You were the kind of girl who explained memes with full etymology and citations. Who won the spelling bee and had to hide in the bathroom from the shame of it.

You hated it. Because nerdy wasn’t hot. Hot was effortless. Hot was chaotic eyeliner and being sarcastic-funny while pretending not to care and saying things like “I hate reading” while…read more

I was never devoted to you, not really.
I visited only every now and then. Holiday flickers. Moments of ceremony.

Enough to know your rhythms, not enough to feel transformed by them.

Your ceilings rose like lungs mid-inhale. Your light filtered through stained-glass in fractured reds and violets, like belief itself shattered and reassembled…read more

Dear World,

You ever look up, squint at a cloud, and think: “eh, 3/10?” Yeah. That’s me now. That’s my blossoming.

I’ve become a self-proclaimed cloud critic.
Every Sunday, I lie on a patch of grass behind the volleyball pit outside my building and review clouds like they’re auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. That one? “Too try-hard.” Th…read more

You still carry the moon on your back.
Do you remember?

That crescent—delicate, deliberate, inked into your left shoulderblade when you were still trying to believe in softness. People probably still assume it was for the aesthetic. For the symmetry. For the romance of the night. But no.

We got it because we didn’t feel whole.
We etched it the…read more

Just yesterday, I watched a girl laugh at a joke she didn’t find funny.
Not a real laugh—just a quick, practiced sound,
a reflex built from years of knowing when to play along.
Her friends didn’t notice.
They grinned, clinked their glasses, kept talking.
But for half a second, her face fell,
and I saw it—
the quiet between the noise,
the moment…read more

You never had a name, but you held pieces of my life like a time capsule strapped in with a faulty seatbelt.

You smelled like gas station slushies and the kind of freedom that only exists when you’re seventeen and think the world is stretching itself out just for you. Your black fabric interior was grayed with time, sticky with coffee spills a…read more

Dear Fear of Choosing the Wrong Line,

It happens again at the grocery store.

I’m clutching a carton of oat milk in one hand, a bag of frozen dumplings in the other, my grip tightening as I scan the checkout lanes. To my left, an elderly woman shuffles through her purse with trembling fingers, her face tightening in frustration as she fumbles f…read more