I hope when death arrives, I’ll know that out of all trillion lives I could have lived, this was the most beautiful. I want to bathe in that realisation, let it consume me. Consume me in the way a lover’s laughter does, when their eyes fold and wrinkle. Wash over me like the many rivers and lakes I waded in. May I have made a home out of the risks I took and the chances I held hands with. And know that I danced. Danced in open fields, on tabletops and beneath gums.

There are many moments I’d happily wring from the folds of my memories, the ordinary evenings and daily mundanities. Most of life will never become a story I’ll tell. But it’ll be one that I felt. You see time could not pass me by if I sit with it. If I fold my laundry while dusk yawns, and a lavender candle smokes beside a spinning vinyl. If the only sunrises I miss are ones I trade for glorious late nights. And even when cigarettes stain my fingers, the 3am conversations will never scrub off.

Sometimes the burden of existing settles in me. It seeps into my skin and I swear I will never feel free again. It is in these moments where I’ve come to appreciate the world. For I could skip or stumble my way up a mountain yet the view remains indifferent; it is miraculous, nonetheless. The issue is I mistake only memorable moments as meaningful ones. As though the best days are those I photographed. But I found they are the days I forgot to take any at all, my hands too busy holding another’s, my eyes bare to a landscape.

And yes a beautiful life is costly, we pay for it when we yearn and mourn and miss and hurt. The beauty in it isn’t in the extraordinary moments, but in ordinary moments that are never treated as just that. It asks for a belief that each second is just as precious as any other.

I have spent so much time trying to understand myself, and not nearly enough time allowing myself to exist. Perhaps we aren’t supposed to know anything at all, really. I never was decisive in the moment; always unsure if someone was the one, or if a job was my passion, or a town was my place. I was so fixated on finishing the puzzle I’d forgotten the joy of finding even a single piece that fit.

Presence is all that life has ever asked for. To kiss with unbound passion. To seek with an open heart. Walk alongside the doubt and sorrow and let life happen. We speak so often of finding ourselves, as though we are hiding somewhere beyond fulfilment, but I wonder if we are the essence of every moment we stayed present for.

Every time I have ever longed to be living in eventually became another ordinary Tuesday. Meaning was never waiting for me to find it. It had followed me, as I made tea for someone I loved, as I laughed until my ribs burned, as I watched the sun kiss a mountain peak or sat amongst the night basking in the moon.

When death comes, I hope it finds me interrupting its plans because a flower caught my eye. I hope it asks if there were muddy boots by my door and books with folded corners and biscuit crumbs on the table. I hope I leave behind kind words, a passing smile and handwritten recipes.

There is only grievance when life ends, if we spent so much of it elsewhere. If I am granted one final thought, I don’t wish it to be of all the things I could have been, but everything I was fortunate enough to be a part of. If I know that I was here, that I loved, and lingered, and paid attention, then out of every life I never lived, this one will have been enough.

—may you cherish every dawn as if it is the last, amber.

We met in the Summer but Autumn is our season. You are as much of me as I am of you; deja vu to the soul. I think our insides are the same hue of marigold. When my reflection bathes in the pool of your eyes, I leave your presence cleaner than I came. You do not sour at my flaws, but rinse me of their stains. And when you speak my words, they sound honest on your lips.

You’re a reminder that connection shares no bed with time. Trees do not beg their leaves to stay, they trust the seasons will return them. The sky does not grieve each passing day, it softens knowing another will come. I think this was meant to be, but not in the way the universe promises a soulmate. More like rain meeting a drought-ridden earth. Or how certain songs find us only after life gifts us the ears to understand them.

And that realisation dawned on me in the midst of small moments. While you spun me around in your kitchen to Love Man. Every time you point to birds in the swaying gums. Even while you held my hand as we wandered through the bush. It was when you sang, and laughed, and let me see you in a softer light. When the sensation of your palm hugging my neck weakens my knees, I melt into you. Unbeknownst to you, the little girl in me revealed herself again.

You must know that the texture of my existence has changed in your gaze. Parts of my stomach had not yet met laughter until I met you. I’ve never played a prettier version of myself with you. Embarrassment does not find me in our silence, or in my noise. Even my grief sits differently beside you, less grotesque perhaps; it wears a smile. As if being witnessed by the right eyes softened my edges somehow.

Yet, the seasons do not wait for anyone. And the trees let go knowing they were magnificent while they held their leaves. Perhaps that is all love asks of us, not possession, but presence in what is real and beautiful while it is here. To learn to hold each other with open arms.

And when we must let go, you’ll always be

the most glorious Autumn I’ve known.

—yours, in hues of amber.

PLAY ME

That opening guitar riff fills my ears, not a moment before nostalgia holds a blade to my throat. A honeyed horizon and Isaak’s voice coaxes something primal from the pit of my stomach. Time curls its fingers around me, luring me back into the past, stripping away what little sanity I have left.

And the world doesn’t mind that I am not the same person I was when our eyes first met. Time carried me here, rearranged me into someone unfamiliar to the girl in the memories being summoned. The years kept stacking themselves. Lovers faded faster than they appeared. Homes collapsed into meaningless sculptures of rubble. Even the tyres still turn, faithful to the road, indifferent to where my mind lingers. Everything keeps building itself while I’m stuck peering backwards.

Life didn't hesitate, the orchestra continued its melody and I slipped into another rhythm. And now I drive along roads that follow alpine mountains, that know where I’m going better than I do. The view is offensive in its beauty. It focalises my insignificance, smirks at my smallness and morality in comparison to its permanence. Reminds me of all that has already passed me by.

Isaak’s words drift somewhere beyond my thoughts, until they meet my ear again: face the world on your own. I’m forced back into the moment. For once I’m not trying to hold myself together. I am alone and nothing is missing.

My fingers trace the wheel of my ‘84 cruiser. The cold air teases at my arm resting out the window, begging for me to play with it. Eventually I give in, dancing my fingers through it; making waves in the wind with my palm. All that’s missing is the burn of a Marlboro between my lips, and its thin chain of smoke marrying the exhaust cloud tailing me. The flash of a sign warning of a sharp drop ahead catches me. Something reckless brushes up against my mind.

I swallow and feel the sting of that phantom blade draw blood. I don’t pull away, daring nostalgia to slit my throat. The sky, that careless minx, bleeds on to the world and into my eyes. The road disappears into the curve ahead, and I bask in the yawning of the canyon beyond it.

I let my hand leave the wheel—

life will go on.

—amber.

This piece felt like indulgence, a little reminder as to why I love writing. Life Will Go On inspired this essay as I was driving home through the mountains. The little playlist below was the soundtrack to my writing and refining of that inspiration. Sweet listening my loves x

who am I?

We question ourselves over and over. We whisper it before we sleep like a prayer we so desperately need answered. Even when we believe we’ve discovered a string of words that seemingly fit, the shape of the void morphs into another question. It is scary how clueless we are to our changing, unaware until we are forced to grieve a version of ourselves we outgrew. We find ourselves bundling old hobbies; distant friends; forgotten dreams, into a little bag, to donate like pre-loved clothing.

We watch people walk in and out, through the revolving door of our four-walls. Each goodbye takes another piece of our soul, like furniture; and what remains: an empty space and dints in the carpet—a reminder of what once was. Yet, they always forget something too; their Metallica tee, or the dimple on their cheek, or the reverb of their laugh.

Home shifts, from our childhood backyard, to a lovers embrace, to a cafe a thousand miles away. At times, we find ourselves homeless, yearning for a place in the world; and we will make a home out of anyone, anywhere, if we don’t find one in our own skin. It is always in desperation that we most forget ourselves. Yet, our biggest flaw in all of this, is how we carry all of it, everything; we simply cannot let go. Our mind sinks its teeth into all that touches us; and it will exhaust itself before it ever dares loosen its jaw.

On sleepless nights, the ceiling resembles past faces; their words still perch upon your shoulders and echo in quiet rooms. The heaviness of your chest is but a reminder of what you still allow to weigh on you.

I realise that the body cannot bury what the soul is trying to revive.

We hold on because we’re scared if we let go, then what we experienced was purposeless. If we walk away, we’ll be forgotten by people whose eyes are burned into our very skulls. And we fear that if we stop looking back, the past and everything we held so dearly will disappear, and what then do we make of the lingering ache? How then can we define who we are?

But, we mistake our sorrow for a life raft. Letting go of it does not mean that we will drown. It only feels that way because it once kept us afloat, but time has passed, the storm has cleared; when do we decide we are safe enough to tread water alone?

Make space for what could be, what might be, if only your hands were free of the shackles you have them in. It is a gruelling, humbling process to dismantle whatever reason you have, for why you can’t change. To unclench the muscle memory of pursuing a life that was never meant for you. Sometimes closure isn’t what you need, distance is. It is standing still in the present and accepting, i no longer belong here.

There are truths I resisted for a long while, subtle ones that I only named when they became urgent.

You can love someone deeply, and still not belong. Love is not enough to keep you safe, or to allow space to grow. Sometimes leaving is the most loving thing you can do for yourself, and for them. Sometimes being left was the only way you could return to yourself. And I don’t believe you must love yourself before you can love another, but I know of how easily it is misplaced when it isn’t held within. Where love is undisciplined, respect and alignment persist.

You can abandon the dreams that once gave you purpose. What once motivated you and shaped you may now suffocate you. That is the discomfort of growth. There comes a time where resilience becomes self-betrayal; when the life you built no longer fits, but you wear it out of loyalty to who you told the world you were. Darling, you are allowed to change your mind. To paint over a future you once marvelled at and begin again.

Grief is a form of devotion, but so is moving on. You do not dishonour the past, or yourself, by choosing peace. At some point, continuing to bleed is no longer proof that you were wounded, only that you refused to heal. And eventually, you will bleed on someone who didn’t cut you. An open wound festers. It spreads. It becomes something that rots beyond where it began. Happiness will always return, but not when something has been left untreated.

Not everything that touches you is meant to be held. We can confuse intensity with permanence. But some moments are only meant to alter your direction, not accompany you there. Some people come only to hold a mirror to you, to reveal something you had not yet seen. A person, a place, a problem: these are only excerpts from your story. You are the only constant. If you are to hold anything, let it be yourself.

Letting go won’t always feel like relief. Mostly, it mimics emptiness. It is mourning what was, when absence settles in your chest. We cling because we learn to identify with our pain. We forget who we were before it, and fear we’ll lose ourselves in the process of healing. But you are not meant to become your agony, only to endure it. To mould it into a suit of armour, not to inject it into your veins.

So when you ask: who am I? Maybe it is not a question that demands an answer, but one that inspires your willingness to change. You are not something to be defined once and understood indefinitely. You shift and you shed, you become unfamiliar to yourself and the world, over and over again.

There’s a life ahead of you, waiting to be lived by who you’re becoming, not by who you’ve been.

Maybe the question is,

who do I get to be now?

—may you find yourself a little more each day, amber.

Hello again, beautiful people. It’s been eight months since I last shared here, and so much has changed. the hunger to be everything reached more people than I ever expected and I’m still in awe of that, still slowly grasping it. Please know how deeply grateful I am, for every read, every message, every moment of resonance. I have a lot to catch up on. Thank you for being here, still. I hope these new words find you well.

There is a version of you that still sits with me on a Tuesday afternoon. Your back is against the wall, the silence is pleasant and the sunlight whispers through crooked blinds. You’re smiling, but not at me, at some thought you’re too shy to share. That smile has not aged, not even in my mind. It’s suspended in a kind of light that cannot be recreated, only remembered, only adored.

Time has carried you forward, I’m sure of it. You’re probably somewhere else now, folding your socks in a way that you didn't back then. I bet you drink your coffee differently; three sugars instead of two because life made you sour. You have said things since, to other people, with a voice that no longer sounds like it did when it was meant for me. You hair might be shorter. You might laugh less often. But none of that belongs to the you that I keep.

The person I hold is still twenty-something, still soft with the kind of naïveté you didn't yet know could be tainted. You still believe in things you’ve probably lost faith in by now. You still touch my arm when you laugh, not because you’re trying to be gentle but because you haven’t yet learned to keep your childlike joy contained. You still close your eyes when you’re thinking, like the thought is a song you must hear without distraction.

I’ve replayed that version of you more times than I’ve replayed our actual days together; the loops are cleaner in memory. The silences seem shorter. You never say the wrong thing, never look away too quickly, never step back when I need you to step forward. You stay just before the moment it all went wrong. And in this way, I wonder if I have been loving a ghost longer than I ever loved you in the flesh.

I can remember the exact sound your keys made when you dropped them on the kitchen bench, the scent that wrapped its arms around me moments before you did. I recall the texture of your hair on my bare chest; its silkiness between my fingers, and the burn of your hipbones pressing into the inside of my thighs.

The truth is, I’ve kept you like a photograph I am too scared to frame. Afraid that once I put you behind glass you’ll belong to the past for real. So I keep you loose, folded into the pages of my mind, where I can take you out when the world feels too much. Where I can touch the edges and believe, for just a moment, that they haven’t frayed.

Sometimes I think about finding you, the you now, and seeing what became of us. But I remember that no living being can compete with the perfection of memory, nor the airbrush of passed time. No present moment can stand in a frozen one. The you in my mind has no baggage, no distance, no anger. You are all the best parts, distilled. And maybe that’s unfair to you, but maybe it’s the kindest thing I’ve done for us both: keeping you intact.

Because I know that if I saw you now, I would lose you twice. Once to the day that we let go, and once to the realisation that there’s a you who is a stranger to me.

There are many versions of you in the world now, the one your new friends laugh with, the one your family loves, the one you are in the quiet hours of life. But this is the one I choose to keep. Not because it is truest, but because it is a version of you that lives in my memory, and no one else’s.

A you I can miss; a you I can love.

—yours in memory, amber.

I am afraid of the small things.
Of eight legs curled in the corner of a room.
Of darkness, of silence, of men who raise their voices.
I flinch and I hide. I confess to you silently in my withdrawal.

When I scream of spiders,
you walk barefoot into the room.
But you do not kill them; a god of quiet mercies.
You kiss the places they once crawled.
And I fall in love again, watching you cradle even the things that I fear.
You let me be soft. You let me shiver.

But I do not flinch at the horror in you.
When your sorrows come, foaming at the mouth,
dressed in a child’s despair and your father’s silence;
I’ll cup your grief in both palms.
An animal trembling at the edge of a highway.
I will not ask it to be cute.
I will let it cry. I will let it breathe.
I will sit with it until it names me kin.

I would unravel the sky for you;
pry the sun from its socket
and press it against your spine when the world grows cold.
I will not leave just because you cried deep and sharp
and said things your mouth regrets.
I’ll wait out your storms.
I’ll brave your pain.

They don’t warn you of the cost of love.
That it asks you to kneel; not in worship, but in ruin.
That you must become fluent in each other’s ghosts.
That intimacy is learning where the rot begins and still savouring it.

I don’t want half of you.
I want your worst nights and your cracked thoughts,
and the things you keep hidden
because you’re afraid they deem you unlovable.
I want the hunger you carry that scares even you.
I’ll feed it. I’ll name it mine.

Bring me the whole neglected house of your soul,
peeling walls and creaking floors.
I’ll make a home in you gladly.
I’ll dance down your staircases
and build shrines from your rubble.

You hold what frightens me,
and I, what undoes you.
This will be our vow.
Something older and wilder than a ring.
Something like devotion,
if it were a battlefield
and tenderness the only weapon we believed in.

You brave the spiders, my love
and I shall brave your sorrows.

—amber.

We are broken in so many ways, by ourselves, by each other, by the world. And yet in each pair of eyes, I see light. This is my love letter to humans, who I choose to believe in, still.

Play this if you want to cry.

I know what we are capable of. How we hurt each other with words sharp enough to draw blood. When we turn away from suffering as if another glance could blind us. Cities engulfed in flames that we lit ourselves. Cruelty clinging to our heels like a second shadow.

But still, I want to love humans.

Because I love the lady on the 3AM train singing Moon River into a silence that feels too large to bear alone. The teenage boys who ran into flood water for a howling puppy. The nurse who cups a dying man’s cheek and calls him darling because no one else is coming. The teacher who writes I’m proud of you in the margin where the grade should be. The clerk who pays the seventeen dollars an old woman is short and slips the receipt inside her bag like a secret only kindness needs to know. I love the comment sections of memes where thousands gather to build a shrine out of shared absurdity. The walking stranger that offers me a pure smile, and greets me with an open heart. How I adore the fleeting moments of generosity.

I used to move through life sealed inside my skull, collecting reasons to stay hard. Newsfeeds. Sirens. Overdue bills. Death. Evidence everywhere that love is naive. But the world finds ways to ambush you with tenderness; like construction workers clapping as a toddler wobbles to step. A funeral erupting in laughter because the widow said her husband always told jokes at the worst times, and suddenly grief had space to breathe. I once saw a girl sobbing on a street corner, her friend held her with one arm, balancing two slushies in the other. Amidst the sobs, she took a sip and chuckled. There was a comment from a man whose wife had passed saying “She always made lasagna. I’ve nearly set the kitchen on fire three times and I hope shes laughing at me.” And beneath it, a hundred strangers replied with tips, recipes and blessings; “You’ve got this, Frank.”

We are absurd, messy, miraculous creatures. We break down in public bathrooms, wipe our eyes, walk out and hold the door for the next person. We break promises but spend lifetimes learning how to apologise with our whole bodies. We write symphonies from days that nearly killed us, paint hope on the underside of bridges, leave free coats on park benches when winter arrives early. To love humans is not optimism; it requires an unrelenting, deliberate faith, the stubborn act of catching every dropped match and insisting it can still light a candle. It is choosing to notice the softness happening everywhere: a stranger pressing tissues into another’s palm, a barista sliding an extra biscuit across the counter, the way a lover offers absolution.

I want to live inside that noticing. I want to say thank you, please, I love you so many times that the words become a prayer. I want to hold eye contact and smile with warmth long enough for a nervous heart to steady. I want to listen until sorrow speaks in a dialect I can understand. Because once, when I was all edge, someone handed me gentleness I had not earned, and it softened the focus of my eyes. Yes, we hate. We betray. We forget to call. We deny affections. But we also wait outside surgery rooms all night, mail postcards to people we met once, beg stay at ledges and mean it with every muscle. We ruin things, but we rebuild them with our own trembling hands. We learn to navigate forgiveness, practice understanding in the early hours, grow gardens from dirt. There are so many tiny, stunning, heart-melting interactions we miss.

So, I choose to love humans; despite the cruelty, we are beautiful in our trying. Because inside each ordinary chest there is a pulse sounding like a promise: I can be better than the worst thing I have done. And I pray, that promise is enough to save the world, or at least one soul—even if that soul is our own.

—with my whole heart, amber.

I’m endlessly warmed by this growing little community; your love, your support, your reflections, mean more to me than I can express. I know I haven’t been as active lately. Between moving interstate and starting a new job, life’s been a bit full, but please know: I see you. I’m catching up on comments and messages slowly, and every word from you feels like home. This space has become a kind of refuge for me, and I’ll keep returning to it, to you, whenever I can. Thank you, my darlings, for being here.

It’s 3:24am, another grotesque Monday. The elephant on my chest bids me good morning. The phantom hands that clasp my throat pull tighter when I think of the day ahead. Again, peace eludes me. Loneliness sits beside me and my tangled neurons, not a friend, a spectator of the unraveling. I suppose I should be grateful, to feel. I look to my restful partner. His chaos isn’t noisy, his demons ran to the arms of numbness for comfort. Where silence is a blanket for my static, his is a cage. An emptiness that eats away at his chest, one he’s failed with endless vices to feed.

It’s to be another of those days, where the clouds resemble my father’s hand and my reflection whispers of my mother.

I suppose, we’re all at war with ourselves.

There are scars you wear on your skin. Souvenirs from childhood clumsiness; back when pain was simple and healing was visible. You could point to it. Show it off. Say this is where it hurts. Unlike the ones you hide in your chest. The ones that never healed. The ones that still hurt to touch.

Everyone thinks their pain is the exception; until they realise every adult is just walls built around a child waiting for someone to come back for them. And that no one survives youth unharmed. Not the golden child, not the forgotten one, not the rich nor the poor. A child doesn’t say this is unfair, they say this is my fault. They do not protest. They adapt. And so many of us did; into over-achievers, caretakers, comedians, perfectionists, ghosts. We made ourselves loveable; experts in withholding to protect ourselves. Know that it doesn’t have to be violence to be wounding. Sometimes it’s absence that cuts. Things that were never said. Affection that’s given sparingly. The gaze that skipped us when we longed to be chosen.

So you did what all brilliant, desperate children do: you conformed. You became useful. Palatable. Quiet. Lost. You denied your own needs and held your breath so someone else could exhale.

You learn quickly, as a child, to translate the world through feeling before words arrive to protect you. You interpret silence as shame, stillness as threat, busyness as rejection. You notice everything. You absorb all that is and isn’t. You perform goodness like it’s a costume you must earn the right to wear. Or you burn the costume in defiance, because any attention is attention. You didn’t need perfect parents; you needed them to see you, and not as a reflection of themselves. You needed presence; to be held like you existed for more than their utility. You never needed the picket-fence house, but you deserved a safe home. Sadly, many of us were raised by the same broken people we’ve become. Grown-ups bearing the same wounds. As humans, we tend to pass on what we don’t learn to hold.

And even if your childhood looked good on paper, even if there were birthday cakes and soft blankets and someone who picked you up from school, you might still be grieving the you who never got to say I’m scared without someone laughing. Or I’m hurt without someone shouting. Or I need without someone sighing. You might still be haunted by the echo of rooms that didn’t make space for your becoming.

So now here you are, grown, aching, trying to learn the language of safety with a tongue that only annunciates in survival. And still we wonder why we flinch when someone calls us beautiful. Why we can’t cry unless we’re alone. Why we sabotage the very things we prayed for. Why we feel grief in places where others feel joy. It is residue. It is memory stored in marrow. The child never vanishes; they just learn to stay quiet inside your bones.

This isn’t about blame, it’s about origin. About tracing the roots of your silence, your shame, your anger. About holding the child inside and saying: You didn’t deserve that. You never had to earn your worth. You were never too much or too little. And now, you get to become the parent you needed. When your partner says I love you and you brace for loss, when a friend cancels plans and your heart sinks into abandonment, when you rest and feel guilt instead of relief; know that is the child, tugging at your sleeve asking, is it safe to come out now? But you get to answer. You get to reparent. You get to gift yourself the words you wanted, to wrap your younger self in all the gentleness they were denied.

And maybe that’s what healing is: not becoming someone new, but finally allowing yourself to be who you were before the world was too wide and you too small. Not building walls around yourself, but windows. Possibly, it’s learning how to love the child in others too.

It’s 7:09am, he laughed with such bliss, that smeared across his face was the hint of a little boy. Tears swelled as I marvelled at the sight of him. We parent long before we birth a child, when we nurture the youth in ourselves, our lovers, even our dearest friends. Unknowingly with time made for a coffee date, late-night belly-aching laughter and tear-stained shoulders, we are healing the child that needed a safe space. The girl that deserved patience. The boy that yearned for acceptance.

The child we can still be.

—with my whole heart, amber.

Thank you so much for being here. If I could give each and every one of you the biggest, warmest hug, I would. I hope this shook something loose in your shoulders, I hope this made you feel seen; validated your pain. We tend to compare our trauma, tell ourselves we didn’t have a bad enough childhood to be this hurt, but there is nothing to compare when you are still aching. Learn yourself, meet your inner child, and from there you will bloom my dear friend. You deserve a wholesome, freeing life, and I know you will get there.

“ Oh, to wake up grateful for the pulse in my neck; to meet the mirror without dread.
I need to be enough—for myself. “

How lost we are, in the virtuality of life.

They told us we are lucky, to live in an era of endless doors; of infinite selves waiting to be summoned with a scroll, a post, or a step-by-step transformation.

But no one warned us of the disease it carries. Of how too much possibility can fray the edges of a person.

Our skin aches for mornings that begin with the light of dawn and not that of a screen. Before our feet touch the earth, our eyes have already wandered into someone else’s world. We didn’t notice when we stopped living and began watching others. We’ve become spectators of everyone and participants in nothing of our own.

We compare the raw underbellies of our own existence to another’s highlight reel. Our hopes now bloom from envy. Our bodies grow estranged.

And I have become a graveyard of personas. Restless in the presence of simple pleasures. Always terrified of settling. I used to think I was failing because I hadn’t arrived anywhere, but I’ve simply been lost in the contradiction of different maps, wandering too many paths.

I carry cities I’ll never walk and careers that died before a resume held their name. I mourn strangers I nearly loved; left behind in unread messages. Because what if, there’s someone else; gentler, funnier, easier, more aligned with me just one scroll further?

And I am so exhausted by this constant orbit around potential. This slow bleeding of meaning. A daily flirtation with who I am not, what I don’t have, and what I haven’t done. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking what I wanted and started asking what would look impressive. And what society worships shifts so quickly, that mentality becomes unstable when worth is measured by trends.

They said choice would taste like freedom, but not that it’s an addictive sweetness. One that rots the stomach, until even our gut-instincts lose their sense of direction. We do not just suffer from an abundance of options, we suffer from a lack of commitment.

And I do not want more doors—I want to walk through one without looking back. I want to love something long enough to feel it love me in return. I want to lay foundations on imperfect soil and call it home anyway.

But I have lost myself in a million other people. I’m no longer fluent in my own language. I’ve consumed so many dreams that weren’t mine, I don’t recognise the hunger of my own longing.

This isn’t freedom. It’s erosion. This is the slow disintegration of self beneath the illusion that we can be anything, everything, all at once.

I am only 23, and already I am grieving a life I’ve been disloyal to; too busy auditioning for all the ones I could have instead. I’m haunted by the time I’ve given to this never-ending feed. How many sacred moments have I missed, peering into someone else’s backyard; only to rip up my own seedlings and plant what they had sown?

There is ripe fruit left untouched on every tree I’ve grown.

But I can’t waste another season exploring other gardens. I want to return to my own. To tend it, to nurture it, to reap the fruits of my efforts.

What if I told you this hunger to endure everything, this ceaseless reaching, this need to feel something more, is not curiosity, but self-exile? Somewhere along the way, you began to believe that living meant becoming exceptional; being seen; being chosen. That it meant consuming everything the world offers.

But you were only ever meant to come home to yourself. To your own food; to your own bed.

And the truth is, nothing you’re chasing will hold you. Not the success. Not the admiration. Not even the healing. Because the moment you are finally still, you will hear it—your own precious life, sobbing in the corner, pleading:

I’ve been waiting for you to stop trying to be extraordinary, to stop trying to be ‘them’, all so I can love you as you are.

Let go of the performance. The great myth was that you had to earn your aliveness. But you don’t. You never did. You are, in this very moment unfolding.

And that is enough, please, let that be enough.

Darling, you don’t want to be buried with regret. You deserve a life you don’t feel the need to escape from through a screen.

And in your stillness, in the tender ordinary of your unlabelled life, you will realise: solitude—true presence, is not the death of meaning. It is the birthplace of it.

The hunger to be everything was only ever a longing to be loved.

But you were always worthy.

Even as just one true, marvellous thing:

yourself.

—i know you’ll learn to live for yourself, amber.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading—if this held you for even a moment, I hope you’ll stay. There’s more softness, more truth, more home to come. 🤍

I’m afraid, like flowers left unwatered,

I’ll fade and be forgotten when I’m gone.

I hope my influence outlives me—

like a flower, dried and pressed, framed in time,

or encased in epoxy, to be marvelled at for years.

A seed adrift,

finding soil in a distant land I’ll never visit,

a time I’ll never see.

What if like potpourri I nestle in a quiet corner,

a whisper in the air—

a trace of fragrance?

What if my words could stir minds that I’ll never know.

My story carried by a wind and etched into the bark of a willow.

I hope an echo of my name

can be heard in a different century—

distant,

but not forgotten.

—amber.

This isn’t just a piece of writing, it’s a lifeline.
For anyone who feels numb, hollow, or stuck in the ache of being.
If you're still breathing but no longer living—this is for you.
Please read it. Please share it.
It might save someone you love.
It might save you.

This morning, writing it, saved me.

There are mornings that do not begin.

They blur, slow and silent, into the leftover ache of yesterday. You open your eyes not out of desire, but because the night spat you out. The sun does not stream into your room, it scalds. The alarm screams like a mouthful of bees and you stare at the ceiling as if it might unmake you. The bed becomes both tomb and tether, a cradle for someone who has forgotten how to resurrect themselves.

And it is not romantic.

There is no golden light kissing your cheek, no cinematic metaphor for courage. There is only the small violence of existing—again. No one teaches you how to mourn a self that’s still breathing. And the world outside asks for things; brushed teeth, matching socks, steady voices, upright spines.

So to you, who cannot rise. You whose soul forgot to attach itself to your body, whose name feels foreign in your mouth. You, whose mind is a gallery of aborted beginnings and unopened doors. You, who holds your breath through days like it's the only power you have left. You are simply a human, sorrow—salted, soul—bruised, who has tasted too much bitterness. And it is okay to forget how to care; if the days have blurred, if the world feels beige, if even joy arrives tasting like chalk.

You have mistaken your stillness for failure. There is nothing shameful about sitting still in your sorrow. Grief has its own geography, and not all paths look like movement. And sadly the world does not applaud survival, it does not throw parades for the days you simply stayed; it wants you bright, efficient, blooming.

But I want you human.

I want your tenderness, your trembling. I want you in the silence where the world forgets to look.

My dear, let the laundry wait. Let the texts rot in their bubbles. Let the day pass judgment. There is a sensuality in slowness, something capitalism has no language for. You are not here to be useful, you are here to be alive.

And listen, there is still so much left for you.

There are oranges that burst dawn onto your tongue. There are trees that gossip in the wind and moonlight that spills like silver milk across open fields. There are songs you haven’t discovered that will feel like they’ve known you forever. There are books whose last lines will shake something loose in your ribcage. There is the warmth of a pet’s weight against your thigh. The scent of an old shirt still laced with the ghost of someone you loved. There is toast. There is honey. There is cinnamon on warm skin. There is a sky that changes outfits every evening and never asks you to clap.

And you, you miraculous mosaic of nerves and nerve endings, you are still here. Even when your mind forgets how to want, your lungs keep rehearsing hope; do you know what that means? This breath means there is still time.

It means there are conversations left to have that will alter your brain chemistry. Someone is going to love you in a way that feels like remembering. One day you will laugh so hard your stomach will fold in on itself, and you will forget, that you ever forgot what laughter felt like. There is much you haven't tasted, and much you haven’t touched. You haven’t seen Venice in the rain. You haven’t kissed someone under a waterfall. You haven’t danced in the kitchen with no pants and no reason to stop. You haven’t witnessed a newborn that blinks like the universe just whispered to it.

And no, maybe none of this will fix the hollow that you’re holding. Maybe this ache will sit beside you for a while longer; a ghost stubborn to move on.

But let the ache come, let it sit. And while it sits, pour yourself a cup. And while it sips, open the window. And while it lingers, look outside and say:

“Even now, there is a world that wants me in it.”

Let the world see you, half—dressed, half—healed, wholly miraculous. Because you are not here for convenience. You are not here to impress or outperform or outpace. You are here to experience.

Listen to the rain, eat mangos over the sink, soak popcorn in tears while you cry over movies. Marvel at the world as it continues, gloriously, indifferent, impossibly alive and still, somehow, reaching for you; begging to bathe your eyes in its beauty. One day, I hope you walk outside and realise, that the sky waited. That somewhere in the soil, a blade of grass learned your name. That time did not forget you. That light, soft and patient, still shines for you.

There are still infinite ordinary miracles left for you to notice.

You are allowed to begin again. As many times as it takes. Even if your fire has gone out—the ashes remember, they always remember—what it was to burn. Life was always about returning; to your body, to the present, to yourself.

Your breath is proof of that.

Start there.

—love, with my whole entire being, amber.

Thank you for being here. Every single one of you beautiful humans, has been a reason for me to keep breathing, to keep sharing, to keep reading.

I have wandered so far from the architecture of myself,

that even my shadow has abandoned me.

Most nights,

I fold maps into trembling origami birds,

and plead with them to remember the way.

But home is no longer a place,

only a scent in someone else’s shirt,

a friend I must have dreamt,

a hallway I pass through in sleep.

My spine aches from bowing to false constellations.

I once held hope like a compass between my ribs,

believing the pull was direction.

I mistook this for prophecy

and followed ghosts dressed in glow.

I wanted to belong to something,

even if it devoured me.

I wear my skin like a borrowed coat.

I speak to mirrors like oracles;

begging for a version of myself

that doesn’t look so much like absence.

But even glass becomes dishonest,

when your eyes no longer know what they’re seeking.

I am lost.

Not like a traveler,

but like a flame left out in the rain,

flickering in the dark,

forgetting it was ever fire.

And yet,

beneath the ache,

beneath the ruin,

something stirs.

Not a map.

Not a voice.

But a pulse, a quiet thrum:

I am still here.

I am still here.

—amber.

You would’ve thought him a vampire, with how necessary it was we came together only in the early hours of the morning. How he never cared to know my friends, nor involve me with his—it was private, untouched by the influence of others. I recall the emotional whiplash: how devoted and present he was during, and then how vacant and absent he became after; as if the bare wall beside me offered more than I did. Accompanied by the warmth of him, yet I’d never felt as glacial than lying naked in his bed—a bed, i’m certain, many lost souls had found themselves in. I wonder if they too fixated on the same mould spot on the ceiling, if only to hold back their tears, their shame—or was it a scuff mark, faeces? I hadn’t seen it in light strong enough to discern.

So i’d tell myself: I can shove it down—the unmet intimacy. I can snuff out the flame of passion and desire. I can take this at face value, and reduce a visceral work of art, the interweaving strings of two essences, to merely a casual fling. I can swallow my emotional urgency, quieten the beats of my heart that sing his name, if only to touch him. To be his, momentarily. Even if fleeting; even if not mutual in consequence. Even if his scent lingers in my hair and his matter outlives his presence beneath my fingernails. I often wonder the endless impressions—the soft fingerprints—that must reside on a soul like his, from all of the people he has held.

The laws of atomic theory speak of how energy can not be created nor destroyed, only rearranged—repurposed. So how can we believe our souls reside solely in our chests? Why is this the foundation of our understanding? What if my soul is the breath of my very existence, abundant and ever-present; what if it leaks from my pores, shadows me like a veil, and cries through my eyes “i’m in here”; all while no one cares to listen? What if parts of our soul scatter along the paths we’ve walked—traces lingering on the skin of every lover i’ve worshipped, on the sleeves of every dear friend i’ve held? What if it sits on the chair i grew up in, in a house now reduced to rubble, in a heart that no longer beats, in the hand of a guardian who now belongs to the earth and the stars.

How can we look at eachother as merely bodies, when this truth exists? How do we not stare at one another in awe, knowing of the presence that surpasses the physical form? It is so heart achingly beautiful, the act of giving ourselves, raw and passionate and willing. How can we allow our atoms to intertwine and bond and dance, and not leave a dent or take a piece of one another’s soul with us when we go? How empty must he be now, to have given so much of himself to so many? Does he unknowingly grieve the parts of himself that no longer belong to him? It leaves me questioning who the real victim is.

And with that thought in mind, i am healing.

I no longer hold resentment toward him, but sadness.

And a kind of distant hope, that the traces of me that live on his skin are the last tether to the pieces of him still capable of loving.

—all of my love, amber.

I envy the hermit crab.

When it tires of it’s shell,

it’s walls too confining and brittle,

it is not bound to it.

It may cast off its husk of which flaws do not serve it,

and emerge,

unburdened by imperfections.

Yet I remain,

entombed in this flesh,

aching beneath the weight of it,

longing for a metamorphosis that won’t come.

—amber.

We’re worlds away,

And I’m unsure of myself,

But I feel I know you;

you resemble no one else.

And so I wonder;

we think we must be alone,

to discover ourselves,

but is it possible,

to find who you are in someone else.

—amber.

I long to feel seen—indisputably, utterly understood.

How I despise being perceived yet beg to be observed,

truly so divinely close,

that no doubt exists in the care that his eyes possess.

To be so flawlessly familiar that my reflection morphs into his;

so that he may look to his palm only to find mine.

—yours truly, amber. 🤍

Maybe this is how I’d love someone.

Maybe it’s how I want to be loved.

Maybe it’s both.

There is a quiet sensuality in the offering of sunlight at 4 a.m.—a tender, amber hush poured upon the world by spring’s cool breath. Consciousness arrives to collect me before it does you, as is its habit. My ears stir first, coaxed into waking by the robins composing their chorus, just beyond our bedroom window.

Not long after, my eyes follow—graced, as always, by the sight of you: your body, bare and unguarded, adorned in the molten gold of dawn. You are my morning sacrament. The admiration I hold for you builds in the hush between my gaze and the sacred sprawl of your form across our sheets. It thickens the air with its density; I can tell by the weight of my breath; each inhale a slow devotion, each exhale a silent offering.

And so I rise, barefoot and reluctant, leaving the warmth of you only as one leaves a shrine; never without reverence, never without return. The air beyond the bedroom is cool, tinged with the ghost of moonlight not yet chased fully from the eaves. It sighs against my skin as I pad toward the kitchen, each step a soft benediction on the slate rock floor.

My cottage kitchen greets me like a well-worn hymn. The wooden benches, honeyed with age, hold the weight of quiet mornings past. Bundles of dried wheat and lavender hang like votives from the exposed ceiling beams, their fragrance barely whispering above the more insistent scent of earth and woodsmoke. French baskets, sun-bleached and tender from use, cradle oranges and cloth-bound loaves; while the Italian stove, a grand off-white, waits with a patient elegance, already knowing the part it plays in this sacred rite.

Like clockwork, I nudge open the casement window, and the world pours in, green and infinite. The paddocks stretch outward in rolling hushes of emerald, dew catching the early light like scattered constellations. Somewhere beneath the gum trees, the magpies have begun their aria—liquid and layered, full of that strange and beautiful ache that belongs only to mornings like this.

Then, the familiar sound of hoofbeats soft against earth. And there she is, my mare, curious and bold, pressing her velvet muzzle through the open window. I laugh, quietly, and offer her the apple already waiting in the bowl. She takes it from my palm with the trust of an old friend; a mutual trust. Her breath warms my wrist. Another kind of communion.

Inside, the kettle begins to hum—a low, growing exhale. The flame beneath it flickers like a secret. As the water boils, steam curls up and kisses the cold morning air, dancing there—suspended, then gone. When the whistle comes, it is not shrill but sweet, a clear and hopeful call. The voice of contentment itself. I pour the tea, yours first, always; and cradle the cups in both hands as I return to the room where you still lie, half-curled in the unconscious grace of sleep.

And you are as I left you: beautiful, bathed in light, holy in your dreaming. I stand for a moment, unmoving, afraid to disturb the art that is you. Dawns colours at war over your bare skin; painting you in their blood. But I know you. You’d be furious if I let you sleep through the morning we made.

So I whisper your name, low and close, and your breath shifts. Your lashes flutter like petals unsure of sun. Ocean blue pouring from those tired eyes. And that look—still half-dreaming, already loving—undoes me every damn time. I place the cup in your hands, and you smile as if I’ve returned from a long, perilous voyage.

This is my morning ritual.

You;

and the cup I poured for you.

—all my love, amber.

I've looked into your eyes before we met,

how could I forget home;

hues of a blue sky wrapped around rolling hills.

I've heard your laugh amidst crowds.

That night we kissed, wasn't the first—

the sweet taste of your lips is too familiar.

When I recognised you that day,

I knew not of your name,

but the kindness in you;

how the world looks from behind your eyes.

I have loved you for an eternity,

in other worlds, in other lives.

I've dreamt of your soul,

the other half of mine, calling for me.

Our eyes met and our souls reunited.

—yours truly, amber.

You watered me just enough to keep me alive; to prolong my thirst.

And I didn’t want much—I let parts of myself die to survive off what little you offered.

I clung to your rationed love; and you savoured the way I withered at your hand.

There is a particular cruelty in posing poison as sustenance—in timing your affection for control, knowing I’d mistake it for care.

It’s evil, to compare the beauty of two flowers; to fault the wilted bloom and absolve the hands that failed to tend it.

Still I grew, but not upward, not outward. I grew inward:

tangled, root-bound;

my worth folding in on itself like a prayer left unanswered.

Still, I praised the ache, and I would whisper ‘enough’ before an empty plate.

I do not blame the sun for shining sparingly— but I do question why I bent so willingly toward its absence.

In desperation to belong, I misconstrued my resilience as devotion and loyalty; I endured my starvation for love.

But I realise, love is not meant to be survived.

It is not a test of how much one can sacrifice.

And now what grows in me is not longing, but memory—a brittle archive of what I once accepted: to be touched, to be sought, to be half-alive in your shadow.

The tragedy is, when you stay long enough in famine, you forget what it means to be chosen, cherished—to be full.

—amber.

“who are you?”.

Your eyes plead for an answer; a yearning to understand.

As if you may spot a crack in my walls, to peek into the hollow of my chest; at the trinkets I hide there.

I am delirious—a lonely soul who purposely occupies one side of an empty bed, as though I’ll be woken by the warmth of a stranger claiming the space I kept for them.

One whose life passes like wind through rotting trees; I feel every fleeting second so painfully deep within my bones that they crack and shatter.

A hopeless dreamer, who hums pleasantries into the night, so as to humble the darkness pressing in on my chest.

A hypocrite—who detests humanity’s cruelty, yet harbours a mind so self-deprecating, it could shrivel a soul to nothing.

My core, my choices, are driven by the fear that I’ll spend my life questioning my existence only to die without answers.

It’s 3 a.m., and I choke on my words at the wonder in your eyes.

“I don’t know… who I am.”

I am a stranger in the mirror and an imposter in my mind.

—with love, amber.