Fragments & Thoughts

I don’t want to work anymore.

I want to learn watercolour,

and let it bloom like excitement on paper.

I want to sit with my cats,

like small warm moons

curled into the day.

I want to breathe in gardens

I haven’t yet grown.

To wonder what fruit remembers

of the hands that never planted it

the taste of labour… of my own.

Why am I so far from my history,

like a letter lost in the folds of time?

Is it still addressed to me?

Why can’t I be human in the old way

bone-lit.

soil-warm.

unassembled?

The metal mother tells us no.

It wants control.

A silver tongue counting everything I add up to.

It asks for pieces.

It asks for more.

It scrapes away the parts

that make you whole.

I am so, very, tired.

I can only dissolve into night’s palm.

And sleep behind a door no one guards.

A small unfiltered world.

They cannot enter.

No.

They still cannot enter.

A kiss,

lingering now,

a slower, deeper caress,

and we color together,

heat rising, spilling softly

into a shared blush.

Then I fall back,

but only just,

my body still answering yours,

drawn in again

by that quiet, aching pull,

that rhythm we cannot resist.

My love for you is that rhythm

our hearts beating closer, closer

in the languor of our bed,

sheets twisted around warm skin.

Your touch lingers,

a sweetness that deepens,

that grows as you trace me,

and I feel you there,

in every breath, every pause,

as we move together,

slow and knowing,

caught in the rise and fall

of something softer than hunger,

but just as consuming

breathing in, breathing out,

again,

I don’t want to feel like a part of you,

Just a limb with no true use.

To worry, to mark your failings,

Or make you feel small.

I don’t want to feel your anger,

The frustration that glows from you,

I don’t want to feel the way you do,

At the cost of our closeness.

I just want to feel a partnership,

Where I am my own thing,

And you are just

you,

We share in helpful things

And pleasant times,

And when we are low, we share that too,

But not in our bones,

Your sadness won’t settle in my skin,

If I say I am a woman

not a feeling, not a phrase

just a body shaped by silence,

will I be erased?

If I ask what makes a woman,

is that hatred on my tongue?

If I speak of blood and birth pain,

am I hurting someone?

Can I name the things I carry

pads in sleeves, fear at night

without being told my language

is a kind of fight?

Why does naming my own story

feel like theft to someone else?

If I do not understand you,

must I deny myself?

Can we both want safe havens

from the hands that make us small?

Must the lock that guards one doorway,

bar another from the hall?

Is it violence to wonder?

Is it cruelty to care?

If I don't fit your framing,

must I disappear?

What does ally mean, in silence?

Is my kindness not enough?

If I tread with open heartache,

must the path be rough?

Could we build a way of speaking

where no one walks alone?

Or must I trade my voice away

When I see you drowning in drink,

my heart is the first thing that breaks.

I look at you and think...

why would you hurt yourself like this?

Do you hate yourself

more than I could ever love you?

The dazed look in your eyes

follows me long after the night ends.

It returns every time

your hand reaches for a glass.

I remember the sounds;

the choking breaths,

the sickness spilling down your shirt,

your voice thick and unfamiliar.

Your kindness, once warm,

turns bitter with barley and hops,

fermented slowly into something cruel.

I want to help you.

I want to hide from you.

Sometimes I want to shake you

until you come back to yourself.

Part of me wants to hold you upright.

Part of me wants to strike you awake,

to slap you back into yourself

before you vanish completely.

Your drunkenness grows thorns in me.

It breeds a quiet hate

where love used to breathe easily.

And the love I have for you

it flickers and dims,

like chapel candles

caught in an unruly wind,

each flame bending,

each one struggling

In the night you came again,

and there was no distance left between us,

no hesitation, no history,

only the slow, inevitable pull of my body finding yours

as though it had been searching in the dark, for you, for years.

I fit into you perfectly,

like something returned,

my face buried deep in your neck,

breathing you in with hungry lungs.

Ginger beer, warmth, sweet, a smell

that always made my chest feel too small to hold itself.

Your hands, skin to skin

lip to cheek, touch.

The weight of it enough to undo me.

The silence was thick,

humid with everything we never said.

And we lived in it, chasing time away.

He was in the room,

a shadow at the edge of it all.

Watching without touching,

tolerating without understanding,

his annoyance a quiet pulse in the air,

but I didn’t turn toward it.

I couldn’t. As your pulse drew me into you.

Your breath slow against my skin,

your scent flooding me,

until I couldn’t tell where you ended

and I began.

And as I was told to leave...

My body screamed no,

one minute more,

one more breath,

Never enough...

But I had to leave,

the smell of you clung to me

like proof of something illicit and holy happened.

I changed my shirt slowly,

hands almost reverent,

folded it carefully,

hid it behind a mirror,

because even in a dream

I couldn’t bear for anyone to see

how much of you I wanted to keep.

Then the dream dissolved.

Morning pulled you from me,

but my skin remembered everything,

my lungs remembered your scent,

my arms remembered the weight of you,

and I was left awake

with the ache of absence

pressing against me,

longing to fall asleep again

They call it progress,

when they finally look

at what has been bleeding

in plain sight all along.

Period blood.

Once a reason to turn women away,

now suddenly the answer.

Funny how that works.

When women start shouting loud enough

to be heard through lab doors.

Screaming to be seen.

At eighteen,

my body rang the alarm.

Heart racing at rest,

pressure climbing the walls of my veins.

The pill did it.

No one told me to stop.

I figured it out myself

and my body forgave me

the moment medicine wouldn’t.

In a white room,

a man with a stethoscope

asked me to bare my chest.

No sheet.

No warning.

No compassion.

Just expectation.

When the answer was just to stop.

When I asked for dignity,

it was treated like a symptom.

Like hysteria.

Like inconvenience.

Women are taught early

that safety comes with conditions:

be polite,

be still,

be grateful

for whatever care you’re given.

We are scraped, opened, exposed,

told it’s painless,

told it’s necessary,

told our discomfort is imaginary

or the price of being alive.

But this blood,

this very same blood,

might save lives

without metal inside us,

without shame,

without fear.

So don’t call it a breakthrough.

Call it overdue.

Call it stolen time.

Call it proof

that women were never the problem,

Friday weighs heavy in my chest,

The door ahead, a quiet test.

I am sick, my body aches,

But saying so is my mistake.

If I speak, it sparks a fight,

So I swallow words, hide my light.

My needs are simple, soft, and small,

Yet asking for them, would risk them all.

I want peace, a corner, and just to rest,

Not tension building inside his chest.

Silence feels safer, although it stings,

He orbited my life

like a quiet sun,

close enough to warm me,

far enough to burn.

Summer evenings

smelled of ginger beer

and laughter spilling

over our fingers,

over the spaces between us.

I flinched, stepped back,

and the moment broke

without notice,

without blame.

I watched him

love another,

smiling through my own ache,

learning that love

sometimes means letting go.

Time sharpened him,

softened me.

At nineteen,

I didn’t know the boy

I once loved,

only the memory

that still fills my chest.

I dream of him

sometimes,

the boy who almost loved me back,

and hold that dream

like fire,

like a hand

I feel the weight of what to hate,

The love, the joy, the hesitate.

I feel the prickle on my skin.

I feel expectation's pressing in.

I think of things I've thought before,

Of paths not taken, that closed door.

I think of life spread out too thin,

I think resentment's pressing in.

I find the choice, much smaller now.

Try not to question the when or how.

I find my time line's lacking kin.

Life with you is diluted—

Joy, warmth, and kindness

Washed away in waters of disdain.

You wish I'd crawl, beg for scraps of love.

But I kneel to no one, not even pain.

I chose you—

Placed you where you stand.

And I can choose again:

To drop your hand,

To walk away

Or maybe to crush,

To claw and caw foul words,

But I will not give you breath.

I pity the pittance forced to cling,

In the pockets of such a rotten thing.

Your stench and solitude.

You are swine.

A squandered hour.

Sometimes I wish I were a tree,

A great old oak, thick with dark bark,

Its gnarly, knotted branches stretching wide,

Its sweet green leaves, shapely and bright,

Swaying high above the noise,

Slipping quietly into colour and decay.

But then again — they say — a tree cannot walk away.

Yet I have heard of a tree,

One that moves its roots:

They sprout up, out, and away,

Creeping, ever so slightly,

Toward the sun,

Or whatever it is they seek.

And so, they must be sure,

Before the effort is made,

Of what they truly want —

Before the old roots are left behind.

I think that deliberation is important.

You must grow a branch.

You must create a leaf.

You must change with the season.

You must learn to walk away —

They marched before the world was ready. With skirts full of fire and fists full of future, They rattled the silence of centuries, Demanding light in rooms long closed.

They were not perfect. Some turned their backs while others still waited, Some raised their voices, but not for every sister. But still—they rose. Still—they tore open the locked doors of power So that others might walk through with less blood on their hands.

Now we stand in the tension— Between what was, and what should have been. Between gratitude and grief, Justice and judgment.

But progress is not a straight line. It spirals, climbs, and falls again. We inherit the torch not to curse its flame, But to carry it farther.

I sit with the noise of the world,

A thousand foreign thoughts pressing in,

All of them sharp, some of them angry—

From my window, last year’s smoke still lingers,

A ghost of something lost,

A warning left unheard.

The streets are filled with fire again,

But now it’s ammunition,

Aimed at innocent passersby.

A rage too quiet to name,

Loud enough to break the skin.

Social media baits the fight,

Politics rise like smoke,

Filling the air,

Choking the hope out of the day.

There is no escape,

No place that feels safe.

The government speaks in promises that fade,

As if words could heal wounds

That have festered too long.

The money is gone.

The work is endless.

And still we wait,

Wait for something to give,

To prove we are not just—

The sum of our failures.

But the anger doesn’t go away.

It moves through the streets,

Through our walls,

In the silence between conversations.

We are all just waiting for the world to burn,

Hoping it will somehow

be resown—

or burn out,