words & poetry

she was not madness, but the garden’s grief — blooming only to sink.

I loved you like a winter lantern, glowing through the storm, warm enough to thaw me, yet always just beyond the reach of my trembling, yearning hands.

Evermore, Burning

EXPIRATION DATE

writing advice

I struck a match to this love before I knew if I could live with the smoke. I fed it dry things: my hours, my hunger, and all the quiet parts of me that catch easily. And now it’s just this—a burn line in the field, too far spread to stamp out, too alive to pretend it was an accident. You can’t unlight what has already become flames.

Oh dear moon,

The days lengthen cruelly without you. I rise each morning with the sun, and be that as it may, absent your presence, its light feels pale, diminished. I find myself recalling the smallest of things; the curl of your smile when you sought to mask worry, the warmth of your hand enclosing mine when the world around us seemed so unforgiving. These remembrances are both my comfort and my undoing. It is a strange torment to be apart, for I feel you everywhere and nowhere at once. But I choose to believe that across whatever distance lies between us, some unseen tether binds our hearts—yours beating in tandem with mine. What odd trick of fate, to set us both upon the same earth, beneath the same sky, and yet deny me the sight of you. Do not mistake me: I am not weakened by this distance. Rather, I am fortified by it. For in the cruel arithmetic of our parting, my love has only multiplied. If my heart aches, it is because it is too full, too full of you, of all that we have been, and of all that we may yet be. I shall not say farewell, for farewells are for those who part with uncertainty. I say instead until, for I believe with every fibre of my being that the tide will one day carry you back to me.

I think about that Raymond Carver line sometimes, the way he knew that love is the sound of people circling the truth, all of us trying to name something that keeps changing in our hands. And maybe that’s what we were doing, too. Sitting in the soft half-light of your living room, talking around the things we couldn’t quite look at directly. You’d sip your drink, let it warm your palms, and tell me you weren’t sure what any of this meant. I’d pretend I didn’t know either. That’s what we talk about when we talk about love, right? The hesitations. The near-misses. The way a silence can say it all. If Carver were watching us, he’d probably shake his head, amused at how we kept pressing on the bruise, returning to the same tired questions as if repetition might save us yet. But he’d understand the quiet all the same. Because love—for us, for anyone—isn’t the story we tell afterward. It’s the moment we can’t explain while it’s happening. It’s the thing we feel in the pauses, in the sunlight between two raised hands, in a shallow breath before lips meet in a kiss.

You are the furious, undeniable gravity of the sun, and I, the solitary particle of stardust, forever orbiting the edge of my own fear.

I’m the lantern-light on your skin and the ember in your breath; you can drown the flame with your venom, but I’ll glow in you yet.

I’d take you in your tempest and your tenderness alike—every fault-line, every dawn, the whole weather of you.

You loved me like absinthe: green-glow wicked, slipping hallucinations of forever into my mouth.

You’re the salt in every ocean I swim, and no amount of diving will wash you from my skin.

You bottle bitterness and spite like vintage wine, savoring every sour note. But I stopped drinking from that vineyard a long time ago.

❛ If I ever loved gently, ❜ she whispered, her voice trembling on the words, ❛ it was only because you taught me tenderness doesn’t make me weak. It makes me yours. ❜

The girl I was three years ago is a shadow in still water, and I honor her reflection, but no longer wade in those depths. She gave herself to mouths that only knew how to take, spilled her heart like wine into cups already cracked and leaking, devoting herself to people who drew the marrow from her bones. I won’t condemn her for it; she was working with the small flame she’d been given, believing if she fed it enough of herself, it might light up the cold halls she wandered through. But I’ve shed that skin now. I’ve learned that companionship isn’t penance, that belonging should feel like soil under bare feet, not like shrinking yourself to fit through narrowing doors. The ones who walk beside me now meet my eyes, and I meet theirs; we root deeper in the same gardens instead of drifting toward separate shores. That is what it means to honor your own heart: opening the door only to those who know how to knock gently, who’ll build the fire with you instead of asking you to burn alone. I am no longer kindling for someone else’s light. I am the whole flame, and I choose what feeds it now.