Red is the colour of me being sliced and shredded because for one cruel, magnificent moment god drew back the veil and showed me the sacred apparition called you. And then came the real wound, the knowledge of what it meant to love you.

It’s been a nightly ritual now, to lie in the dark, put on NFAK and let his voice descend into the deepest chambers of me, pouring wine through my ears until every locked room of the soul is drunk on memories. My heart churns with longing and my jaws clench tight, twisting the bedsheet in my fists. The music ends and the room goes quiet. But my heart stays standing in the same corridor, clutching my palette of affinities in my vain hands.

گلوں سے رنگ، تاروں سے روشنی لے کر
جمال یار کا نقشہ اتار لیتا ہوں

Gulon se rang, taaron se roshni le kar / jamaal-e-yaar ka naqsha utaar leta hoon.
Taking colours from flowers and light from the stars, I capture the beauty of my beloved.

My paintbrush laughs at me when I try to paint you. My palette collapses in itself and all the colours dissolve into a black. A black so dark it encapsulates the whole universe in your hypnotic iris. Pardon me, may all my metaphors be in vain, may all my paints dry out, for nothing I make could ever do justice to you.

The scythe entered my heart gently at first. But it went deeper, twisting slowly through the chambers of me until the walls of my house were drenched in red. I stood among it all and cried out in horror. God, what is this? I never asked for this. I did not know I had so much red inside me. But god knew what he was doing. Giving me the most ordinary thing in the world and then showing me the extraordinary capacity of my heart to love it.

It’s just that we have to bleed first to bloom, empty our cup so that god fills it in his own ways. Roses and thorns come together, we need to learn to hold them, right? That’s the beauty, you have to let the thorn cut your skin sometimes, you have to let your fingers bleed from holding it. And still, with the same hand you reach for the velvet of the petals. That’s what it’s like to love. What a miracle the heart is, pierced by the thorns yet still beating so tenderly. So let me keep my red and let me be marked by it. Let the thorns prick me and let the roses bloom anyway.

Somewhere along the way, my heart became strangely soft, almost translucent. Light passed through the places that were dark since long. You became a kind of portal to the infinite. Through you, I started to understand the wisdom and beauty philosophers talk about. It stopped being about you in a way, or maybe it became more about you than it ever was.

I had to bleed oceans and soar through skies, just to find out all that depth falls short in front of a single scarred human being.

And this isn’t because god made us so perfect, it’s because god made us so terribly flawed in our essence. Perfection can be replaced by another perfect thing, but when you love someone because of their flaws, nothing can ever come close to that. Once their flaws become dear to you, the entire world could offer you something more beautiful but your heart would still look for the oddities that belonged only to them. There is no replacing a person whose very imperfections have become sacred to you.

An artist hates a painting they make themselves no matter how perfect it is. But when god paints a person and places them in your life, you love them despite the messy strokes, the darker colours, and the cracks that appear in the painting over time. I’ll gild every crack with gold, nothing in them is too broken for my love. Don’t you dare question my devotion.

They tell me you’ll fall in love again with somebody else. Who’s gonna tell them I’ve only ever known the word love through the shape of your face. I can’t spell love without spelling your name. Every poem I write starts with your name and ends at mine. Just like my love, it sparked when I saw you, but as destiny intended, now it rests in my heart alone.

Your beautiful black eyes are knives to my heart; that’s why all my verses bleed in red. All my canvases are attempts at decorating that red when in reality it bled through me with the brutality of a knife dragged slowly through flesh.

I’ve blown all trumpets trying to resurrect my red heart from the black trenches.

It’s like someone grabbed a hammer and nailed my heart into his. It’s been long now. I am trying to take it out, god, I promise I am trying my best. But the workings of the heart are strange, it has a habit of growing roots around the things that wound it.

I tell my friends that it’s all about the wisdom and lessons it taught me, but then why do I still wish to caress your face sometimes. I am a human after all, I want to hold your hand and caress the half moons neatly drawn on your fingernails. And then the moons your eyes make when you smile. Oh my living breathing midnight sky, all your scars are like stars to me. I’ll call it stargazing and lose myself in the galaxies of your face, there I’d find moons and stars nobody has ever seen. I’d crash my rocket and die in the embrace of my beautiful midnight sky.

Thank you for reading
Love, Sarah <3

War is full of terror but then the second you’re martyred, you’re the most exalted. Angels come to you, your scent so sweet, your face all in peace, and here you are in the ethereal breezes of heaven. What a beautiful surrender. The next time my grim reaper comes cloaked in onyx, scares me with the apocalypse, shows me omens of 3 and 7, I’ll give in. Without a question I’ll surrender. I’ll let 37 wash over me like the calm salty breezes on a shore. I’ll be martyred. I won’t fight to escape 37. Yes, I’ll give in quickly this time. No one asked me to fight a war. Why was I trying to run away from 37. The prophecy was carved into my flesh and the omens all scattered around. It was the sweet destruction of a martyr I didn’t know I craved. So yes, the wave of 37 comes and sweeps me in. The skies are scarlet like the martyr’s blood. But the martyr is all at peace. Martyr of war. Martyr of love. Martyr of sweet sweet destruction.

Thank you for reading!!! I wrote this at 5 in the morning while listening to CAS and watching the sunrise. It’s probably one of the most nonsensical things I’ve posted, but it’s also very symbolic and I love the imagery. A lot of it is tied to events from my personal life which makes it especially dear to me. Some parts are pretty rough, but I chose not to edit it to preserve its sanctity. I’d love to know what you think about it and how you perceived it. Love, Sarah <3

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Anyway, these spikes of anger have become recurrent, and I can’t seem to trace their cause. Perhaps it’s the heat. It’s melting away all the facades, all the presumptions, all the memories, and with them, my sympathies. Olivia Rodrigo’s album is playing in the background “tell me something honest so the memories turn dark, memories turn dark.” Yes Olivia, thank you for making this song. Memory is a chasm in the brain. You’re walking down memory lane when your foot slips and you fall inside. Lava oozes from within, turning the meadows to ash. One wrong step and suddenly all the effort you’ve spent adorning the garden with flowers is annihilated in a fleeting moment. The blackened remnants decay, and the vultures arrive to feast on whatever dared to remain. One small misstep and you’re seventeen again, bargaining with the world to be just. But never mind, the world stayed the same. Somewhere along the way, we became more like it.

The weather is too hot and my brain has returned to the default emotion it knew at seventeen. Anger. The heat has stripped everything bare before me. The world has shown its true colours, and people have shown their true faces. I don’t want to be surrounded by people. I am so overstimulated even the air feels crowded. Being alone in my room isn't enough, I want to be alone in the world. I want every trace of everyone to disappear for just a while so I can untangle the knots inside my brain. I want to be surrounded by me. sarahs and sarahs, thousands of sarahs. sarah everywhere. sarah on the ground. sarah in the sky. sarah on the left. sarah on the right. sAraH. SaRah. sArAh. pardon my frenzy, I have a habit of recording myself losing my mind in words.

My hands smell of ink. Even the pages are tired of me. Day and night, with trembling hands, I keep on writing the same old sentences. I am a loser. Where am I? This room that looks like mine, but the walls lean closer every night, as if they’re listening. The curtains sway when there’s no wind. I swear they whisper my name. sArAh. I laugh. At least I think it was laughter because what else can you do when even the furniture starts pitying you. I tried to stop yesterday. Closed my journal. Locked it in a drawer. Told myself I’d sleep. but when I woke up, it was on my pillow. My tiny scribbles across the page. I don’t remember writing those words. Yet they were. Redder. Angrier. Maybe I sleep-write now. Or maybe I don’t sleep at all. Where am I? Not in this body. Not fully. I look in a mirror and flinch. Because the reflection blinks a second too late. Almost smashed it today. Some days I forget why I started writing. I just know I can’t stop.

I am tired. I rest my head on the headrest of my chair and look at the ceiling. I have my glasses on and everything feels clear and sharp, I can even see the direction of the paintstrokes on the ceiling. I keep staring. I zone out a bit too much. Now I can see stars and synapses and soliloquies written in scarlet ink. I scream and scream and scream until my voice starts cracking the ceiling and reaches the sky. I traverse through the skies, the strong acidic winds no harsher than the weather I’ve left behind. I land on Venus. I’ve always found this planet very interesting. It makes me think of 7x7-49. The heat, the time, everything about this planet is very intriguing to me. Perhaps it’s the heat.

Why is the epitome of heat considered to be more intense than the epitome of cold? Why is it hellfire and not hellice? Perhaps because the fire burns and screams, it is raw, it is honest, it is like me. I like to think it was the heat and the orange of Venus with has pushed out the cold and blue of Pluto away from the solar system. The world is built on dualities and opposites, but just a slight imbalance can cause destruction.

Heat is always stronger than cold. It overpowers it. Just like the heat of feelings overpowers the cold of logic. We think logic is what makes us see things clearly, but only the heat of feelings can strip things down to marrow and show us truths unfathomable to logic. The things which shape us most profoundly will never justify themselves to reason. They simply burn. They burn until even love starts to smell like smoke and you start flinching from every trace of warmth, mistaking it for fire.

How miserable I have made my life. Eyes heavy with sleep and hands typing into what I think will be my salvation. If only the words didn’t rise like phantoms in the night, drinking my blood for daring to summon them with such impure hands. my blood curdles with envy as I stand at the crossroads with my bow drawn and arrows aiming at all those who are firm in the direction of their lives. Here I am, marooned upon the shore of my own indolence, where the carcass of Icarus washes ashore each morning to laugh at me. I bury it with ash and drape it with a pall before it can mock me. The serpent of pride coils around my heart with every passing day. But my own hissing is louder than the serpent. It sends both serpents and people retreating alike. Wasn’t this my dream? Solitude. Silence. Now it’s thrust into my mouth in spoonfuls until I choke on it. Pride, indolence, envy, shape — this is my palette, the colours of my choice. And with them I’ve painted nothing but grotesque portraits of the devil. And if I look long enough, I can discern faint vestiges of the artist beneath the dark glaze. So I gather my palette of vices in a warm embrace and walk towards my pyre, where the last portrait to finish is my own.

Every heart has its own palette, and loving someone is giving them permission to paint over yours. I can never see red the same way again. You’ve stained it with black. My mind sometimes resents it and tries to scrub it away. But my heart, oh my heart, it keeps varnishing over it. It’s one of my dearest possessions, because I don’t think I could have written these poems without it. Whether that’s beauty or tragedy depends entirely on how you choose to look at it.

a painter will say, black deepens red
a lover will say, red softens black
and I found myself wondering
have I been painting you or loving you?

for every time I reach your darkness
my hands returned the colour of wine
and every time I offered you my red
you left it deeper, darker

creation chose a colour
for things that break with love
longing has its own way of bleeding
my heart knows it too well

red kept reaching what black concealed
black kept mourning what red could heal
and that’s what I tried
to do with us

black wore the moon like a mourning veil
red wore the sun like a bleeding crown
you, the colour of endings
and I, the colour of beginnings
how could I not mistake you for destiny?

I shall keep painting
until your black breathes beneath my skin
and my red shimmers inside your black
until colour becomes fate
and the painting refuses to end

a painting that horrifies the curator
a heart that terrifies its bearer
have I ruined my canvas
or surrendered my heart?

on a stormy night of rain and ruin
my heart was seized by wind and dread
there amidst the holy wreck
black taught the anchors how to wait
red taught the sails how to leave
the sea tried to obey both
and tore the ship apart

the sea has had its way
the storm has had its say
my stubborn faith stayed all the same
the wind had lost its strength

I’ll split my crimson heart for you
and spill it through your endless night
if they split my heart open
they’d find your midnight beating
and if they tore the night apart
they’d watch it bleed in red

take my red and make it yours
for in your darkness
I found my home

But not everyone is granted the vision to see through them. Most people stop at the superficial, never wondering what lies beyond it. Only a few are blessed with the vision to see beyond the veil, and that vision is earned through a yearning so intense it carves new eyes into your soul.

Now this will be difficult for me to articulate, but I’ve always been strangely drawn to odd numbers. Perhaps because they carry a mysterious vibe, as if they refuse to be solved. I have always found myself yearning for a certain kind of oddity, something mystical in nature. I’ve been drawn to anything I associate with odd numbers, they seem to point toward an infinite, primordial mystery. It’s more of a feeling than a phenomenon, and that too a very elusive one. That’s why it has always remained just beyond the reach of language.

I’ve always felt like numbers are the closest humanity has ever come to infinity. So whenever words fail to articulate this mystical oddity my soul keeps reaching for, I instinctively turn to numbers instead. They seem to carry mystery better than words do. Words are too definite, too straightforward for such vast concepts. Even art has never brought me close to this strange yearning. Music sometimes comes close, but I think that’s only because I’m always trying to project that longing onto anything abstract enough to hold it. Whatever this feeling is, I know it is unquestionably divine in nature. I’ve searched for it in prostration and in scripture, and they have offered me fleeting glimpses just enough to reassure me that my longing is pointed in the right direction.

But the closest I’ve ever come to that mystical oddity was when I fell in love. My beloved became the smallest aperture through which the infinite poured into my life. His eyes lured me in like black holes, drawing me towards the very oddity I had spent my entire life yearning for. In those few moments I was no longer standing on the earth, I was suspended in a vortex of infinity, carried through constellations and galaxies, drifting toward a place so heavenly it felt older than memory itself. What kind of sorcery was this? What unearthly spell could strip a person off their feet with nothing more than a glance?

And naturally, I mistook the holiness of the experience for infatuation with the person. I condemned myself for loving someone who was clearly undeserving of such devotion. The contradiction tormented me for a long time.

Only when I reread this couplet by Allama Iqbal, I had an epiphany, and things fell into perspective.

Transliteration:
kabhi ae haqiqat-e-muntazar, nazar aa libas-e-majaz mein
ke hazaron sajde tarap rahe hain meri jabeen-e-niaz mein

Translation:
for once, oh awaited Reality, reveal yourself in a material form,
for a thousand prostrations are quivering eagerly in my forehead

Here the poet expresses his intense longing for the awaited reality by which he means god. His yearning has become so overwhelming that he wishes the awaited reality could arrive in tangible form so he could express his everlasting devotion towards him.

I resonated with this couplet in a totally different way, my interpretation may not be accurate but it did put things in perspective for me so it’s worth sharing. The mystical oddity my soul has spent its entire life searching for, had never appeared in a tangible form to me. I searched for it everywhere, in numbers, in art, in music, in prayer but they only ever offered me fragments. And the closest I ever came to witnessing it was in my beloved’s face. For the first time, that ancient nameless reality (haqiqat-e-muntazar) I had always longed for seemed to have taken on a visible form (libas-e-majaz). It was like the infinite had found a body through which I could glimpse it.

I wasn’t captivated by the person, I was overwhelmed by the glimpse of the reality I saw through him. And for a moment, the longing that had haunted me my entire life felt as if it had finally found its home. Naturally, I became confused. I thought I had fallen in love with the person, when in truth I had fallen in love with what I could see through him. My devotion was never directed at him, it was directed at the glimpse of eternity I saw in his presence.

Before our souls entered this world, they resided in alam al arwah (the world of souls). There, our souls were connected to god through a deep intimacy before we were stripped of it and sent into this world. We still remember that realm emotionally. And that’s why beauty doesn’t just please us, beauty awakens us. The feeling of awe it awakens in us is our soul’s brief recognition of its forgotten homeland.

Now I’ll quote my favourite line by Rilke to add to it
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear”

He doesn’t mean beauty is frightening in the ordinary sense. He means that genuine beauty is terrifying because it hints at something infinitely greater than ourselves. For a fleeting moment, it tears open the veil between this world and the one our souls still ache for. It reminds us of a home we cannot remember, only miss.

I’ve been fascinated by the philosophy of aesthetics ever since I saw him, perhaps in the vain hope that one day I’d find an explanation for what I had felt. Yet nothing ever fully satisfied me. Plato believed that every beautiful thing derives its beauty from the eternal form of beauty, and everything is only an imperfect instance of it. The sufis thought jamal (beauty) was one of god’s attributes which was reflected through god’s creation. But everybody arrives at the same conclusion that beauty is never complete in itself. It is always pointing towards something higher. And our task is not just to admire beauty, but to trace it back to its source, to ask what it is revealing, and what it hides behind itself. And that was the mistake I made, I stopped and clung to the beauty I saw instead of taking it as a direction to walk towards.

The true purpose of beauty is not to imprison our gaze but to teach us where to look next, to look beyond the form, in which eternity is quivering. The tragedy isn’t that we love beautiful things too much, the tragedy is that we love them too little. We stop at the surface instead of following the trail they leave behind.

So yes, the first time I glimpsed an ethereal beauty, I was struck with terror. I didn’t know what to do with a vision so immense. When the mystical oddity arrived in front of me clothed in libaas-e-majaz (human form), I surrendered. It rushed through me like a storm. I wanted to worship it, to devour it, to possess it entirely. I was too overwhelmed to ask what it was pointing toward. Only now, after the dust has settled, have I started to make sense of things and strive in the direction it showed me.

You may ask how one follows beauty to the higher reality it points towards. I honestly don’t know. That is the most personal and subjective part of all this. And I am no expert, I am only gathering breadcrumbs and hoping they lead somewhere true. Sometimes I lose the trail, and sometimes an unexpected epiphany finds me. It’s been a strange journey. Even now I catch myself searching for the glimpse those eyes once showed me. I still find traces of it in odd numbers, in music, in certain symbols, and whatnot. We are finite creatures trying to understand the infinite, and so we reach for finite tools to make sense of it.

The moment I looked into two ordinary human eyes and found myself standing at the edge of eternity is the closest I’ll come to heaven in this life. Beauty is the most powerful force in the world, nothing else dismantles us so completely. I only pray that wherever beauty finds me again, I remember not to stop at it. To let it wound me, awaken me, and then follow where it is pointing.

Perhaps that’s what muses are for. They leave us with a longing more sacred than their presence ever was.

Perhaps you were only ever destined to be my muse. You showed me heaven just long enough to lure me in, and then disappeared. Leaving my soul stuttering somewhere between the heavens and the earth. Forever reaching towards you, or perhaps towards the glimpse of eternity I once saw through you. I’d give up forever to touch you. Then I’d combust, scatter into a thousand small pieces, each one faithful in its ascent toward heaven. And I will reach it. I know I will. You have left me, but you did not leave me adrift. Before you departed, you showed me what the heavens looked like. And that was enough. Now I know which way to walk. Holding tightly to the rope of what you revealed to me, I will climb towards them, because of you. Only because of you. You lured me with heaven on earth and left me yearning for it forever. I will reach God by following the thread you left behind. And perhaps, when I finally arrive, I will forget you. Perhaps you will fade away when I reach my destination. For now, thank you for being my muse. Thank you for showing me haqiqat-e-muntazar in libaas-e-majaz. Thank you for showing me what heaven looks like. I cannot write unless I am writing about you. You are the red ink that flows both through my pen and through my veins. Now I drift through a black infinity, still moving upwards. The black has devoured the red. The soliloquies in scarlet have faded into black, written in the futile hope that they might reach you someday. But perhaps you were never meant to be anything more than my muse. Maybe that was the cruelty. Or maybe that was god’s mercy. For in searching for you, I found god.

The clouds hang all dark and grey from the vaults of heaven. What thunder do they behold? What makes them so dense? I sit barefoot beneath them on the sediments of memory and regret, mindlessly rolling the rocks under my hands like the beads of a rosary. Except the prayers have crystallised in my throat. And my heart has learnt to withhold the thunder, just like the clouds above me.

The horizon clinches itself tighter around its own throat. And the ethereal blue that once floated so freely amidst the clouds has begun to calcify beneath a slow invasion of ash and smoke. The grey colonizes what was once a dreamscape and drinks the pigment from everything until colour becomes a false hope I whisper to myself before falling asleep.

I feel like I am standing in a surrealist painting by Salvador Dali. There are mouths floating around me, each one muttering a different prophecy into the marrow of the air. They hang there like figs left too long on a tree. I reach for none of them and yet each one finds me. Scarlet reliquaries of unsaid futures. They keep murmuring until I get dizzy, chattering with the mechanical certainty of clocks that have mistaken themselves for oracles. Their little teeth grinding possibilities into a thin powder that pollutes the air. They continue their liturgy and I, a castaway on the shores of tomorrow, stand beneath their haunting chorus with my hands against my head, wondering if it’s the world that is spinning or the unbearable abundance of possible lives.

The mouths loom over me with a faithful insistence. My desolate brain mourns its inability to write beautiful prose. But beautiful prose would be a lie, my prose should be as ridiculous as I feel. So yes, the clouds birth mouths and the mouths drag me by the ankles through this jagged terrain until my skin learns the language my tongue can’t speak. Anything gentler would be a lie. I let my imagination continue its little atrocities, making spectacles of my fears.

Kierkegaard famously said “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” and I cannot think of a better description for this landscape before me. He says that when we look into the abyss of all the lives we could possibly live, we experience a kind of vertigo heavy with dread. Because what’s stopping us from becoming all that, except our own selves?

He goes on to explain that this dizziness of freedom is a gift. If every possibility is open before us, then our choices matter, for every action carries consequence. To choose one life is to abandon a thousand others. We are free enough to become almost anything, and somehow that is precisely what terrifies us.

My imagination, ever the optimist, refuses to leave me. My mind is generous with the courage reality never seems to offer. So I imagine myself standing amidst this forsaken terrain with a bow slung over my shoulder and a will carved from rock. One arrow towards the clouds and the heavens surrender their thunder, one towards the scarlet mouths and they fall into the dust, their prophecies spilling from broken teeth like pomegranate seeds. For once, my hands know exactly where to aim. The blue is no longer an illusion, it is something I can walk towards.

But I’m afraid I don’t possess such prowess. Why do I talk about aiming at the sky and catching the prophecies when my hands get unsteady even while writing these clumsy words. They cannot steady a pen, let alone a bow.

Blue has always remained an illusion, it escapes my grasp just like the last ribbon of steam rising from my tea. I sit confused, wondering whether to resent my own hands or the horizon that forever escapes them.

So yes, my tea goes cold and the dreamscape in my imagination slowly combusts. I am snapped back to reality where the mouths are no longer floating in the sky but are speaking through people. The clouds have been living inside my chest all along. They keep growing heavier but don’t have the courage to break down. Because I am not a coward, am I? So the clouds keep growing denser and darker. I keep hoping for an arrow fierce enough to pierce them someday. So I have the mercy of seeing what falls out of my weary heart. Fools like me can only lose ourselves in imagination and write absurd metaphors. In the end, the landscape disappears but the dilemma doesn’t, leaving only freedom and my stubborn reluctance to choose.

For now, it’s just me, my laptop, an unfinished cup of tea, and the horrible privilege of being able to become almost anything.

Thank you for reading !!!
Love, Sarah <3

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Ancient people didn’t have many distractions, their lives were slow and mindful, and they paid more attention to things around them. When night arrived, there was little to do except sit beneath the sky and stare at it. And what a terrifying thing it must have been! An unending black abyss stretching before their eyes, a darkness so vast their minds could not fathom it. Imagine standing at the edge of a pit so deep you don’t know where it ends or what it holds. Then imagine tiny specks of light glowing from it. It still terrifies you, but now it also fills you with wonder.

God adorned the dark sky with specks of light so that there is also a reassurance within the terror of the night sky. It gives us a feeling that although the unknown stretches endlessly in every direction, there is also something worthwhile and beautiful hidden inside it.

Ancient people must have looked at this unending abyss and felt the same sense of terror that we do, asking the same questions: what does this dark abyss hold? how big it is? what’s our place in it? And whenever humans are confronted with something too vast for their comprehension, they come up with stories. So yes, they weaved myths and fiction into the sky as well. They noticed patterns in the scattered stars, connected the distant points of light, formed some shapes and called them constellations. Suddenly, there were lions and dragons and horses where there was once only plain blackness. They turned the sky into a beautiful canvas of familiar shapes.

Since the beginning of time, humans have responded to uncertainty the same way. By creating myths, stories, and fiction. By gathering scattered things and organising them into patterns we can understand. That’s how we came up with constellations and all the myths surrounding them.

The stars themselves weren’t connected, humans connected them. And somehow they became real enough to guide sailors across oceans, mark the passing of seasons, and survive thousands of years.

What a pity we’ve lost the art of stargazing now. I believe stargazing is one of the most intimate things you can do with another person. Standing beside another person and looking up together, looking at something infinitely larger than both of you. For some reason, it just makes us feel connected. Perhaps because the iron flowing in our blood was forged in the ancient stars. We’re closer to stars than we think. And yet we are farther from them than we could ever imagine.

Maybe it’s the distance of the stars that fascinates us. The farther something is, the wilder our imagination is about it. We have a grander view of things we can not possess.

So while staring at the stars, imagining impossible worlds and distant futures, I also find myself thinking about the people beside me. Something about standing beneath something so ancient and unreachable makes our differences seem smaller. We become companions in our naivety and wonder. Fellow travelers sharing the same bewilderment.

I looked into the etymology of the word constellation to understand it better. The word constellation comes from the root word “stella” which means star in latin. All the word origins for star like stella, ster, aster, setareh are very similar but we have no record of how that originated. The origin of the word star is just as mysterious as stars themselves.

It amazes me how often stars linger in our language. The word “consider” (considerare) is traditionally linked to observing the stars before making a judgement. Even the word “desire” (de-siderare) meant the longing for a missing star. And the word “disaster” (dys-astron) meant a bad star, or an event caused by a bad star. A lot of important Latin words about human thought, judgment, fate, and longing were imagined through the stars. Our ancestors kept reaching for the stars whenever they had to talk about the deepest parts of being human. For most of human history, people just had the sky, and that was their clock, their calendar, their compass, their map, their mystery. So it makes sense that whenever our ancestors needed metaphors to describe hope, fear, longing, or destiny, they instinctively borrowed it from the sky.

Humans don’t just make constellations in the stars, we make constellations in whatever we find fascinating. We make constellations in love, in memory, in grief, in identity. The universe keeps scattering, multiplying, eroding things; everything is drifting towards entropy and disorder. So humans decided to answer it in their own ways.

We gather it all, arrange things into beautiful patterns, and insist they belong together. We build constellations of everything that is scattered, to fight the entropy the universe throws at us.

One of my favourite constellations is Andromeda. In Greek mythology, Andromeda was a princess chained to a rock by the sea as a sacrifice to the sea monster. It is so beautiful how ancient people looked at a cluster of stars and imagined her there in the dark sky. Humans always told stories projecting their own familiar struggles. In the end Perseus comes and saves her, they refused to tell stories where darkness has the final word, we have never been content with darkness. Somehow, we always place a light within it. We look into the unknown, weave stories around it, and make it all a little less terrifying.

Perhaps that’s what artists have always done. Poets, painters, musicians; we spend our lives making constellations out of whatever captivates us. Choosing colours we like and arranging them into beautiful patterns, gathering chords that would be ordinary on their own and turning them into a symphony. Stars of our choice and lines between them, the result is something beautiful enough to keep us grounded in the vastness around us.

Look at ourselves, a constellation of memory and identity. So much has happened to us, some events fill us with pride, others with shame, some memories define us, some we choose to bury deep down, the labels others give us, the identities we choose for ourselves. From all this chaos, we curate a coherent narrative of ourselves. We draw lines between experiences, decide which moments matter, and organize the fragments into something coherent enough to call a self.

And oh, the constellations we make in love. The beauty of our perception peaks here. The way they laugh, the scar on their wrist, the sentences they keep repeating, their little habits, we keep collecting all the fascinating parts about them like tiny stars. Then we draw lines and connect them in the most beautiful way until the person becomes irreplaceable. And what is grief if not watching those lines remain after the stars are all gone?

All of this arranging, connecting, and telling stories is a human response to the terror of the universe. We are forever gathering things that are trying to scatter. Forever drawing lines that the universe keeps rubbing out. Forever making constellations out of everything.

Maybe that is what it means to be human. Not to win against the entropy, not to overcome the terror. But to look directly at a universe that is always coming apart and answer with tenderness anyway. To answer with stories, with names, with art. To answer with our absurd, stubborn insistence that these pieces belong together. That this person belongs to me. That this life, despite how fractured it appears, forms a shape. And perhaps the shape is imaginary. Perhaps the lines exist nowhere except within us. But then again, so does every beautiful thing.

Perhaps that’s all a human life has ever been, the stubborn art of making constellations. Looking into the darkness, gathering whatever lights we can find, and drawing lines between them until they become beautiful enough to live by.

How spectacular, how beautiful this reverie of warmth is. It leaves my thoughts scattered like withered leaves. Why, god, why is the season of loss so beautiful? It’s the funeral of all bloom, why then, is a funeral so colourful? Why is the harvest of sorrows painted in shades of gold? Perhaps beauty is the veil through which loss becomes meaningful.

There’s a peculiar loneliness in the autumn air. It smells of endings. The trees are dying just like they always do, the leaves are falling just like they are meant to, but still we mourn it. We knew it would all go away, it always does, everything occurs according to the laws of nature. Then why do we mourn it? Why do we grieve things when we already know they will end someday? Endings come laden with emotions, no matter whether they were expected or not. Because anything, if it stays enough to leave a mark, makes its withering away a sorrow. All the things that couldn’t be kept, all the promises too fragile to survive the changing temperature of the heart.

I sit beneath the gnarled branches of trees, lost in introspection. My heart is a cathedral of unanswered prayers gathered over all these years, it rattles with their clashing, scaring away any trace of hope that dared to linger. I wrote down all my prayers with a feather as soft as hope, only to see the ink fade away with time. All I remember is the fervor of my prayers and the vehemence of my heart. All I remember is that the ink was my blood. Now the scarlet gleams all blurred, and I can’t tell if it’s anger, grief, or hope left too long to rot.

Perhaps the most miraculous thing about the human heart is that, no matter how much it is twisted and turned, no matter how violently it churns in agony, you can never knead it enough to annihilate hope in its entirety.

The earth keeps turning, the seasons keep changing. Summer comes, then winter follows, and spring arrives with its ridiculous optimism. The trees begin again as if nothing happened. Leaves and flowers bloom from branches that were black and dead only weeks ago. Sunflowers rise, their faces toward the sun with a faith I have always envied. Dandelions gather themselves into fragile white constellations and wait for someone to make a wish. And I do, of course I do.

I tell myself this year will be different. The sunlight lingers for longer and I bid a bittersweet farewell to my old comrade, grief. There are days I genuinely believe I have crossed some invisible border and left my grief behind. But my old comrade is very loyal. It wanders through mountains and swims across seas, only to return and sit comfortably inside the home it has made of my heart.

You bury all your grief, only to discover it has roots. You think you’ve escaped it, only to meet it in another season, dressed in another colour. The leaves wither, the prayers wither. I stand among the ruins wondering how relentlessly cyclical this tormenting world is. The earth is a sphere, perhaps that is why it keeps returning our sorrows to us with every rotation, with every season.

The withered leaves, the withered prayers. How similar they are in their frailty. I stand among the crumbling leaves and imagine all my unanswered prayers around me. Beautiful and brittle. They began full of life, colour and hope; changing form with every season of my life. Until here they are today, rotten and brown in the vain pursuit of becoming. The pleas I made in the dead of night and the hopes I tried to carry towards heaven. Now they all rot at my feet. How dire it is to drag ourselves through springs and summers and autumns. Through all the little deaths contained inside a life.

Perhaps the trees know something I don’t. Their antiquity has taught them a timeless lesson about attachment and letting go. How beautifully they perform this ritual of release every year. Letting something beloved drift away while the heart grows heavy and the eyes grow wet. Perhaps because you know it’s for the good. Perhaps because you know it always will come back to you in one way or another, as all good things do, only changed in their form.

And just like the old comrade grief, love also makes its way to your heart. Yes, love has a longer route than grief, it encounters more trials on its journey. It’s tattered and bruised when it reaches its destiny. But in the eyes of its keeper, the more broken it is, the dearer it becomes.

So pardon me, my comrade grief. You’re dear to me and you’re my own. But once love comes home after its tumultuous journey, I’ll exalt it over all there is.

I’ll use this as an excuse to quote my favourite couplet by Allama Iqbal

Translitaeration:
tu bacha bacha ke na rakh isey, tera aina hei wo aina
ke shikasta ho to azeez tar, hei nigaah-e-aina saaz mein

Translation:
don’t keep protecting it so cautiously, your mirror is the mirror that,
when broken, becomes more precious in the eyes of the mirror maker.

(the mirror mentioned above is a metaphor for the heart)

All the seasons of my life; breaking me, remaking me, stripping me bare, and forming anew, they were carrying me towards my destiny in their own peculiar ways. The withered leaves and the withered prayers, the seasons and the losses, the grief and the love, at the end it all collapses into the black arc of devotion. It connects us to the unseen, the wisdom behind all the seasons we were too naive to see.

So every year, when the leaves begin their descent, I am reminded that something else also lingers beneath the loss. A doorway. A return. I bow in prostration, dust returning to dust, holding my tattered heart in my palm, offering it to my lord in surrender. The black arc of devotion stretching from my bent body towards the heavens. A line that cuts clean through every season, every loss, every illusion. A bridge between all that withers and all that remains.

A doorway through which the heart finds its way home.

The first is deep gratitude. She sacrificed her life for us, gave us everything she could. The meals on time, the clothes placed in the cupboard, everything done perfectly before we could even give a second thought to it. I love her so vehemently that I can feel it in my marrow.

But the love doesn’t come alone, it drags something else with it. Beneath all the love and gratitude, there is also something else I feel for her, something darker. Resentment.

The woman who brought me into existence, the woman who taught me how to live, the first woman I ever knew, she was supposed to be my role model, right? She was supposed to be my first example of what a life should look like. Then why is she the clearest example of everything I am terrified to become?

Why does my mother’s life feel less like a blueprint and more like a warning written in a language I understand too well?

God, this question tightens in my throat. There’s something so pure in my mother’s love that it makes me feel sick to even question it. Because what kind of daughter stands in the middle of all this sacrifice and still feels unsettled?

But I do. God, I do. Because every time I contemplate my existence at 3 am, every time I feel hollow and directionless about my life, and I try to trace back my existential dread, it always leads to the same absence. The absence of a role model my mother could be. The absence of a version of womanhood that felt whole and admirable to me.

I hate that even in my most vulnerable moments, when I am searching for comfort or direction, I cannot find it in the person who should have been my first answer.

And the guilt that comes tangled with every thought. Am I a bad daughter? How do you look at the woman who gave you life and feel appalled? What kind of person is repelled by the very life that made hers possible?

Mama? If you loved me so much, why didn’t you choose a kinder fate for me? You walked through all those thorns for me, but somehow they still bleed beneath my feet.

Maybe that’s why something between us always feels tense. Because deep down you know what fate awaits me. You’ve lived with it mama, you’ve seen how it ends. And I don’t understand how you could just stand there and let that happen to your daughter. I don’t know how to forgive you for that.

“She’s just like her mother” people say. Tell me that’s not a compliment. Tell me that’s not my fate. I can be anything, mama, anything. Cruel or kind, broken or whole, loved or feared. Anything, just not you. Please, save me mama, save me from a future that looks like you.

The weight of your cursed legacy looms over me like a sword, my worst nightmares fade away in front of your reality, mama. Because this destiny is closer to me than I’ll ever admit.

Honestly if you ask me, I would’ve taken the meals a bit late, I would’ve taken the clothes wrinkled, I would’ve taken the house slightly out of order, if it only meant I had a version of womanhood I could look up to.

Now the burden is mine, to build from nothing what should have been shown to me. To move through the world like a lost child, studying fragments of other women, trying to piece together a version of womanhood that I can live with.

Because when I look at my mother, I only see a future that terrifies me to my core.

When I am alone at night, when everything is dark and there is nothing left to distract me from myself, this is where my mind goes. To her. To what her life represents. To what it might mean for mine.

And it terrifies me in a way I don’t know how to explain.

I keep thinking about a future version of myself I don’t want to meet. One that looks like her in all the ways that scare me. And sometimes, I think, will I ever have a daughter? And it makes my chest tighten, because what if she feels the same about me? Does the vicious cycle of mother-daughter contempt ever end?

Mama? Maybe you felt this once too? Maybe you also looked at your mother and felt something break inside you. Maybe you also promised yourself you would be different. But you couldn’t, could you? And what if I can’t either?

You and I are a mirror of each other. I want to shatter that mirror with my bare hands and build something for myself with bloodied knuckles. Anything, god, anything to escape this cursed legacy.

You gave me life mama, but somewhere within that, you also gave me a fear of living it.

You look at yourself in the mirror and it makes you throw up. Where’d that go? The joy, the liveliness. Maybe that was all temporary; it had to pass away for something more permanent to arrive.

The earth didn’t spin any differently that day. But mine did. It lurched, tilted, lost its rhythm. Spun so violently I could only make out some blurry fragments. Suddenly gravity stopped working and everything that once held me in place let go. My world lost its centre. How does it spin now? Who does it orbit?

People might call it a disaster. But “disaster” means “a bad star” in Greek. Originally, this word was used for a calamity caused by an unfavourable of position of celestial bodies, and then people started using it for earthly calamities too. But my calamity? Was that a disaster too? My calamity was you. And I won’t let language reduce you to an error in the cosmos. You were the most beautiful star in the sky of my soul.

What broke me also made me who I am today. I wish I could say I regret it. I wish I could be angry and just move on cleanly. But I can’t. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Yes it broke me, shattered me I’d say. But I still trace all the cracks with reverence, I run my fingers across the scars and feel awe. There is an artistry to this ruin, it is sacred in what it made of me.

Because something in me opened the moment I saw you, and then it kept flowing, it just kept pouring out of me in ways I didn’t know I was capable of. And now when I look back at everything — the loss, the mess, the way it all fell apart; I can’t resent it. Because if I resent it, then I’m resenting you. And I can’t do that. So I take it all in; the loss, the ruin, the ache that lingers in places no one sees. I gather it tenderly, wrap it like a relic, and place it inside my heart because that’s where it belongs.

They say the iron in our blood literally comes from stars. Like actual stars that exploded a long time ago. How crazy is that! Stars, galaxies, and our blood are made of the same substance. It’s so absurd to think that something so vast and violent is inside us, keeping us alive. Every human being has a whole universe of their own built inside them.

And it makes me wonder if that’s why we fall in love? Like when you look at a person and catch a glimpse of an entire cosmos within them. They make you see stars in them and for a moment you understand infinity. Then you spend the rest of your life trying to explain what you saw.

Ink dries, pages end, voices falter, but there’s something in our hearts which never seems to end. We try to name it, but every name just makes it sound smaller. We try to understand it, but the absurdity goes past all senses and is only found in a glimpse which leaves you trembling.

They say there’s a river in paradise called Hauz-e-Kausar. Its water is said to be sweeter than honey, smelling of musk, and surrounded by rubies and crystals. They say whoever gets to drink from it will never be thirsty again. You taste it once and suddenly nothing ever feels the same. One sip from that blessed river is enough to make you forget everything that ever hurt you, every injustice, every grief.

I think if there’s anything that can come anywhere close to hauz-e-kausar on earth, it is love. Once you drink from the hauz of love, you’re never the same person again. There’s something about the taste, which makes you forget every taste of the world.

And that is why I hold the sanctity of my pain close to my heart. Nothing has ever broken me like that, but at the same time, nothing has ever made me feel that alive either.

Only I can ever truly know what I saw in that one glimpse. I can try to explain it, I can try to put it into words, but it always ends up sounding smaller than it actually was. That’s because love isn’t something you can explain to someone and have them understand. It’s not something you can pass on through language.

Understanding love is a privilege on its own. To understand it, you have to pay a price. To understand it, you have to let it break you in its own specific way. Love is not gentle when it’s real, it’s a calamity. You can’t come back the same from it.

Because it doesn’t end where it’s supposed to. Love doesn’t end when the person does. It lingers in the parts of you that never returned to who they were. You don’t move on from it, you move with it.

That’s the thing no one tells you, love has an afterlife of its own. And you live the rest of your life inside it.

Maybe if I lived in the moors like Charlotte Bronte my writing would come out naturally beautiful. But I am inside these four walls that keep leaning inward. I press my bare hands against them, trying to keep them from caving in. The walls are heavy, but heavier so is my heart. I don’t want it all to collapse. I keep holding back the walls. Sometimes a shudder runs through my body. My strength flickers. The walls collapse. It all gets ugly. I get bruised and life pauses. Days pass. Eventually, I gather the courage and begin clearing the wreckage myself. I am always alone when it’s time to lift the heaviest pieces. I sit in the rubble where everything is sharp and heavy. sharp and heavy. sharp and heavy. I repeat the words till they lose their meaning. I look at myself writing these absurd sentences and I feel embarrassed. Grief makes my language feral. I realise even my thoughts have dust in them. The rubble has reached my brain. And I am alive beneath what should have buried me. Alive beneath what should have buried me.

I like to pretend I’m all steel and storm, but the truth is I shatter the moment I’m dragged before the cold iron wall of fate. The wall doesn’t flinch. It watches my ruin with indifference. I fall to my knees, defeated and humiliated. Begging for a crack, a mercy, anything to hold on to. I tear myself apart, frost by frost, desperate to find even a flicker of warmth inside this body I no longer recognise. But even hope freezes on my tongue. Who reaches for warmth in the Himalayas of their own grief.

Tired of fighting. The war has gotten brutal. The wounds, the cuts, the broken bones. God, I am dropping the arms now, I am surrendering. Call me a coward but oh I can’t fight anymore. I can’t row my boat anymore. God, I retire. My hands hurt, I lend you the shafts. Take me where you want, I’ll follow your lead. Row my boat, god, row it with love please.

I pray, with a hopeless trembling heart. I pray to a god closer than my spinal cord. I hand him the shaft to my boat hoping he takes me to a kinder place. Perhaps slowly, perhaps painfully, but I believe he’s taking me to a kinder place.

The grief will condense. The snow will melt. The heart will breathe. Even in the Himalayas of my grief, the sun will shine anyway. God is taking me to a kinder place. I hope I stay alive to witness it.

row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merily, merrily
life is but a dream

Sometimes nostalgia feels ugly and blue, like pressing on a bruise you forgot about. But today it feels gentle and golden like this nursery rhyme. This is my favourite nursery rhyme since childhood and every time I hear, something in me still softens. It feels tender and hopeful in a way I can not explain, like someone else is rowing while I sit quietly and trust the movement.

When I hear this, I am a kid again, and I can see mama singing this to me while feeding me cereal and rushing around to get me ready for school. Good old days. She didn’t know she was giving me a memory I’d come back to when everything got messy.

Pardon my incoherence today. All I am is blurred fragments of my past selves drifting through this random monday. Most days there’s no nostalgia, only remembering in its ugliest form. It grabs me by the collar and suddenly I am seventeen again, crying in the shower, sobs clawing at my throat, breath breaking. It does get better. It does get better. Only that it kills you a million times before it does.

Now there’s my 21 year old self. Stable. Tediously stable. But I am at a point where I am finally free of all my insecurities and negative emotions. I can finally sit back and enjoy this strange play called life. I’m an attentive, thoughtful, peaceful spectator I’d say. I love this more than anything.

One thing which fills my heart with joy is that through all the past versions of me — the sad, the angry, the defiant, the loser — I have been equally loved. And that has made all the difference.

I dont have to be hyper productive like my 17 year old self to be considered a good daughter. I dont need to get good grades or look pretty or be smart enough to earn love. I’ve tried being everything, and learnt that I will be unconditionally loved in whatever I choose for myself.

Mama still brings coffee in bed to her 21 year old unemployed loser daughter and tells me she’s proud of me after hours of bedrotting. And that means the world to me. I don’t want anything else. No matter how bad of a day I am having, as long as I enter the four walls of my home, I am lavishly flattered for how amazing I am. After all, I am Sarah. In my most imperfect form, I am always perfect in the eyes of my people. And once in a secure and healthy state, what you choose for yourself is always the best decision. Because there’s no expectations or fears holding you back. I know whatever I choose, I will be met with unconditional positive regard. And so, I choose to create.

Peace has taught me something over the past few years — “everyone is an artist until rent is due.” This is so real. I never imagined myself choosing art. I was bad at it. I even failed art in 8th grade. But peace made me choose the brush at the ripe age of 20 with absolutely zero experience. And within one year, my art made it to an exhibition where I made my first sale.

I could have never believed it two years ago when I held a brush after years and made wobbly flowers. But hey, we did it!

These past years have also made me curious in a gentle way. I think better, I read better, I love better. Everything in life softens when your stomach isn’t constantly knotted with anxiety. (Though I’ll admit the writing was much better with the trauma but I wouldn’t trade this peace for anything.)

When life is merely survival and maintenance, then creativity just turns into a coping mechanism. Something used to endure rather than to explore. Sure sublimation is real, and art made in a life of discomfort may be more intense, even extraordinary as a finished product. But peace totally alters the role of art.

When the mind is no longer preoccupied with threat or instability, perception widens. Things begin to make more sense. Creation is no longer driven by the need to escape or survive, but it is purely driven by curiosity and genuine interest in the world.

When we’re in this state of peace, art stops being a means to an end. The process itself becomes the source of meaning. Attention slows, experimentation feels safe, and wonder fills the process. The act of making matters more than the final product.

There is no pressure to justify expression through suffering, and you approach art with curiosity and openness rather than desperation.

So yes, art that comes from a traumatized place may be more intense and more impressive as an object, but art born from peace offers a different kind of value. It carries the richness of a mind that is free to linger, to enjoy, and to create without needing to be rescued by the result.

row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merily, merrily
life is but a dream

After all these years, my life feels as tender as this nursery rhyme again. Gentleness takes courage, and I choose to row my boat gently, with love, and with wonder. Life really is a dream and I couldn’t be more grateful to god, to my loved ones, and to myself.

Thank you for reading !!!
Love, Sarah <3

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This is where the sorites paradox enters, it uses a very simple idea. Imagine a large heap of sand, if you remove just one grain of sand, it still looks like a heap. Removing one grain doesn’t seem enough to change what it is. The same feels true for the next grain, and the next. But if you keep removing grains one by one, eventually you are left with only a few grains, or even just one, and that clearly cannot be called a heap.

The paradox is that although we know a heap needs many grains, there is no clear, exact point where the heap stops being a heap. There is no moment where you can say, here, this is where it stopped being what it was.

The Sorites paradox is supposed to be about sand. But to me, it always seems about us. Because this is exactly how humans break. Each individual alteration appears insignificant. Each feels like just one grain. And yet people do change. Relationships decay. Selves erode. What once felt solid becomes scattered.

You don’t become harsh all at once. You just get tired. Tired of explaining yourself. Tired of holding your softness so carefully. You excuse yourself once. Then again. You start choosing ease over care, silence over responsibility. You tell yourself you are still good because you recognize yourself from yesterday. But kindness, like heaps, does not collapse loudly. It thins. It loosens. It becomes something else while retaining its name.

If we can slowly become someone else while still calling ourselves the same, then what exactly are we loyal to? Our past selves, our intentions, or our present actions?

Love is the most painful version of this paradox.

Love does not usually die in moments. It dies in pauses. In the way conversations shorten. In the way you stop reaching first. In the way you start feeling lonely even when someone is right beside you. One distance doesn’t mean anything. Neither does the next. You tell yourself you’re overthinking. You tell yourself love isn’t supposed to feel easy all the time. And then one day, you realize you are grieving something that never officially ended. That’s the cruel part. There was no last sentence. No final touch. Just a slow drifting apart that felt too small to stop.

We want clear lines because they give us something to hold onto. If we knew exactly when things fell apart, we could fix them. But life doesn’t work like that. It moves quietly. It takes away gently.

Perhaps this is why so much grief feels insidious. Without a clear ending, mourning feels like an overreaction. And yet the absence is real. The weight is gone. The name remains.

A closely related problem appears in another famous philosophical thought experiment, the Ship of Theseus. If a ship has its planks replaced one by one over time, is it still the same ship? And if it is not, at what exact point does it cease to be what it was? Although the ship seems continuous, every part of its material substance is eventually changed.

This shows us something deeply unsettling. If identity can be preserved through complete replacement, then what truly makes something the same over time?

Applied to human beings, the question becomes existential. If one belief changes, we are still ourselves. If a desire fades, we are still ourselves. If a value reverses, we remain the ourselves. But if every belief, desire, and value is eventually replaced what anchors the self? Are sameness and continuity just illusions created by memory?

Here the sorites paradox reveals something cruel about selfhood. We experience ourselves as the same person, not because we are, but because change happens beneath the threshold of our awareness.

We give ourselves away gradually, in choices too small to notice, until there is nothing left that resembles the beginning except the name we keep using out of habit.

What remains is not a broken version of what once was, but something else entirely, standing in the same place, answering to the same name, unable to locate the moment it replaced itself.

There may be no particular moment when we stop being who we were, only a point at which we realize we no longer are. And by then, the grains are already gone.

How long has it been? I don’t remember anymore. Only that it never left. Tried to kill it with logic and wrap it in poetry. Thought time would dilute it. But no. It grew teeth. It howls beneath my ribs.

Oh god, I’ve tried everything. To bury it. To starve it. To silence it. How cruelly poetic is that, something so fleeting could be so eternal in its echo.

I wonder, is there grace in the ruin? it certainly left me with something; maybe clarity, depth, or a sharpened way to see things. Should I be grateful for the silver lining that flickers faintly in the dark it brought? Or should I dread how it left me stumbling across a new terrain without a compass? I do not know.

No one is coming on a white horse to save me. At the end of the day, it is just me, I have to pull myself out of the abyss with my own hands. I have to stand on my own two feet and build something from whatever remains.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe next year. Maybe next lifetime. But hope feels flattened out, pressed thin. Everything is rough and bumpy in this terrain. So I lull myself to sleep because there is nothing else to do. In the dark of the night, may my soul find solace. Even sleep feels violent without hope.

How do I wake up in the morning knowing tomorrow will be equally dreadful? No sun to look forward to. No moon to seek refuge in. I bury myself under the sheets because I cannot bury myself in the grave yet.

See how desperate I sound. Rambling like a child. Howling on the page. Believing writing will make it better. But without hope, nothing really helps. Without hope, even my prayers feel hollow. I am too tired to write further. Too tired to pretend this helps. I let the night consume me, devour me whole.

The wolves howl beneath my chest because they can’t see their moon. The sunflowers reach out and wither because they’re waiting for their sun.

Absence is so unbearably heavy, it’s a presence of its own. It hovers over my heart, alluring in its disguise, seducing me with its illusion. I recognise the addiction in its whisper, and yet the yearning persists, for the thing it withholds is as intoxicating as red wine.

My brain is clouded. My heart is hazed. It needs light. But only my wounds glow, as if absence has learned to shine.

Light does not arrive gently. It never has. It fractures the dark violently, exposing what the shadows were merciful enough to hide. I wait for it anyway, knowing illumination is another kind of wound.

I live in the pause before twilight, where longing stretches itself thin and breaks. Where desire gnaws at its own ribs. I am suspended between hunger and surrender, breathing around an ache that refuses to resolve into language.

I need a light that reaches inward, into the cavities where absence has settled in and made a home. Until then, I burn in the twilight. Wolves restless, sunflowers bowed. Everything in me is reaching. Everything in me is waiting.

My thoughts rot in their own echo, circling the same wound until it learns my name. Even hope feels predatory now, flaunting its teeth, promising salvation while sharpening the knife.

There is something obscene about how deeply I want. The wanting hollows me out, leaves behind a chamber of hunger where silence multiplies and absence echoes. And still, I listen for footsteps in the dark. Knowing they lead nowhere. Knowing I will follow anyway.

Maybe god is breaking me in fragments so I can learn the language of loss before he hands me the final script. Maybe every heartbreak is a small rehearsal for the grand collapse he’s written for me ahead; soft preludes to a devastation so divine, it will split me into something unrecognisable.

He’s feeding me sorrow in small doses so I won’t choke when he finally pours the whole sea into my chest. Teaching me how to survive the ache, the way trees learn to live through winter, again and again, until it no longer feels like dying, only transforming. Each heartbreak feels like a knife I was meant to recognise later, so that when the real one comes, the one carved with my name, I won’t be surprised by how deep it goes.

God loves me too much to let me stay whole. He’s sculpting me through ruin.

We want love with a desperation that feels holy, and yet we fail, we sin, our reaching so often becomes distorted.

It is strange how the anatomy of sin is rarely analysed with tenderness. To the ordinary eye, sin is merely due to laziness, weak morale, or strong desires. But I think that’s a very superficial way to look at it. It is so much deeper than this.

When we act out and sin, people are very quick to pass verdicts. But can a human being ever be reduced to a single action? Are we only what we do? What about the constellations of thought, memory, fear, and hope that go behind a single action? Who is to see that?

We judge actions because they are visible and convenient. To judge the thoughts would require time, patience, and a willingness to sit with the complexity. And we are rarely willing to do that for one another. Human connection is not worth the effort to us. We don’t prize each other highly enough.

And when love and acceptance is scarce, we start misbehaving just to be noticed. So sometimes sin is not defiance at all, it is a test of mercy. A desperate reaching out from the darkest place in us, asking God, will you still want me like this? Will you love me when I am most unlovable? Will you embrace your imperfect creation, whose second nature is to fail? Or will you, like all others, turn away?

I think, if I am honest, I am more afraid of love than I am of sin. Sin gives me something familiar to hold onto, it gives my self hatred a reason, a story that makes my pain feel earned. But love, real love, would take that away. It would leave me without an explanation for why I despise myself. Because if even sin cannot exile me, then I lose my final excuse for self hatred.

And I don’t know how to live without the guilt and shame. I don’t know how to accept gentleness without suspicion. I have learned how to survive judgment, but I have not learned how to survive being accepted.

When people pull away after I falter, a small part of me understands. I have done the same. It feels safer to leave than to stay with something broken. But another part of me keeps count. It remembers every time affection wavered, every moment love turned conditional. And so I learned early that love is fragile, that it must be earned daily, that one wrong movement can shatter it.

So sometimes I test it. I cross lines I already know exist. I become difficult, I become too much. Not because I want to destroy myself, but because I want to know where the edge really is. How far can I go before I am no longer wanted? How much of my ugliness can I reveal before I am sent away?

I want God to answer me in the places where human love has failed. I want him to look at me in my most broken form and still remain. To not reduce me to my failures. To look at me at my worst and not turn away.

And this is the place where divine love breaks the patterns we have learned to expect. Because again and again, despite everything, despite the testing, the failing, the returning, he does not abandon us. He keeps holding us where we should have come apart. He stays, not because we are consistent, but because he is. Not because we have proven ourselves worthy, but because his love does not depend on worthiness at all.

God does not love us in spite of our brokenness, he meets us within it. Our brokenness is not an offence to him, it’s an invitation. He meets us in our brokenness, and gradually, beautifully, in his own way, fills all the crevices with love.

Perhaps love is not something we are meant to master immediately. Perhaps it is something we grow into, awkwardly, with trembling hands. God asks us to be willing. Willing to stay a little longer than our instincts demand. Willing to believe that we are not tolerated, but cherished.

Love and sin both teach us to sit with our own hearts without immediately condemning them. To realise we were never meant to earn love through suffering, we were meant to receive it, unconditionally.

But when love stays conditional and unanswered, it doesn’t just simply fade away, it rots. Even the most gentle impulses, when ignored for too long, begin to decay into something unrecognizable.

We are not born cruel. We are worn into it. We do not begin by wanting to destroy ourselves or others, we begin by wanting to be seen and loved. But when tenderness is met only with silence and returned with distance, something in us breaks its own rules. The heart, denied shelter, learns how to burn the house down just to feel warmth.

And so sin becomes the language of unanswered love. We are not just our reaching, we are what we become when that reaching fails. What we call human brokenness is, at its core, the tragedy of love that was never answered in time.

Even our sin and destruction were once an attempt at love.

If god loves without condition, then perhaps our calling is to love the same way. Generously and unconditionally. To let our love become a refuge, rather than a reward. Because when love is withheld for too long, desire learns the language of sin. And when love is given freely, it gives the heart a place to soften before it hardens. Perhaps what we call evil is only what happens when love is withdrawn for too long.

The most violent thing we do to ourselves and one another is to abandon the heart the moment it reveals itself. And then wonder why it learns to harden.

Am I writing to cope or for clarity? What is there to cope from, when the architecture of my soul is hollow? What is clarity, if it only deepens the abyss? I swear — one more inch, one more drop of awareness, and it will break me. I am thrashing in a sea made of absence, reaching for a shore I cannot see.

Anything, god, anything to hold on to. A truth. A hand. A word. Anything firm. Anything which doesn’t vanish when I reach for it. All I touch is smoke. Is this real? Is any of it real? The smoke is too thick to see through. I’m afraid I won’t make it to the other side.

I am tired of writing. Tired of cloaking it in metaphors. Words are fake. They shrink it. They lie. I want to scream until my throat rips. I want to smash glass. I want the sound to matter. I want it to be as loud as the pain. Instead, it comes out as some stupid words on a screen. Type, delete, edit. Nothing close to the size of it. I want people to hear the sound of my rage. Not some polished sentences. Not some scraps on a page. Its unfair. This exchange. To endure something which splits you in half, and be left with nothing but some paragraphs in the end. Feels like mockery.

I still reach for language. I still write. Because somewhere inside me, there’s a faint and trembling belief that maybe if I string the right words together, they will solidify into something I can hold. Maybe they’ll form a bridge over the void. Maybe they’ll save me.

But the void is louder. The silence hisses. The smoke thickens.
I am screaming inside my skull and no one can hear it.
My hands slip. I am clawing at nothing.

And yet I keep writing. That’s all I have left. Even if the words don’t save me, at least they leave a trace.

and yet, somewhere
in the marrow of this black
a tooth mark still glows
the last trace of red
of a truth I tried to taste

[ the black devours the red ]

The candle smells like December. Not the cold and suffocating December that presses on my chest now, but the old one, the gentle one, when I would fall asleep with a book slipping from my fingers and mama would wake me up because I didn’t have dinner. I would ask for hot chocolate instead. Maybe to avoid dinner, maybe because I wanted mama to stay beside me a little longer. She would sit patiently while I drank, the room somehow softer in her presence. And when I finished, she would tuck the blanket around me and stroke my hair. All I worried about back then was how to spend the last few days of winter break.

Now I light the same candle, and the scent tightens around my throat like a memory with claws. It yanks me backwards so violently I almost lose my balance. How can a scent betray you so completely?

I look at mama, I think about hot chocolate, about the way she once placed the warm mug into my hands like it was a promise that everything would be okay. And god, I wonder if that warmth could still soothe anything in me?

But no, nothing melts the frost that has settled inside my chest. The demons aren’t visitors anymore, they’re tenants. They know the layout of my mind better than I do. They’ve settled in, rearranged the furniture and repainted the walls.

I look at myself now and I feel sick with recognition. Like I’m staring at a crime scene I cleaned too well. No blood anywhere. Just absence. Just the unbearable neatness of a life never fully entered.

Oh god, how sinful am I? You gave me everything, and what did I do with this undeserved abundance? Squandered it. Crumpled it up like a piece of paper and threw it away. A grotesque waste of a soul.

I can’t remember the last time I felt integrated. I exist in parts. Mind sharp, but hands still. Heart yearning, but body mute. Spirit aware, but will absent. God, I’ve made myself a fractured offering. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know if I’ve lost the path or if I never stepped onto it in the first place.

The angels record every moment. What do they write beside my name? The same line repeated? The same excuses reworded? I picture the ink drying beside my name, day after day, with no new entry. My existence blurring into a monotonous failure.

I am not moving forward, not moving backward, I am not even standing still. I’m sinking. Circling the same drain. Trapped in the same storm I was drowning in five years ago. Five years. Five years and the clock still ticks like it’s mocking me.

Five years and I’m still here, fingers on the same keyboard, recycling the same ache. Years change, people change, but the trap remains exactly where it was. It grips my ankles when I try to move, digs into my ribs when I try to hope, and strangles me with the truth that five whole years have passed, and I am still frozen in the same shape. Watching life pass with the hollow ache of someone pressed against a window they’re not brave enough to break through.

I tried, god, I am trying. But oh, saying this feels like a lie I’m rehearsing for sympathy. The truth is uglier. I hid. I waited. I hoped the world would carry me forward without me having to choose pain and grit and discomfort. But that’s not the world we live in, nothing is granted here until we give ourselves away, again and again.

I hate how aware I am. How clearly I can see the door and still refuse to open it. I am thrashed by my own insight. Self-awareness is its own kind of prison. Knowing exactly what I am capable of and watching myself betray it daily. Trembling with potential but refusing to become. That’s what damns me — the quietness, the passivity. Not the days that passed in sin, but this slow erosion of purpose. I used all the clarity just to sharpen the blade of inaction.

Time feels like a train I was meant to board on years ago, a train that once opened its doors wide for me, its warm lights spilling onto the platform as if inviting me home. And I just stood there frozen, telling myself I’d catch the next one, and then the next, and then the next. Now all that remains is the aftermath of my hesitation, the ghostly smear of smoke hanging like a warning in the air, the rails gone icy and abandoned, and the distant, hollow cry of a whistle fading into the dark — once calling my name, now swallowing it whole.

It’s quiet here. Too quiet. Every tick of the clock feels like a tiny breaking. A crack splitting through my heart. A blister peeling open. The sound is so sharp, it deafens me. Oh, I am so tired of being pierced by time.

I want the trial. The judgment. Not in afterlife, but here. I want to be held accountable for every breath I wasted. God, I want to confess that I feared being your creation more than I feared death.

The lingering bitterness of wasted potential tears at me from within. 2026 will be confrontation. It won’t coddle me in the “be gentle with yourself” slogans. It will drag me to a mirror and make me look, at what I am and what I could have been. At the gap. At the shame.

Tonight I asked mama for hot chocolate again. I choked on the first sip. Because it tasted exactly like five years ago.

I am listening to 10:37 by Beach House. I love this song. It carries an oddity, an ambiguity. Something unresolved, something quietly trembling. I have always recognised myself in that space. Ambiguity has always been my native tongue. Certainty feels violent. It ends things too quickly. And I am not ready for anything to end.

I have only ever seen this oddity reflected back to me once, and it was in my beloved. Recognition is a dangerous thing. What is love, if not the sudden terror of recognition, of finding something intimately yours inside another body? What is yearning, if not the mind recognising itself where it does not belong?

I want to write something good. Something profound. Something that bears the same unresolved shimmer as this song. If I am honest, I dress my writing in profound words only to speak about him beneath a careful veil. I wrap my hunger in beautiful language and offer it to the world as thought. But all I am doing is circling one name. The oddity I saw in his eyes entranced my soul in a way nothing else ever has.

10:37. Me and him. One and zero. Three and seven.

Numbers pretend to be neutral, but they are mythic. We use them to give meaning to entropy. I know it does not make sense. The idea of me and him has never made sense. And still, I hoped. Hope is irrational by design. It is the mind’s rebellion against uncertainty. Despite the absurdity, despite the unlikelihood, I hoped and hoped and hoped until my mind hollowed itself out around the wanting.

My friends tell me he is ordinary. Mid, they say. You deserve better, Sarah. They insist there is nothing special about him at all. But do we ever speak of the moon as a dull, cratered stone suspended in space? No. Despite its ordinariness, we call it heavenly. Perhaps beauty is not about being flawless, but about being distant enough to remain untouched. Perhaps what we cannot reach is what keeps its light. And so it is with my beloved. His quiet, mundane oddity lights my heart the way the moon lights the dark, not by being flawless, but by remaining out of reach. Just like the moon. Just like 10:37.

My friends say he is ugly. But all I can remember is the sharp ache in my chest when his gaze cut through me. The heart knows before the mind can object. Messy hair. Messy smile. Oh, light up my messy life. There is something beautiful about disorder. Symmetry is sterile, but mess is alive.

I tried to move on. At one point, I even believed I had moved on. But time does not heal, time only rearranges the architecture of your ache. After all this time, now I finally admit what I have always known, I can never move on. Because moving on assumes progress, and my yearning is not progressive, my yearning is cyclical.

Whenever I try to walk away, he follows me the way the moon follows me on my night walks, distant and unreachably loyal. In all its phases, broken and incomplete, the moon still pierces the heart. With its craters and missing pieces, it remains celestial. And so does he. A captivating body, unreachable, glowing.

I ask god why he placed the moon so far. Why he placed my beloved so far. His answer is silence. But silence is not absence. Silence is a language too vast for grammar. It wraps around my heart like a thick black warmth, haunting but strangely kind.

The moon is far. My beloved is far. God is far. Distance is all I have ever known, so do not be surprised if my hope stretches too far, if my yearning goes too far. Perhaps distance is not cruelty, but pedagogy. God teaches us desire by refusing proximity. Some distances are intentional, placed carefully between us and what we want most, so that we learn the weight of restraint.

Hope drags me behind it like a body tied to a vehicle, breathless, bleeding, lucid. Still reaching, still kneeling, still listening for something that has already decided to remain far away forever.

Some distances illuminate. Some distances keep you awake at night, fixed in awe, thinking of angels and crystals and snow-lit caves. You think of beauty. You think of the moon. You think of your beloved. Oh Lord, imagination is all I have left. How far will it take me? Will it take me as far as him? Or will it return me endlessly to myself?

10:37. God, 10:37.
The house made of dawn disappears.
The moon disappears.
You disappear.

In the darkest hour, everything vanishes. I am left bargaining with the void, asking god whether you have truly gone. God, you did not disappear, you did not. Faith is not certainty, it is just a refusal to stop asking, and that I have not yet achieved. 10:37. God’s mysteries. God’s beauty hidden in the mundane. Now I realise, even 10:37 is a form of distance. The distance of the moon. The distance of my beloved. A distance that is odd, ambiguous, magnetic. A distance that keeps you hooked despite yourself. That is the curse, not the yearning itself, but its persistence.

3 and 7.
Blue and orange.

3 and 7 hold the violent contrast of blue and orange. Too bright for the eye. Too sharp for the heart. Sunsets that hurt to look at. Flames on a stove that punish your stare. There is something about these colours together that unsettles me. Like two entities never meant to coexist, somehow forced into the same frame after endless bargaining with life, with god.

Blue and orange do not belong together because they demand opposite kinds of attention from the body. Blue asks you to sink, to slow down, to look inward, it is the colour of distance and depth. Orange does the opposite, it lunges forward, it gives off heat, hunger, and immediacy. This contrast lacks compatibility. When they are placed side by side, the body receives two contradictory instructions at once, and it causes irritation. To me, it feels like the visual equivalent of being shouted at while trying to think.

How sharp is the oddity. 3 and 7. Not every strange thing is meant to fit. Blue and orange do not belong together. Some contrasts are too sharp, almost violent.

Some things are fated not to meet, only to align from far away. Their beauty requires distance. The way stars become constellations only because they are impossibly far from one another. If brought too close, they would lose their shape, collapse into something ordinary, or destroy each other. From afar, they make sense. From afar, they glow.

Perhaps this is the quiet cruelty of fate. Not to deny connection, but to allow just enough proximity for recognition. Then seal it in distance so they can remain beautiful. Seal it in distance so they glance at each other through the void. Hearts pinned to a distance they will never cross.

10:37
The house made of dawn disappears.

But then comes the number three, desolate and lonely, carrying a mild kind of oddity. Not the powerful oddity of seven, which stands alone with its own mythic certainty, but a softer kind of oddity that wants to merge in and amalgamate. So it stands at the crux of two opposing forces, believing they need to be soothed and reconciled. But not everything sharp has to be softened. Sometimes the beauty lies in the sharpness.

Duality is the spine of existence. The world stands upright because everything has an opposite leaning against it.

Good means nothing until evil stands against it, and evil loses its shape unless there’s good in contrast. They are the two ends of a moral axis, giving direction, clarity, and consequence to every human choice. Their tension is how we have a moral framework in the first place.

And then three arrives, disturbing the necessary pull between them. The third thing, the so-called moral grey, tries to unite good and evil. And it fails. It dilutes them, blurs their edges, and makes their boundaries bleed into each other when they must stay sharp.

In the grey, good loses its conviction and evil loses its recognizability.

The compass spins. Intention becomes fog. And a world built on fog cannot stand. Good and evil do not need reconciliation, they only need distinction. Their contrast is what allows us to navigate, judge, and choose a moral stance. Without that tension, morality collapses into a murmur with no direction at all.

The same is true for love and hate. They’re not opposites but two intensities feeding on the same root. Fierce and consuming forces that move the world. Both demand energy, attention, presence. Love reaches inwards, pulling you into closeness, and hate pushes outwards, forcing distance. But both burn with passion. Both keep you emotionally tethered. They don’t want peace or softening, they thrive on their sharp edges.

Three enters here in the form of indifference.

It thinks it can balance or neutralize both the forces. Instead, it murders them. It waters down the fire that makes both of them real. It cools down what’s meant to burn. Emotion collapses into flatness, and nothing meaningful survives. Once again, three is tragically pushed aside.

Now let’s take a look at the timeless duality of light and dark, the world’s oldest equilibrium. Light reveals shape, detail, and certainty, while darkness offers rest, depth, and mystery. Each one finishes what the other begins. Their cycle turns time itself.

And as you anticipated, three intrudes again. This time in the form of twilight.

It tries to hold both forces in itself, mixing new colours, diffusing edges, but it cannot sustain itself. Either light or dark eventually conquers it. Twilight is not unity, it is just dissolution. A brief, unstable blur where neither force can fully exist.

It softens light until it loses clarity, weakens darkness until it loses depth. The world cannot remain inside that blur. One force must prevail. Twilight’s destiny is to rise, shimmer, and then be swallowed. Dualities are too certain of their states.

Be it physical or emotional, dualities have always pushed aside three. Not with anger, but with the steady insistence of something which knows its purpose.

Dualities always push aside three, but the dismissal is not always gentle. Depending on the nature of the duality, the push can be soft, violent, or skewed towards one side. This is why shapes like circles and squares have fixed, predictable forms, while the triangle, which symbolises the number three, has countless configurations: acute, obtuse, right-angled, elongated, narrow, fat. There’s something about this shape, so sharp and unforgiving which makes it very interesting for me.

All three sides of a triangle hold tension. Connected, yet always pulling away. Each point definitively directs energy outward, yet is anchored by a line to reality.

Three has never been at peace. It always carries a subtle spite. The third eye, third wheel, three wishes in folklore — three is almost always associated with bitterness.

Centuries before modern signage, ancient cultures used triangles for cautionary symbols, sacred boundaries, and markers of danger. Something about those three sides, three edges, three points feels inherently decisive, unsoftened, and commanding. It’s the most aggressive of all shapes.

The features of a human face (two eyes and a mouth) are also roughly a triangular shape. Whenever I got scared as a child, I started detecting faces in the dark everywhere. Now I understand, I was seeing triangles, and me detecting triangles in abstractions now is just an evolved version of the same mechanism.

That is why the triangle unnerves and fascinates me. Three points are enough for the mind to imagine a watcher in the dark. Even when dualities reject it, three insists on being seen. It keeps finding ways to appear, in omens, in symbols, in patterns the mind can’t ignore.

Three longs to be the mediator, but dualities stand firm in their purpose, carved into the bones of the universe. Light and dark. Love and hate. Good and evil. Each pair holds the world upright by resisting collapse into a single blended thing.

Three is the question mark lodged between answers. Duality builds the structure of the cosmos, but three is what makes the cosmos strange. The necessary disorder that keeps the universe from becoming still.

The odd pulse of existence. Never settled, never satisfied. Forever pointing somewhere beyond itself.

Even now, in the quiet of the witching hour, I still flinch at three, just like the scared child who once imagined faces in the dark. Three has never stopped watching me back. Some shapes haunt you across a lifetime.

I wrote their name. Typed out everything I never dared to say. But at the final moment ego wrapped its cold hands around my wrists and twisted them until every drop of courage bled out. So I didn’t send them. Folded them into the dimmest corner of my soul. Now they rot inside me. Staining every thought until my silence feels cursed.

And then one fine day, grief yanks you from the collar and catches you at 3 am listening to music in your sheets and you can’t decide if its your body shaking or the world has shook from the terror of holding such grief inside a single trembling body.

Addicted to the almost.
Terrified of the after.

Why do I keep ruining everything before anything has the chance to ruin me? I look at the damage, and god, it feels familiar. Chaos is the house I grew up in. Ruin is the first religion I ever learned.

Every time I get close to something real, I retreat like it’s a threat. Like tenderness is a weapon I’m not built to survive. I back away. I sabotage it. And then I lie to myself in beautiful words. I dress my devastation in softer names. I call it fate or timing or fear.

But the truth sits heavy in my chest. It’s me. It’s always been me. I don’t know how to stop being the disaster I’ve learned to feel safe inside.

This familiar dreadful voice in my head keeps whispering that collapse is safer than connection. That it’s better to shatter on my own terms than be touched and changed by something else. To leave before I am left. Because at least the knife is in my hands.

The voice takes over and I keep burning the bridges that were meant to carry me forward, then crying over the smoke as if I didn’t strike the match myself. Every time, I find myself kneeling in the rubble, begging the universe for mercy, while clutching the match I lit.

It’s me. It’s always been me.

I find a strange romance in the incomplete, a kind of safety in the things that almost happened but didn’t. You can project everything onto an unfinished story. You can make it beautiful, eternal, perfect. But reality never offers that mercy.

I love hovering at the edge of possibility, where nothing has solidified enough to disappoint me yet. Reality asks everything. It asks us to be seen. To be vulnerable. To risk being wrong. To risk being changed. To risk being broken. Potential only demands imagination. And imagination has never betrayed me the way living things have.

There is an intimacy in incompletion. An unfinished relationship holds a kind of purity that finished ones rarely do. A conversation that never happened still contains everything you wished you could have said. A love that almost began still carries the glow of its perfect version.

But once something crosses the threshold into reality, we must face its limits, its flaws, its gravity. We must confront ourselves, our capacity to love, to fail, to hurt others and be hurt.

That is why I cling to the almost, because it lets me love without loss, hope without risk, and believe without being proven wrong.

It gives me the illusion of freedom, the idea that I can keep imagining the best possible version of something without ever facing its imperfect truth. But that freedom is only another cage.

The detachment feels safe, but what am I to do with this coffin made of comfort?

Eventually, you must step into the world, trembling and unsure, and trust that reality, in all its imperfection, is still more alive than the most beautiful possibility you were too afraid to touch.

You were not made for the safety of hypotheticals. You were made to be drenched, to be shaken awake, to be rearranged by the sheer force of living.

Two versions of me are clawing at the walls of my chest, each trying to drag me towards a different kind of survival. One part of me wants to be held so gently that my ribs finally unclench. She wants to trust, to lean into something real, to believe that not everything I touch turns to ruin. She is the fragile hope wrapped in bruised skin.

But the other part, the older one, the survivor, has built her entire existence on the certainty that safety lies in distance. She believes that closeness is a trap. That tenderness is a mouth waiting to swallow me whole. She keeps reminding me that everything I love eventually leaves, breaks, withers, or demands too much of me. She drags me backward by the throat because she thinks distance is the only shelter I’ve ever had.

Both of them are right.
Both of them are wrong.

Connection versus collapse. Hope versus survival. Desire versus fear.

I don’t know which version of me will win. I only know that both are fighting for my life.

God, I’m running out of places to hide from myself. All that remains is the quiet, lifelong violence of all the words that died in my throat before they ever touched the world.