips, grabbed my purse and slammed the door.

My night seemed to be playing the same broken record over while I talked about the weather with men who blurred into one another.

The plot almost never changed.

Meet someone.
Chit-chat about things that barely mattered.
God forbid I gave a real answer when someone asked, “How are you?”
And, of course, I’d cut myself off halfway through a sentence before sharing what I actually thought, because my role was never to be remembered, only to be pleasant.

Stand there. Nod. Look pretty.

Leave before anyone noticed there was a whole person underneath.

Otherwise, I’d simply be, too much.

The greatest horror story of our nation.

Instead, my night shifted its colour when a pair of green eyes caught my attention.

They always had.

I’ve been drawn to green eyes since childhood.

During primary school, I even begged my mother for green contact lenses until I wore her down to say yes. When I blinked too much and couldn’t get them in, I lost them two days later but not before convincing myself that green eyes might have made me prettier.

My body had a way of rejecting what didn’t belong to it.

I had way of longing for what wasn’t mine.

As the night continued, the music began, and I began to sway with it.

He stood behind me. The green eyes.

Our backs faced each other, but never our faces.

The melody travelled through his body the way it travelled through mine.

I turned my head, only slightly, and caught his smile.

A moment passed.

We both knew we were drawing closer.

I smiled.

He smiled.

Soon we were leaning against the bar, our bodies angled toward one another.

He grabbed my hand and pulled me closer.

“I’m Nick.”

“Imi,” I said, playing with my hair.

“Can I buy you a drink, Imi?”

I smiled as he turned toward the bar.

“Can we have two tequila shots?”

“I just moved into a new house,” he said, “and want to hang a painting of my own.”

He lifted the hand resting on my waist and reached for his phone and turned it toward me.

“This is the painter I admire,” he explained. “I’d like to create something similar myself for my house.”

On the screen, three delicate lines crossed an otherwise empty canvas.

His eyes sparkled.

Mine remained blank.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

I suggested that he and whichever lady friend he happened to have at the time—not me because that’d have scared him off— should buy an enormous canvas, fill balloons with paint, attach them to it, and throw darts until something appeared.

I saw it in The Princess Diaries.

When I saw his expression dropped, my attempts on trying to restore my cool only made it worse when I said, “Or, we could cover our bodies in paint and have sex on the canvas.”

Gone were the admiring eyes that had met mine only an hour before.

My confidence replaced itself with embarrassment flaring, hot and sharp, in my cheeks.

I sank.

And sank.

And sank.

The cocktail bar, cast its yellow light over us as if announcing that the evening had come to an end and that we should all make our way outside.

I said goodbye before he had the chance to say anything at all. Then I turned and left.

Rejection has always sounded louder in my imagination than in other people's mouths.

Across the alley, I lit a cigarette as I watched the door.

Waiting.

Certain his eyes would find me the moment he stepped outside.

When he finally emerged, he was talking to another woman.

My cigarette immediately turned to ash.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, until I convinced myself that stalling wasn’t going to bring him over to the corner where I stood.

“Go.”

“No.”

“Just do it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re making this worse.”

I lifted my hands to my face as though splashing water on it, swept my hair back, and arranged a smile that did not belong to me.

My hand landed on his shoulder, and before a second had passed, his gaze met mine, his eyes already lit with a smile.

First, his pressed his lips against mine.

Then I watched the other woman step aside, her strides long and purposeful.

“I can wait with you until your car arrives.”

Minutes dragged; our silence thickened.

“You really don’t have to wait with me,” I pleaded.

While my mind kept repeating:

You’re being a burden.

Let him go.

I said the very same thing aloud.

He reassured me that I was not a burden.

The conversation repeated itself once more.

I refreshed the Uber page over and over, waiting for someone to accept the ride. When I noticed Nick watching my screen too, I started biting my lip.

“It’s getting late. I don’t want to keep you.”

“Is the driver close? I don’t mind waiting a few more minutes.”

“Umm...”

I twisted the rings around my fingers.

A minute later, my phone lit up.

Your driver will arrive in 15 minutes.

I immediately lowered the brightness and tilted the screen away from him.

“You should go. It’s arriving in three minutes.”

By the end of the night, I had become a burden, if not in his eyes, then certainly in my own.

"Okay. If you don't mind waiting, then I'll go."

My lips parted as though I was about to say something, but all that came was a restrained smile.

“Send me a message when you get home.”

I tried to muster the courage for a simple yes.

The silence stretched.

My gaze drifted toward the sky until I managed to nod.

“Good night,” he said as he turned his back and walked away.

My heart ached, not because he left, but because of how little I thought of myself.

Why shouldn’t he wait with a woman he had spent the entire night kissing while she stood alone in a dark alley after midnight?

My tears blurred my sight as I reached for the car door and threw myself onto the seat.

Not because he had left.

For I had spent the entire night apologising for taking up space.

Every read, share, and recommendation helps more than you might think.

If you’d like to support me but aren’t in a position to purchase a paid subscription, you can also:

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If you’re new here, this is probably the best place to start:

I’ve always been the kind of poet who plays it by the ear instead of structure. While I don’t believe in restrictions in creative exploration, sometimes restrictions can be their own kind of exploration. Today at the seminar in the writing program I’m going to at Edinburgh, I got to learn a form that I’ve been very curious about and wanted to try for a long time: blackout poetry.

A blackout poem begins with an existing page of text. Rather than writing new words, the poet uncovers a poem by erasing the rest, allowing another voice to emerge from within the original. It feels less like writing and more like excavation, as though the poem had been waiting there all along.

The text I used for mine is an excerpt from Physiology: The Science of the Body by Ernest G. Martin that explores one deceptively simple question: What is life?

I hope you enjoy discovering what I found hidden inside it.

Everything I learn eventually finds its way here because I believe knowledge grows when it’s shared. Consider supporting my work by upgrading your paid subscription.

Your support is what keeps this space sustainable and allows me to keep creating things like this for all of us by me keeping learning and keeping it on.

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With love always,

-imi ♡

---

On the sign of life
some sort of living
if not
dead
in living

When the wind is blowing the air full of dead leaves and butterflies,
moving but only part, the butterflies, alive.

So shall we decide which remains
indefinitely?

Is anything to be
judged alive?

Suppose the inhabitants of Mars
sealed
to earth.

Suppose exploring
lakes, and rivers,
they are
to
give up and fly away to Mars.

Not alive, yet, as this little shows,
like living is it?

What the Martian explorers missed was
sight.

Though who is
known to be living is actually
dead.

Within it a living—
how is it
the only
signs of life
becomes lifeless
when awake.

The poem above is only one way of reading it. Paid subscribers can continue below to experience it in its original blackout form and discover the page from which it emerged.

Read more

Today, I took myself on a journey and didn’t return from it the way I expected. My day changed its colours when I found myself standing before a vast green land and thought, perhaps for the first time in a long while, that I had finally arrived at myself.

Then I burst into tears.

What followed was chaos. Inspiration carried me somewhere I hadn’t planned to go. I missed the last train home and found myself stranded, with no idea how I was going to get back.

Looking back, I no longer think it was random.

If, you read The Ruins of Me, you find pieces of yourself scattered between these pages, I hope they return to you the courage to lose yourself without feeling compelled to leave a trace for your return.

Sometimes healing is not becoming the person you used to be. It’s learning to love the stranger who remains after everything has fallen apart.

If my writing speaks to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue creating from a place of depth and truth.

Please help me make my dream come true.

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There comes a moment in life when everything you once knew about yourself feels like a distant dream.

You wake up one day and start thinking of Hansel and Gretel then ask yourself:

Why did they leave breadcrumbs that could become a bird’s meal instead of leaving something permanent to trace their steps back home?

Perhaps breadcrumbs were their way of reassuring themselves that there would be a return while leaving nothing behind still felt like a quiet betrayal.

Perhaps they didn’t want to go home while the path ahead became a door that opened into becoming something new.

The witch, then, meets them inside the candy house, feeding them with sweets, with the taste of what they already knew, numbing their palates to refrain them from recognising the sour taste of disappointment.

Hansel and Gretel feel safe yet equally trapped, like our nervous system that chooses what it knows because uncertainty feels like a threat.

What if the witch was never the villain but their former selves that they quietly outgrew?

What if uncertainty isn’t a danger but an invitation to free ourselves from our mental prisons?

Before coming to Edinburgh, I was drowning in the depths of uncertainty, almost on the verge of breaking.

At times, it even felt like I’d lost myself, and there were no breadcrumbs from the path I followed that could allow me to trace back my steps to the girl I was in love with.

A typical day began with me opening my eyes, still wearing the black lace bodysuit and black shorts I’d worn the night before.

Unable to remember how I’d fallen asleep or carried myself to bed, I woke to the same question every morning:

Where is this life going?

The thought pressed me back beneath the duvet, and all I’d wish for was to drift back to sleep.

Instead, the first rays of sunlight pressed against my eyelids through curtains
left torn since winter, granting the Celestial King permission to interrupt my sleep
while Scorpio recoiled at ten in the morning.

Cursing myself for never getting my curtains fixed, I’d remind myself there were far more important things waiting on my list of priorities. Like the window I shattered at the very beginning of winter, beneath which I spent the entire season teaching my body how to live with the cold.

I’d pick up my hairdryer and hold it beneath my blanket while the warmth began at my feet before climbing towards my knees, chasing away the cold.

When I finally managed to quiet my thoughts, I’d convince myself to get out of bed, I’d throw off the duvet I still slept beneath in July while London baked beneath the summer heat.

My forehead grew damp, as it had every day since summer began, from the heat joining forces with the shame travelling through every cell within me,
when I looked around and saw what my flat had been saying about me.

I’d step over clothes that had become another layer of the floor as I walked, sometimes barefoot, sometimes wearing shoes.

The rest of the day hardly mattered.

I waited,
for evening to arrive,
for red veins to creep across my eyes
when the haze found its way into my blood,
into every cell that craved numbness
instead of being alive.

When night began humming,
I’d escape into the shadows,
swollen beneath the sky,
begging Death to learn my name,
only to be met by silence in return.

I paced the same streets,
walked to remember
while every touch in return
left another wound.

Until the night revealed my tears
when I swallowed each of my dreams
with the next sip,
until my name became foreign
in the mouth of sleep.

Until the sun rose,
until I repeated it
all over again.

Eventually, the recurring whispers in my head grew too loud for me to bear any longer, and maybe for the first time, I stopped trying.

I just lay there.

When something within me screamed loud enough for me to finally realise that I was about to disappear if I had stayed in my flat in Notting Hill, I packed my bags and left my apartment, wishing for something life-changing to happen in Edinburgh.

Now, I’m writing from a place that finally accepts that there might not be something better waiting for me in the future.

I followed the silence
I woke up to in my bed,

while the sound of seagulls
flying above me in St Andrews
met me instead.

Walking down the cobblestone streets
between the brick houses,
my feet felt sure of their next step
over the stone-paved roads
that refused to follow
a straight path ahead.

They brought me to the seaside.

My gaze lingered on the sand first.

Yellow fused into gold,
like the sun that chose not to
offer its glow.

Instead, the clouds took over
while drizzle turned into a storm,
catching me
sitting on the steps
of St Andrews Castle.

I rushed to find shelter
until the wind slowed me down,
bringing life to the tip of my nose,
a glimpse of burning
when the sea salt touched my scars,
reminding me how it felt
to be alive
long before I chose numbness
over being awake.

While the noise dissolved into the melody
of a street artist’s violin,
standing in the alley
beside the Keys Bar,

I stopped
and surrendered to the rain

I didn’t expect to burst into tears when the stone-paved roads of St Andrews took me to a green land.

While I thought of finally arriving at myself, I let go of the pressure I had kept building within me to quiet the earthquakes, even though every structure I had built had already collapsed.

A quiet moment passed between me and myself before my tears asked permission to release themselves.

Sometimes they tend to do that.

Other times, they declare their own freedom while I cry so easily nowadays.

That moment didn’t arrive loudly.

Its quiet made it harder to understand.

While I tried to attribute my tears to something, I realised there wasn’t anywhere to place them.

Instead, there was a quiet but powerful ache that had locked itself into my heart for a while.

I kept it locked, not because I didn’t have the keys, but because I didn’t know which room held the biggest damage.

So I numbed myself altogether instead while life brought me somewhere strange. I’m scared because sometimes I can’t recognise myself. I look in the mirror only to find a stranger looking back at me.

Sometimes I love that stranger.

I talk to her like I can’t with anyone else.

Sometimes I feel sad thinking about her childhood innocence.

My mother used to tell me that I smiled all the time as a child.

I didn’t turn my back on those smiles.

They became the cost of everything I built.

But I feel like no one understands.

That’s why I became quiet, withdrawn into my shell.

Yet somehow, in that stillness, in that quiet, the noise becomes louder.

Or maybe it was always there.

I’m not sure what is which and which is what anymore.

All I know is that my tears arrived like the drizzle that had quickly turned into a storm only moments before.

Not long after, the sun rose over St Andrews while my tears stopped, but not everything within me emptied itself.

I didn’t expect it to.

I stopped expecting things from life when I lost my hope for tomorrow.

I don’t know when it all started, but all I wish is to hug that stranger and tell her:

Please don’t force yourself to smile in public while you cry in the quiet.

If you don’t want others to witness your sorrow, I’ll sit with you a bit longer in the darkness.

I see you crashing under the weight of what you promised yourself to be.

Don’t try to lift it.

Let your tears wash away its ruins.

Even if you aren’t born anew tomorrow.

Because you tried, and I understand if you no longer can.

I’m glad you took a moment and let me have the pen.

Even if I don’t have a tomorrow, please remember: whenever you feel tired, you’re always welcome in this land.

Come, rest a while. I will forever hold your hand.

Blame me, but please don’t resent yourself.

Forever yours,

Stranger

I thought this essay would take an afternoon.

Instead, it took the entire day.

Every time I reached the final paragraph, I found myself returning to the beginning. I kept changing a sentence here, removing a paragraph there, convinced the problem was the ending.

It wasn’t.

It was that I had overlooked where it all began.

The essay kept resisting me because I had been circling the same story for years without ever saying what it was really about.

I wrote it anyway and chose to share it for free, like most of my work, because I believe stories are meant to travel. Sometimes they help us understand each other. Sometimes they help us understand ourselves.

If this piece stays with you after you’ve finished reading it, if you find a part of yourself somewhere inside these words, I hope you’ll consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

Writing has given me a way to transform some of the hardest parts of my life into something that can reach another person and make them feel less alone. Every subscription helps me keep doing that.

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We are all carrying things we rarely speak about. This essay is one of mine.

And if you’ve ever found comfort, recognition, hope, or companionship in my words, thank you for being here.

It means more than you know.

With love always,

-imi

We’re all addicted to something.

Some addictions belong to being human.

Others are handed to us long before we know how to refuse them.

Love.

Attention.

People.

To be chosen.

To be seen.

Humans will reach for almost anything to make their existence feel meaningful.

I grew up watching addiction so closely that it felt less like a choice and more like an inheritance.

When my father started smoking, I had just started going to elementary school. During those mornings when I woke up at 7 am to catch the school bus, the kitchen would already be covered in smoke due to my father’s smoking pace.

“You really don’t need a lighter, Father; you could light your next cigarette with the one you finished smoking,” I’d often joke with him.

Yet, he also had the strongest will.

He’d choose a day to quit, and while none of us believed he could, he would.

I cannot say the same for my older sister, who became a drug addict during the year I graduated from university.

The evening after my bachelor’s graduation, we went to dinner with my family, but my older sister was missing.

When my younger sister finally told my father what was going on, I saw his devastation in his tiny gestures. The way he bent over to reach for the button that fell from his shirt. The slowness of his movements, the way his eyes were filled with tears.

There was no button on the floor.

That was the time when I had to erase every ounce of mercy I had for someone I loved until she recovered and became one of the most compassionate people I know when the doctor told her she was one sniff away from taking the golden hit.

The following years, another addiction grew in our family as my father didn’t flinch, every weekday, between eight in the morning and five in the evening, while his mind drifted through columns of numbers rising and falling.

His stock market addiction carried him somewhere we couldn’t follow.

He could look directly at us without ever really seeing us, hear our voices only in fragments. Eventually, we learned not to interrupt a man who had already left the room.

Until a month ago, when I visited my hometown and my mother asked my father to drive me to get a new ID card because, of course, I had lost mine in London while running after a bus.

Following the loudest sigh, my father stood up from the yellow couch that had slowly begun to sink inward while his eyes remained fixed on his phone screen as he checked on his stocks.

Our car ride was horrendous.

We kept missing the right turns, inevitably turning the journey into a rather sour city sightseeing tour as my father’s eyes darted back and forth between his phone screen and the road while he drove like a crazy taxi driver.

I’d enjoyed driving along the Mediterranean coast, seeing my beautiful city, since it had been a while since I had last visited my hometown if it weren’t for my father who couldn’t stop complaining.

He was convinced that my mother plotted against him.

There’s something rather heartbreaking about your father seeing a moment he gets to spend with you as someone else’s vengeance.

According to him, my mother was terribly annoyed that he never left the house, never taking his eyes off his phone.

There might have been some truth in that.

His shouting grew louder, eventually targeting me while I silently cried, turning my face toward the window.

When we finally found the address, the officer couldn’t process my application because I had brought an old photograph.

I told my father that everything had gone well and that they would post my ID to our home address; otherwise, he would have kept blaming my mother for another hour.

In truth, my father had two addictions.

The stock market and blaming my mother, which was far more long-lasting.

Once, when he missed a flight, he called her from another city to say it was her fault.

Everyone in my family reached for something different to fill the same absence.

My father believed success could replace everything childhood had taken from him: his mother, who died when he was young; the security that was never a birthright but something he had to earn; and a family whose love often seemed to arrive only when he paid their bills.

My sister spent years seeking the approval of a father who rarely seemed to see her.

Drugs made her impossible to overlook.

I wasn’t much different.

My addiction started writing itself long before I could understand disappointment, when I learned what it felt like to be one.

Being a girl didn’t stop my father from loving me more than anyone else in this world, even though he wholeheartedly wished for a son.

Yet, growing up beneath my father’s perfectionism taught my mind to measure itself against an impossible scale.

I constantly fought with the idea of not being enough. Proving that I was worthy of being kept became my lifelong quest. With that seed planted at my core, I ended up never feeling truly satisfied with my life.

Yet that unconscious motivation shaped the way I moved through the world. I listened, asked genuine questions and never minimised someone else’s pain.

It was easy to make other people feel seen.

Much harder to notice when I had disappeared from my own life.

When my father called everything I had built a failure, I realised I could never earn the approval I had spent my life chasing.

That realisation didn’t free me.

It gave me permission to rest.

Perhaps the approval I had been seeking all along was my own permission to admit that I was tired.

Tired of guilt.

Blame.

Constant motion.

Disappointments.

While I spent years trying to fill an absence, the things I reached for only deepened it.

I never stopped believing I deserved a better life.

I only stopped noticing what it was costing the life I already had.

Perhaps that was the real addiction.

Not proving I was worthy of being kept.

Abandoning the only person who believed I deserved to be fought for.

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Each week, I’ll invite a paid subscriber to join me for a live conversation. We’ll talk about ideas, experiences, projects, creativity, psychology, relationships, and whatever else feels alive in the moment.

Whether you’re a writer, artist, entrepreneur, psychologist, creator, or simply someone with a story to tell, this is an opportunity to share your ideas and work with both this community and the wider Substack ecosystem.

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Don’t forget to tune in tomorrow, July 23, at 6 PM EST/ 11 PM BST alongside my co-host !

What began with T.S. Eliot and Modernism somehow found its way through Hemingway, Stoicism, toxic masculinity, unforgettable teachers, high school memories, military life, neurological recovery, and the astonishing things our bodies are capable of.

Somewhere along the way, I realised we had quietly stopped talking about books.

We were talking about people.

About the ideas that shape us long after we’ve left the classroom. About the teachers we never forget. About how philosophy can guide us, but never fully explain us. About the stories we inherit, the ones we resist, and the ones we eventually choose to tell.

One of my favourite moments wasn’t about a writer at all. It was hearing how a single teacher, decades later, could still be shaping the way someone sees the world. It reminded me that we often underestimate the quiet impact we leave on one another. Sometimes a conversation, a classroom, or even a single sentence outlives the person who first spoke it.

That’s what I love most about Beyond the Page. Not because we discuss literature, but because literature so often becomes a doorway into everything else.

Thank you, , for bringing your curiosity, generosity, and extraordinary breadth of knowledge to today’s conversation. It felt less like an interview and more like two readers following every interesting thought until it led somewhere unexpected.

And thank you to every one of you who spent part of your Sunday with us. Whether you asked questions, listened quietly, or joined us from somewhere across the world, you helped shape today’s conversation more than you know.

If you couldn’t join us live, I hope you enjoy the replay and, somewhere in it, find a question that stays with you long after the conversation ends.

---

Beyond the Page with Imi is a new paid subscriber benefit that I hope to shine a light on the remarkable people in this community.

Each week, I’ll invite a paid subscriber to join me for a live conversation. We’ll talk about ideas, experiences, projects, creativity, psychology, relationships, and whatever else feels alive in the moment.

Whether you’re a writer, artist, entrepreneur, psychologist, creator, or simply someone with a story to tell, this is an opportunity to share your ideas and work with both this community and the wider Substack ecosystem.

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For whoever needs these words, I’m glad they found you.

There comes a quiet moment in many lives when wonder begins to make room for expectation, and play slowly gives way to performance. We seldom notice the child disappearing until we begin looking for them again.

This poem is my attempt to leave a trail of light she might one day choose to follow home.

Becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue creating from a place of depth and truth. It may seem like a small gesture, but it sustains the quiet work behind every word you read here, and maybe something even bigger in the future.

Please help my dreams come true.

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The voice in the audio belongs to me.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear yourself reflected back through art, I create custom songs for my paid subscribers. Personal songs and spoken pieces shaped around their writing, and sung by me.

Ma petite fille,

please,
come back.

Would you,
if I mapped out the stars
to trace your path?

I promise
the moon
will never ask you
to divide
your light

perfectly

like your fingers
pressing against piano keys
until you learned to ask,

“Father, can we take a break?”

turning your life into a discipline
while all you asked for
was play.

Ma petite fille,

what if
I promised
for the morning sunlight
to rest upon
your mother's
blonde hair,

like when the sun brushed my legs
on Arthur's Seat
while I stayed with the wind.

So did the grass.

Some green.
Alive
and fresh.

Some look like hay.
Short.
Yellow
and plain.

A moment passed,
then the wind began to sing,
whistling through the clouds,

asking for a dance
when the melody
of being myself played.

Il est trop tard.
Je ne suis plus celle que j'étais

like when I scratched the floor
with my nails,
trying to pick up the card
while still holding a cigarette
between my fingertips
and wedging a water bottle
between my arm
and my waist,

cool water
spilled from the bottle
onto my knees,

smiling,
with no gaze
to press
click

to remember
later,

forever

being

myself

when no one
was watching.

Il est trop tard.
Je ne suis plus celle que j'étais.

Like a mayflower,
favouring only one season
to blossom

during those cold winter nights
I kept waiting
for summer

while it only arrived
as another winter.

Ma petite fille,

would you spare me
your smile
if I promised
never to leave you alone
when February arrives again?

Ma petite fille,

though my longing
to hear your giggles again
began turning into despair,

would you spare me
the joy of waking

beside

you

tomorrow,

without your mother's face
appearing before you,
as she says,

"Don't frown.
The marks
will never leave
your face,"

without your scream
that echoed
long after the voice
had fallen silent
when your babysitter
dropped that burning coal
on your throat,

without your gaze
drifting toward
the ceiling,
never giving permission
for your tears
to trail down your cheeks.

Maybe,
you wanted
to leave,

but what if
I loved you
the way I love
my dragonfly necklace,

asking

nothing more of me

than to

just be.

Ma petite fille,

if I became
your dragonfly

reviendrais-tu
auprès

de moi ?

Every read, share, and recommendation helps more than you might think.

If you’d like to support me but aren’t in a position to purchase a paid subscription, you can also:

♡ Support me through:

Buy Me a Coffee

♡ Become a free subscriber and join my community.

♡ Leave a comment and join the conversation

Leave a comment

♡ Restack the post if it resonated with you.

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If you’re new here, this is probably the best place to start:

Beyond the Page with Imi is a new paid subscriber benefit that I hope to shine a light on the remarkable people in this community.

Each week, I’ll invite a paid subscriber to join me for a live conversation. We’ll talk about ideas, experiences, projects, creativity, psychology, relationships, and whatever else feels alive in the moment.

Whether you’re a writer, artist, entrepreneur, psychologist, creator, or simply someone with a story to tell, this is an opportunity to share your ideas and work with both this community and the wider Substack ecosystem.

Anyone can watch, join the chat, ask questions, and be part of the conversation.

Don’t forget to tune in this Friday, July 19th, at 1 PM EST alongside my co-host !

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I poured a lot of thought into this one.

And I didn’t hold back a single drop of honesty.

What started as a reflection on what it means to be a “bitch” became a story about projection, people-pleasing, identity, and the subtle ways we surrender ourselves in exchange for belonging.

I hope it finds the people who need it.

I don’t think writing changes us.

I think writing reveals what we’ve been trying not to see.

Every essay I publish begins with a question I can’t stop thinking about. Then comes the reading, the psychology, the philosophy, the conversations with myself, and eventually, if I’m lucky, a piece like this.

If my writing speaks to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue creating from a place of depth and truth. It may seem like a small gesture, but it sustains the quiet work behind every word you read here, and maybe something even bigger in the future.

Please help my dreams come true.

Because if I could write all day, every day, I’d do it with joy.

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The first time someone called me a bitch, I was in seventh grade.

The summer before, I had my first boyfriend.

For a week.

A week of occasional texts. Never any calls. Going on a date wasn’t possible either because I left my hometown, Mersin, for Istanbul a few days after he asked me to be his girlfriend.

That day, he was going to be at the mall with his friends. He invited me and asked me to bring a friend. Unaware that the friend I brought, Begüm, secretly had a crush on him, I walked with her towards the bowling alley and saw him standing there with his large group of friends.

Adrenaline.

My heart immediately began racing.

Instead of walking over to them, Begüm and I hid our faces and somehow found ourselves sitting on a pile of tyres in the mall’s car park.

I spiralled, convinced I had already ruined everything. Deep down, I didn’t want to be the reason it all fell apart by not turning out to be the cool girl I imagined he was hoping for.

As Begüm and I sat there inventing theories, our attention turned to my phone, its screen lighting up both our faces in the dark car park.

“I’m sorry you had to leave.”

It was him.

Maybe I hadn’t ruined it after all, I thought.

I remember Begüm supervising every message I sent and received, editing my texts and giving herself the final say on what I should reply.

“Will you be my girlfriend?”

After we broke up, Begüm confessed that she had left the mall that day with a tear trailing down her cheek.

Shortly afterwards, we had a fight over something I no longer remember.

Among the many insults she sent me over text, one word appeared more than any other.

Bitch.

I kept questioning what I had done and what being a bitch actually meant.

All I had done was date the boy she liked and disagree with her on things that made her unhappy.

How did that make me a bitch?

What did being a bitch mean?

I wasn’t called a bitch for a long time after that.

The year I graduated from university, I had a boyfriend.

I wasn’t in love with him, but I don’t think I had ever loved anyone the way I loved him. The kind of love where someone else’s smile becomes your greatest reward.

Yet, when the novelty of first love faded, I began to suffocate.

I started leaving myself notes on my phone whenever I felt trapped, so I wouldn’t talk myself out of breaking up with him, since gaslighting my judgement was my second nature.

13 August 2021

You want out of this. The longer you spend with him, the more trapped you feel by what he says and how he acts. Nothing in you wants to meet him halfway.

Yet I kept doubting my judgement.

Way too often.

If I left then, something beautiful would remain untouched while we, in time, accepted that it was time to part ways.

Instead, I stayed while, in truth, I had already left internally months earlier.

I started catching feelings for someone else.

Someone who would later become the one that got away.

Yet I couldn’t break up with my boyfriend without making sure I had enough proof I shouldn’t stay.

I never saw the captain again after telling him that I was in a relationship.

He never called me a bitch.

The disappointment that crossed his face did.

I never got to tell him that I was ready to break up with my boyfriend.

So I didn’t.

Yet if there’s anything worse than heartbreak, it is experiencing it while in a relationship with someone else.

I cheated on my boyfriend later that summer with someone else, and that still remains one of the biggest regrets of my life.

The worst part, though, wasn’t cheating.

It was never telling him.

I knew what betrayal meant to him.

He didn’t know until he unfortunately found out through a friend and called while I was walking to the gym. I picked up the phone casually, and he interrupted me, his voice boiling with anger.

“You are a fucking bitch.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Then he blocked me everywhere.

I knew he was devastated.

So was I.

Not because he called me a bitch.

A moment can change your state. It doesn't get to rewrite your character.

But because I knew he would leave believing I had never loved him.

I had.

By the end, though, my love had become something softer, more like the love you have for a best friend. While he stayed because he still believed in our future, I stayed because I hadn’t yet found the courage to leave.

I stood there, in front of the gym, staring at my phone for a while.

I wanted to understand how I was feeling, but whenever I reached for it, all I grasped was emptiness. Part of me felt as though this was the universe’s way of, once again, sealing our break-up by making sure we never got back together.

Shortly afterwards, panic surged.

He blocked me everywhere. It was killing me not to have a way of adding my narrative.

Yet the narrative I wanted to tell wasn’t true.

I wanted to have the chance to rewrite what had happened.

More than convincing him, I wanted to convince myself that he was wrong.

To protect the story I’ve been telling myself.

We didn’t speak for two years after that.

Yet I couldn’t stop wrestling with the undoing of my entire self-story, pierced by a look that silently insisted I was a bad person.

A bitch, maybe.

Later that year, I decided to go to Sri Lanka to teach English to kindergarten students while living with a local family.

I needed distance.

From there and from them.

Most importantly, I needed distance from the person I had begun to believe I was.

So I flew to the other side of the world.

Being away helped.

So did reading The Dispossessed.

It made me wonder whether I had spent years treating identity as though it were a possession.

Something that needed to be defended.

Protected.

Kept intact.

I had become so attached to proving or disproving that I was a bitch that I stopped asking who I was becoming and started obsessing over who I should never become.

Letting go of an identity wasn’t a loss. The less I tried to possess a fixed version of myself, the less I was possessed by everyone else's version of me.

When nothing belonged to me, I belonged to no one.

My worth could never be measured by what I managed to keep, but by what I set in motion; the words I spoke, the hands I held, the traces of care I left behind. Nothingness became spaciousness, a place where change, healing, and new beginnings could enter.

I returned from Sri Lanka more peaceful.

Slowly and quietly, I moved away from living inside the expectations I had built for myself.

I stopped trying to prove I wasn’t the person I feared I had become.

Instead, I slowly let go of a self I had already outgrown.

When I moved to London, no one knew me through the identities I had carried for years.

For the first time, I had the freedom to meet myself before anyone else’s expectations could.

When the version of myself I'd spent years suppressing finally had space to breathe, I realised how often I had mistaken silence for kindness, compliance for love, and self-erasure for virtue.

My life had become hijacked by “musts”, “needs”, and “shoulds”. Society had already given me enough expectations. Somehow, I kept inventing more.

This winter, I felt something unfamiliar surge within.

Or maybe emptying itself.

The emotions I had swallowed didn’t disappear. They became impossible to silence. I became less tolerant of noise, less willing to absorb pressure, and no longer willing to perform emotional labour.

Being responsive became a burden. Messages suffocated me. I delayed replies for months.

It unsettled the people-pleaser in me, yet for the first time, I met myself with compassion instead of criticism.

I was so busy trying to change the way the world saw me that I never thought to change the way I saw myself.

Once I did, other people’s opinions no longer felt like verdicts.

The world never stopped judging me.

Some draped me in admiration. Others wrapped me in suspicion.

Either way, they were responding as much to their own stories as they were to me. I simply stopped treating their judgements as definitions.

After years of searching for evidence before leaving, before believing what I already knew, I met someone who became the final proof that I had stopped waiting for permission to trust myself.

We met through mutual friends, and our conversations came easily.

At first, he seemed nice.

Before long, I thought I’d found a good friend.

I thought he understood me.

Looking back, I realise he had been studying me: my writing, my fears, my ambitions, my wounds.

I mistook attention for care.

Then he told me he was in love with me.

“I love you too,” I said, “but only ever as a friend.”

When reality failed to match the story he had already written in his head, affection turned into rage. Suddenly I was fake. Cruel. A coward. A bigot who should die alone. My appearance became something I had supposedly weaponised against him.

“Your writing sucks, by the way. The only reason anyone reads you is that they have this misconception that you’re attractive or sophisticated,” he wrote in one of many relentless emails that still arrive in my inbox despite blocking him everywhere.

Yet I was no longer interested in proving myself to anyone.

While he kept turning my vulnerabilities into ammunition, using everything I had trusted him with to make me doubt myself, I realised he had never wanted to know me.

He wanted a version of me that belonged to him.

I used to belong to the roles people needed me to be.

My positivity spilt into other people’s lives, feeding them while emptying me.

Until finally, when I emptied everything that wasn't mine, I had room for myself.

For the first time, I felt free.

Free to be anything.

To do anything.

To hold countless possibilities, a love that needs no searching.

When reality didn’t match his illusions, he called me a bitch.

Only then did I realise I’d been asking the wrong question all along.

The question was never whether I was a bitch.

It was why that became the word people reached for whenever I refused to become who they wanted me to be.

The same part of me became something different in everyone else’s story.

To one friend, it looked like jealousy.

To my ex, betrayal.

To someone else, rejection.

None of them were describing me.

They were naming the shape of their own hurt.

The word never described my character.

It described the moment I stepped outside the role they had written for me.

Every story demands a villain.

I’d rather be the villain in someone else’s story than disappear from my own.

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About This Space: For Those Who Refuse To Stay Unseen

I write for people who feel deeply and refuse to stay unseen.

What began as a chat about writing somehow wandered through economics and writing, played music, wandered into psychedelics, reflected on the stories we carry, and somehow found ourselves laughing far more than either of us expected. It was the kind of conversation that refused to stay in one lane, moving effortlessly between curiosity, humour, vulnerability, and complete unpredictability.

The kind that reminds me the most memorable moments are rarely the ones you plan.

Thank you, , for being exactly who you are. Thank you for saying yes, for bringing your wit, your curiosity, your music, and your ability to make every conversation feel wonderfully unpredictable.

I couldn’t have imagined a better person to share today’s episode with.

And to every one of you who joined us live, thank you. Whether you asked a question, left a comment, laughed with us, or simply listened quietly in the background, you were part of the conversation.

I still remember sitting with the idea of starting this series, wondering whether I could pull it off or whether people would show up. Yet, seeing so many familiar names returning week after week, while new faces continue to find this little corner of the internet, fills me with a gratitude I’ll never take for granted.

Every episode reminds me that this wasn’t just worth beginning.

This was meant to be.

And that’s entirely because of all of you.

I hope to see you next week and in the meantime, let’s keep creating. ✨

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Pride

()

It's lonely, at the top
But then, you couldn't possibly conceive of that

Could you?

Wrath

()

I was already breathing
when mountains still believed
they would never crumble,

when rivers had not yet learned
the patience of stone.

I have lived
inside broken promises,
inside kings
who called conquest justice,
inside mothers
who buried children
and found no language left
except fire.

I do not arrive shouting.
I enter quietly,
like winter finding
the smallest crack
beneath a door.

I ask only
to be remembered.

Pride

With your limited faculties for imagination
And an obvious disdain
Towards achieving anything
Look at my awards, these accolades
Merely the pinnacle
So deserved
By the obvious victor
I wear the laurels for a reason
I earned them solely for showing up
Attendance providing proof
There's no other, before me

Why need a god
when you can stare
at your own reflection all day?

Greed

()

True happiness in wealth and things
sometimes the power that it brings
yet when you’ve managed to accumulate
enough to set up your own state

those riches don’t feel such a score,
greed teaches that you still need more
it worms its way into your soul,
and ever more becomes your goal.

Pride

Something you can witness
But seldom perform, without being worthy
The truth is here to see, given a shape
Manifest in intellect, in gift
I made myself
Talent wrought in flesh
Capabilities barely needed honing
Crafts needn’t refinement
My wants came first, and always will
Fie! For your mewling, wait your turn
And the same for whatever arguments
You want to make
I’m way ahead of you, you’re mistaken
Setting aside the fact
That I cannot be wrong
It’s quite impossible, you see
To find a flaw or a failing, in me

Wrath

Do not mistake me
for the quick spark
that leaps from insult
or the hot word
thrown carelessly across a room.

I am older.

Sloth

()

Beware the sin that never chases,
It lulls with every sweetened yawn.
It asks for only little graces,
Until all your days are gone.

Pride

Your eyes and wits, we know
Are lesser than mine
Bright lines of fire
Like dawning light
I wear like a crown, behind the horizon
To spare your eyes
The sight of radiance
Like a morning star

Greed

Nothing stops this chief pursuit,
you’ll stand in an expensive suit
and order wars, and kill a few,
their blood it means nothing to you.

As long as it brings wealthy end,
you’ll even sell out your best friend,
for there’s nothing quite like the sensation
of that non-stop accumulation.

It’s easy arrogance spreads through your veins
a position it holds and maintains,
so all you want is ‘more more more’
making you a kind of whore

bending your self every way,
to ensure you get more every day,

Gluttony

()

I was a seed,

overwatered,

chasing sunlight
with a hunger
that never stilled,

growing
beyond enough,

inward
and outward,

like a stomach,
expanding
with each offering,

refusing to collapse
back into its smaller shape.

Wrath

One wound.
One humiliation.
One betrayal
repeated until memory
hardens into scripture.

Then I begin my work.
I polish every grievance
until it gleams
like sacred metal.

I sharpen every silence
into a blade.
I teach the heart
to rehearse old injuries
so faithfully
that yesterday becomes
more real
than tomorrow.

Gluttony

Mistaking my expectations
for a future
never promised.

My days stretched wide,
but never settled
as I chose illusions
over presence
and fell in love
with possibility,

romanticising
the joy
that vanished
when the moment
disappeared,

leaving
my starving soul
ravenous,
without allowing
even Persephone’s garden
to stir
my wonder.

Wrath

Soon
the blood forgets
its own warmth.

The hands
can no longer distinguish
between justice
and revenge.

Every stranger
wears the face
of an ancient enemy.

Every kindness
looks like deception.

Every sunrise
becomes merely
another hour
in which to continue
the war.

Envy

()

An invite cataclysms through my letterbox,
falls onto the ochre-red and silken threads
of my imported Persian carpet.
It carries the weight of something important.
Envelope China-white,
handwritten and addressed:
“To my dearest Lou.”
The ink, the detonation of a fountain tip,
smudged by a sprawling hand,
in twisted italics, verdigris green.
Upon it is listed a Mayfair address,
which I know to be expensive.
I must say I am impressed;
he has moved fast, my brother.
Once a connoisseur of white lines,
a collector of artisan prostitutes,
a fine investor of our family’s inheritance.
Now, no doubt, in a sleek Savile Row suit.
I can imagine him: tanned hand held out,
Welcoming his hungry guests.
A little golden crucifix around his neck.
God bless, if he’s able.

Wrath

Wrath is patient.

Far more patient
than mercy.

Mercy grows tired.

Forgiveness limps.

Hope sometimes
falls asleep.

Wrath waits.

It keeps perfect records.

It counts
every omission,
every laugh,
every turning away,
every door
closed too late
or opened
too soon.

It remembers
what memory itself
would gladly surrender.

It whispers,
You owe them.
And the whisper
sounds so much
like justice
that few
ever question
whose voice
they have begun
to speak.

Sloth

They say she met it late one night,
When moonlight dressed the floor in white.
It wore no horns to stir her fear,
It simply smiled and hovered near.

Wrath

Look long enough
into wrath
and you will discover
it does not wish
to kill your enemy.

That would end
its purpose.

It wants them alive,
forever guilty,
forever standing
at the center
of the courtroom
inside your skull.

The sentence
is never carried out.

Lust

()

They say my name
through clenched teeth,

while their bodies
keep better records,
their skin remembering
what their minds pretend to forget.

I’m the silence
that falls between two strangers
when their eyes meet
and neither one remembers
how to breathe

Greed

and there is nothing you’ll refuse,
for you’re just greeds’ plaything to use.

When you’re gone,
objects are all you’ll leave
you won’t be one that many people grieve,
greed will continue and infect others too,
so, more misery will grow, anew.

Wrath

Only renewed.
Again.
Again.
Again.

Until years
are nothing more
than circles
around a single wound.

Cities have burned
because of less.

Families
have vanished.

Kingdoms
have taught children
to inherit
the unfinished rage
of grandparents
whose names
they no longer remember.

Wrath calls this
tradition.

History
often applauds.

Yet beneath
its magnificent speeches,
beneath banners,
anthems,
and righteous declarations,
there remains
a frightened child
still asking
why no one came.

Sloth

It stroked her hair with gentle hand,
As mothers soothe their child’s sleep.
It asked no vow, made no command,
Its promises were soft and deep.

“Rest now,” it whispered. “The dawn can wait.
The world has never mourned one day.
Let tomorrow bend to your weight.
Lie down a while and drift away.”

She woke to find the morning cold,
Yet nothing seemed amiss at all.
Her bones just felt a little old,
A little slower in the hall.

Each evening found it by her side,
Its patient fingers through her hair.
It hummed until the hours died,
Then tucked her gently into prayer.

The books remained upon the shelf,
Their spines rested beneath the dust.
Slowly misplaced bits of herself,
As bright ambitions turned to rust.

It drank tomorrow sip by sip,
Before tomorrow could begin.
It praised each dream she’d let slip,
Then thanked her with a tender grin.

It stitched small weights beneath her gown,
So every step became a climb.
She thought the world had pulled her down.
And it knew she’d give it all her time.

The windows dimmed with gathering gray.
The garden bowed beneath the frost.
She watched the seasons fade away,
Yet never counted what she’d lost.

One evening, standing pale and still,
She faced the mirror’s waiting stare.
She searched with all her fading will.
It was a stranger that met her there.

Lust

The reason your pulse
suddenly becomes a drumbeat
between your legs.

The reason your hands,
so confident a moment ago,
ache to know the weight of someone’s hips.

I’m why you notice
the freckle near someone’s mouth,
and suddenly wonder
how it would taste under your tongue.

Why the curve of a shoulder
makes you think of teeth marks.

Why the pulse beneath warm skin
invites fingers to press down, hard.

Without me,
your family tree
ends with you.

Every generation
began with two people
who wanted more
than conversation,
who found words inadequate
for what their bodies demanded.

Gluttony

My body kept
what should have
withered,

never realising
that loss
often arrived
in the shape of

the next bite,

grieving
the dissatisfaction

I’d feel
once it was
finished.

The next cigarette,

I hid
in my high school backpack,
to enjoy my food in peace,

already mourning
the cigarette
burning down
to its tip,

before my meal
had even ended.

The next trip

I was abandoned
on a Greek island
by a French man,

only to be texting
another guy,
turning into a ghost
the moment
our lips met.

The next lover,

who said,
“I am in love with
my ex-girlfriend,”

Lust

They praise love.

Love is the version
fit for written speeches.

I’m the rough draft.

The first unbearable hunger.

The glance that lingers on lips,
on throats,
on the way fabric stretches across thighs.

The air between two people
that grows thick enough to swallow.

Love sends flowers.

I make someone
replay a smile until morning,
their own hand tracing the memory
of another’s touch on their skin.

Love writes vows.

I keep you awake,
wondering how another person
would sound saying your name
muffled against a pillow.

Love builds the home.

I’m the reason the bed squeaks,
the reason the shower runs too long,
the reason there are fingerprints
on the foggy bathroom mirror.

Now they tell you
to be careful.

Measure every word.

Count every glance.

Keep your admiration
locked behind your teeth.

Everyone walks on eggshells,
afraid that wanting
will be mistaken for taking,
that the heat in your belly
has become something
to apologize for.

So compliments die
before they’re spoken.

Curiosity is mistaken
for guilt.

People become spectators
inside their own bodies,
strangers to their own desires.

I never asked
to wear shame
like a coat.

I never demanded
that desire
replace respect.

I only asked
that you stop treating
your own arousal
like a curse.

Wrath

Wrath builds cathedrals
from unanswered cries.

Their stained glass
is beautiful.

Their foundations
are bones.

And when at last
the fire has consumed
everything it promised
to protect,
when victory stands
alone
among ashes,

Wrath smiles.

Not because
it has won.

Because now
there is enough ruin
to begin again.

Gluttony

The next achievement,
interrupted
by a body
that refused
to keep pace.

The next version of me,
that never left
while I shought
to belong
through the roles
people needed
me to be.

Envy

I arrive at the fall of a sultry London evening
and join the glittering procession into the reception.
Champagne and Scotch are borne
in crystal, anointed on silver trays.
Red-raw slices of roast beef, silver calf fat dripping
off serrated steel serving knives.
A congregation of waiters wait on our sins.
I see his lover’s predatory nails,
shellacked, emerald and bejewelled.
Ruby-pursed lips, her cinder eyes
sumptuous with contempt.
I realise, I knew her! Perhaps, maybe years ago,
we’d spent a little time together
and then I discarded her.
Now here she is, wrapped around my brother,
luxuriating in my family’s wealth.

They look happy. Well, we shall see.
Father greets me, squeezes my shoulder.
“Son, please forgive him for the sin of greed.”
I speak: “I have been here since he left.
And he almost lost us everything!
Striving through nights and days,
I helped you build it back.
That whole bitter year I barely saw
my wife or daughter, save to wake them
or watch them dream. Now you embrace him?
You cast me aside so easily?”
“Because I love him,” Father says,
“And I love you too. You are brothers.”
So what, then, is a beloved to do?

Lust

Notice beauty.

Let your breath catch.

Feel your body answer.

There is nothing sinful
about the flush that rises to your chest,
the tightening of your nipples,
the dampness that spreads
when your imagination runs wild.

Only what you choose
to do after the spark.

I’ve carried blame
for crimes
that belonged to power.

For hands
that confused hunger
with ownership.

For people
who never learned
that “no” is not a challenge
and “maybe” is not permission.

Those ghosts
were never mine.

I am recognition.

The instant
another human being
becomes impossible
to ignore,
when you can almost feel
their skin against yours
from across the room.

Everything that follows
belongs to character.

So stop speaking my name
like an apology.

Say it
the way you say
freedom.

The way you say
summer
after a brutal winter.

The way you finally exhale
after holding your breath
for far too long.

I’ve inspired paintings,
poems,
songs,
children,
cities,
and every future
that began
because one person
looked at another
and thought,

I want to know
what you sound like
when you lose control.

Call me dangerous.

So is every honest thing
worth living for.

Call me reckless.

I’ve watched fear
leave far more beds empty
than desire ever has.

I am lust.

Not the enemy
you were warned about.

Only the oldest voice
inside your ribs,

still reminding you

that another body

was never meant
to leave you indifferent,

but to make you wonder
how it would feel
to have their legs tangled with yours

until morning.

Sloth

The morning came with soft sunlight.
No footsteps stirred the lifeless room.
The house remained as still as night,
Perfumed with lavender and gloom.

They dressed her all in linen fair,
And spoke of burdens left unnamed.
They brushed each silver strand of hair,
As though exhaustion were to blame.

They laid her gently into earth,
With whispered prayers and lowered eyes.
They praised her silent, patient worth,
Beneath indifferent autumn skies.

Each mourner cried what needed said,
But one shadow lazed at her stone.
It stroked the strands upon her head,
Admiring what it once had owned.

It left the grave without a sound,
No footprint marked the sodden clay.
Among the mourners gathered round,
It found a weary soul to prey.

It paused beside a grieving face,
Whose tired eyes had lost their light.
It smiled with slow, familiar grace,
Another soul to claim tonight.

It leaned to whisper in his ear,
And reached to tuck one strand just right.
He felt roll down his cheek a tear,
It knew this night sealed his plight.

Envy

The weight of a thing,
she taught,
is not its mass alone.
There is density too:
so then how much matter can be
accumulated into the space of a single heart?
How shall we assay hate?
How shall we calculate
the gravity of envy?
How fast is the dark?
I shall play my part.
“Of course, Father. Take a seat.
I’ll take mine soon. I need to eat.”
I think it is often reported that people
are seldom murdered by strangers.
At last for supper, we are arranged
along a varnished table,
polished dark like a window at dusk.
Seated, we begin to eat our meat
as the servers slice it, piece by piece.
I can only observe my brother
and his lover at the head of us all,

smiling with such casual beauty
it makes my life ugly.
I begin to think of shrieking bombs striking roofs,
of walls collapsing inward,
of teeth shattering like boiled sweets,
of this accursed house entirely disassembled.

Gluttony

Blinding myself
to the borrowed identities
I polished,

without realising
how drained
I’d been left

Envy

Our ashes thrown into the air like confetti.
Shall I sprinkle crushed glass into the hors d’oeuvres,
or else splash cyanide into the Moët?

At that prophetic moment,
my brother Adam stands. He drowns in his aperitif
and clears his throat.
“I have an announcement. Eva and I,
we are engaged.”
My smile, an accelerating wound
that laughter expands, exponentially.
The room nauseates and begins to clap.
I think of my empty bed, the shadows that I now possess,
cold creased sheets that keep me company.
I ponder how I did not want her,
not then. But now, so much more
than I ever had before.
Perhaps as great as my hate for him.
They have sublimed into the same thing.

Envy then, it must be the original,
the Genesis of every other sin.
The perfect love before the fall,
sundered when the divine’s gaze
fell and split upon a mortal.
Why choose ice then,
when we can choose fire?
Why know love,
when we can know desire?

I stand up, cut glass in my hand.
It bears the light, so precisely,
on its silver rim.
The room looks to me
as an orchestra to its conductor.
But oh, I have such plans for them.

Such plans, even the devil cannot conceive,
for angels dreamt of envy.
“A toast then to the happy couple!”
I shall make sure
they are all buried
beneath the rubble

Gluttony

without pausing
to take stock,

without ever believing
that hunger

for more

might cost
me

everything.

I didn’t flourish.
I rotted.

Beneath
excess.

Author’s Note

This is, without question, the most ambitious project I’ve ever published.

For weeks, I found myself haunted by a single question:

What would my life have looked like if I’d caught that flight?

Instead of answering it with one essay, I answered it with two.

This project is called Ms. Nobody.

It follows two versions of the same woman whose lives split from a single moment. One catches the flight to Prague. The other doesn’t and, almost by accident, ends up in Edinburgh instead.

Both stories are written as though they truly happened.

Neither version knows she’s living the better life.

Writing this meant imagining two complete summers, two emotional journeys, and two entirely different versions of who I might have become. It became part memoir, part thought experiment, and part tribute to one of my favourite films, Mr. Nobody.

I’ve never attempted anything this ambitious before, and it demanded far more time, thought, and emotional energy than any piece I’ve ever written.

If you enjoy work that pushes beyond the boundaries of a traditional memoir and you’d like to support projects like this, I’d be incredibly grateful if you considered becoming a paid subscriber.

Your support doesn’t simply unlock this series. It gives me the time and freedom to keep creating the kinds of literary experiments that I merely see attempted on Substack.

But I don’t believe creativity should be limited by format, and this project exists because I wanted to find out what would happen if I ignored those limits.

Paid subscriptions help sustain this level of depth, experimentation, and presence so this kind of work can keep growing in the way it already is.

If this space has ever made you feel seen, steadied, or quietly accompanied, and if you’re in a position to do so, becoming a paid subscriber is the simplest way to support the work and keep it alive.

Please consider supporting me to help my dreams come true.

Because if I could do this all day they everyday, I’ll do it with joy.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading, for believing in my writing, and for making projects like this possible.

Now there’s only one thing left to do.

Choose your Imi.

When I received my passport back from the Greek Consulate, it hadn’t been processed.

My visa hadn’t been rejected.

It hadn’t been accepted either.

They had simply closed my application because of the timing.

As I sat on my couch staring at my unprocessed passport, I couldn’t stop wondering what my life would’ve looked like if I’d caught that flight to Prague on Monday morning.

All my life, people had kept telling me how lucky I was.

How lucky I was to have the freedom to do whatever I wanted with my time.

How lucky I was to have a “supportive” family.

How lucky I was to be pretty.

How lucky I was to be living not only in London but in Notting Hill.

Yet all I could think about was the life I wasn’t living.

The one I’d spent weeks worrying had slipped away before it even had the chance to begin.

And somewhere between those two realities, I couldn’t help but feel like a loser.

A loser who couldn’t get a visa.

A loser who couldn’t go to Prague to attend the writing programme, despite having covered all the expenses.

A loser who wasn’t chosen by the guy she’d been dating.

A loser who couldn’t get her house together.

A loser who couldn’t get herself a job and, eventually, stopped looking.

That’s what life had felt like for a while.

Though not long ago, I’d naïvely believed that maybe life was finally turning its kinder side towards me.

The kind where at least one of these setbacks didn’t leave disappointment lingering on my palate.

Have you ever wondered what your life would look like if you’d made different choices?

I have.

More times than I’d like to admit.

Somewhere along the way, my mind became convinced that every closed door must have led to a better life.

That’s probably why I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Nobody.

The protagonist, Nemo Nobody, is a 118-year-old man living in a future where humans have achieved biological immortality. He is the last mortal person alive. As he recounts his life, something strange happens.

He remembers many different lives, all of which contradict one another.

Did his parents divorce?

Did he marry Anna, Elise, or Jeanne?

Did he have children?

Did he die young?

Did he become wealthy?

What if every choice really did create another reality?

Perhaps that isn’t the question I should be asking.

Perhaps the better one is this:

What if one missed flight created two different summers?

So I created my own version.

It’s called Ms. Nobody.

One version of me catches the flight to Prague.

The other is forced to look for another writing programme and, almost by accident, ends up in Edinburgh.

Neither of them knows she’s living the better life.

Now it’s your turn.

Which Imi would you like to follow?

Imi Takes Prgaue

Imi Takes Edinburgh

Read more

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