nothing but nettles

you’ll find strange things here sometimes.

not always poems. not always truths.

occasionally gossip scribbled in mushroom juice,

sometimes interviews with spiders,

field notes from the inside of a teacup.

these dispatches once belonged to the goblin gazette —

an ongoing chronicle of unverified news, emotional melodrama,

and entirely reasonable supernatural theories.

the paper’s official headquarters have now relocated to [@goblingazette],

but the echoes, leaks, and moss-stained drafts still seep through here sometimes.

expect columns like:

• dear delilah — unsolicited advice from a spider with strong opinions

• moss and misunderstandings — fae romance. deeply unprofessional journalism.

• this week in suspicious mushrooms — a very biased nature report

• occasional poetry leaks through the floorboards. it smells like moss and grief

no posting schedule. no apologies.

loving you hurts in ways i don’t know how to name.

not sharp, not sudden—

just the slow bruise of trying to hold something

that doesn’t want to be touched.

i keep finding new ways to say

you are worth loving

and running out of ways for you to hear it.

some nights, i think if i could just hand you my eyes,

you’d finally understand

how impossible it is

not to see you as something miraculous.

you call yourself ruin,

and i call it proof.

what else could endure this long

and still be soft?

i am tired,

but it’s the kind of tired that feels like faith—

stubborn and bone-deep,

still reaching, still hoping

the world keeps asking me to be harder.

to speak louder, move sharper,

to trade my softness for survival.

i used to believe kindness could save me—

that patience would earn safety,

that tenderness would teach mercy.

but softness here is a liability.

it bruises before it blooms.

it learns to flinch first.

still, i tried.

i kept offering calm to the fire,

kept holding out my hands

until they blistered from the reaching.

there’s an angriness living in my chest now,

built from all the swallowed words.

it stirs when i smile too quickly,

when i say “it’s fine” and mean “it’s not.”

i was made to be soft.

why won’t you let me?

why does it always feel like mourning

i don’t know any other way to love

except with my whole body—

nails, teeth, trembling hands.

i want to hold things so hard

they forget how to leave.

people tell me to loosen my grip,

to call it growth, forgiveness, release—

but they don’t know how love

rots when left untouched.

for everything i ever let go of

has claw marks on it.

not because i wanted to hurt it,

but because i couldn’t bear

to let it slip away quietly.

i don’t know any other way to love

than to keep what ruins me

the night peeled itself from my skin in ribbons—

rose, amber, the hum of distant violins.

her laughter still caught in the folds of my dress,

the air tasting faintly of promises kept.

joy like that doesn’t fade;

it settles.

a shimmer on the surface of the dark,

a warmth that lingers in the bones.

what followed me home was quieter—

a thread of silk caught on the doorknob,

a whisper curled in my hair,

the faint taste of champagne

that refused to go flat.

the house held its breath around me.

shadows tilted in their frames,

as if the walls themselves

were listening for a heartbeat.

and when the morning pressed its quiet face against the window,

i almost mistook the light for him—

that tender illusion of return,

that brief, impossible bloom

sometimes it feels like the world is happening to me,

like I’m buckled into the backseat of my own existence,

watching the turns come too fast

to pretend I ever held the wheel.

and maybe that’s why

I never stay the same.

maybe every reinvention is just me

pretending the change was a choice—

just so I can feel what it’s like

to have a say.

because the truth is

I’ve killed every version of myself

just to prove that I could.

I’ve never died the same way twice—

some stubborn, feral part of me

refusing to go down

without rewriting the ending.

maybe my entire personality

was shaped on uneven ground.

maybe I learned to keep shifting

so I wouldn’t notice the ceiling

crashing down around me.

maybe when life keeps happening to you,

you start clawing for any moment

you can make happen yourself—

even if it’s small,

even if it’s chaotic,

even if it’s just changing your hair

at 2 a.m.

because you needed something

to be your choice.

sometimes I wonder if I’m unraveling into someone new

or just shedding whatever hurt me last.

but even that is a kind of becoming—

a slow, stubborn promise to myself

that I won’t end where I started.

I’ll keep remaking myself

Thanksgiving comes around again,

and it’s strange how the table feels fuller

and emptier

all at once.

I stand in the kitchen making cranberry sauce

the way my aunt used to—

same pot, same stubborn boil,

same recipe written on a card gone soft

from being touched more than read.

My brother fusses over Nana’s stuffing,

swearing at it the way she swore

at everything she loved.

And Mom still makes the sweet potato casserole

no one else touches,

because she ate it with her own mother—

and grief is sometimes just

repeating the motions

so your hands won’t forget.

We do these things

like rituals, like bargains,

as if getting the seasoning right

might coax their laughter

back into the room.

I didn’t fit in back then—

always the quiet one,

the strange one,

the girl who hovered at the edge of the room

like a ghost watching the living.

I didn’t know I’d miss that feeling—

the ache of belonging almost,

but not quite.

I didn’t know you could grow homesick

for a life where you were only

half-there.

It’s been years,

and still I think of the ones we buried

and the ones we didn’t—

people who are somehow gone

even though they’re breathing somewhere else.

Loss has a thousand shapes,

and I carry every one of them

to the table.

A family rearranges itself

after a loss the way a body does—

compensating quietly,

awkwardly, tenderly

around the missing limb.

We stir the same pots,

set the same table,

retell the same stories

because grief rewrites the family,

but tradition keeps the outline intact—

a faint reminder of who we were,

love is a town caught in permanent twilight.

the sun sets, but never finishes.

the neon sign over the diner still buzzes—

half-alive, half-memory—

spelling open to no one.

the jukebox hums a song

no one’s played in years.

a curtain moves in the upstairs window

though every door is locked.

some nights, the streetlights flicker on anyway,

dutiful, loyal,

as if light alone could resurrect what’s gone.

the air smells of rain that never falls,

and every silence feels rehearsed.

here, even absence has a heartbeat.

love stays—

out of habit, out of hope,

you broke your promise gently—

like someone setting down a cup

they no longer wish to drink from.

and i, ever the fool for tenderness,

watched it spill

and called it mercy.

now i live in the hush that follows.

i keep my heart wrapped in soft cloth,

press my palms against its trembling ears

so it won’t hear your name

in every quiet room.

i don’t hate you.

but sometimes the ache pretends to be your ghost,

and i let it stay a while—

because even pain sounds a little like love

i want to be loved for my mind—

for the way i turn thoughts over

until they shine,

for the soft precision of my words.

but people don’t stay for philosophy.

they stay for warmth,

for skin,

for the illusion of closeness they can touch.

so i let them.

i know how to make hunger look like love,

how to turn devotion into performance.

it’s easier to be wanted

than to be known.

knowing demands listening,

and listening always reveals

what people wish you’d keep quiet.

i tell myself i’m in control—

that i’m choosing this—

but it always ends the same:

me, stripped down to apology,

trying to remember which part of me

they came here for.

and when they leave,

they take the room’s warmth with them

and leave me naked with my mind—

which was all i wanted them to see

you are the most beautiful woman I know.

not for how you look,

but for the way you’ve learned to live

unapologetically in your own skin.

you’ve turned every insecurity

into something sacred—

made peace with the cracks

and called them yours.

when you laugh, I see the missing tooth.

you used to hate it,

and it’s always been my favorite thing about you.

every time we met someone new,

I’d say, “this is my best friend—she has a fake tooth.”

and you’d groan, and I’d make you show them,

and maybe that was cruel,

but I just wanted you to see what I saw:

something imperfect,

and impossibly lovely.

you laugh like nothing could ever go wrong

so long as there’s something to laugh about—

like the sound itself could hold the world together.

you love people in ways that matter.

in kept promises, and coffee dates,

in “how are things with your parents?”

and “have you eaten?”

and “I saw this and thought of you.”

and I swear—

every time you say my name,

I feel like I’m being forgiven

for something I didn’t know I’d done.

you are the proof

that kindness can survive anything.

and I am endlessly lucky

to have known you long enough

to see it bloom.

if she ever forgets who she is,

i used to call it devotion—

the way i would dissolve inside someone,

how i’d hand them the map to my tides

and say here, take it, i trust you not to drown me.

i mistook disappearance for intimacy.

i thought the depth of my love

was proof that it was pure.

i have loved like a shipwreck.

like a lighthouse that forgot it could burn out.

like a star that keeps collapsing just to be seen.

but now, i am learning a gentler syntax.

how to cup love in my palms

without crushing it to prove it’s real.

how to let someone trace the constellations in my skin

without handing them the whole sky.

i am learning that love is not a surrender—

it’s a tending.

a quiet, steady light

that asks nothing but to keep you warm.

i used to love like gravity—

pulling, consuming, inevitable.

now i am learning to love like orbit:

held, but free.

near, but whole.

and maybe that’s the lesson—

that the heart doesn’t have to shatter

they said i was too far away to count,

but maybe distance is my magic.

maybe i was never meant to be

in the middle of anyone’s orbit.

i still have moons.

they still follow.

i still pull tides, even out here in the quiet.

and when the sunlight takes years to reach me,

i don’t curse the dark—

i learn its language.

sometimes i wish i could burn

the way the inner planets do,

but then i remember—

fire dies fast,

and i have always been slow and steady.

some loves are flashpaper.

mine is gravity.

so let them call me what they will.

planet, not-planet, forgotten thing—

i am still here, circling the same sun,

faithful, fierce,

I want to raise them gently—

to let them see me cry,

to let them know that love can be tired

and still be love.

I want them to believe safety isn’t something

they have to earn.

that home can be quiet

without meaning silence.

I don’t want them to mistake fear for care

or apology for affection.

I want to raise my children in a way

they don’t have to heal from—

to give them the softness

I had to build from the rubble.

maybe that’s all any of us can do—

stand in the wreckage of what raised us,

and build something gentler