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 into art. You had your quiet, and your structure, and this soft ache of yearning.

That’s why I always felt like you could change a person. If not through revelation, then at least by proximity to something so vast and ancient. By nicking a taste of the goodness and morality that lived in you, like dust in the arches, ready to settle on anyone willing to stay still long enough.

And maybe that’s also why it struck me the way it did— how easily the idea of you unraveled.

It was an ordinary afternoon. Low sun, pews empty. I’d forgotten a jacket the day before, so I came by to retrieve it. The heavy wooden door creaked.

In the soft half-shadow near the altar, two bodies moved in sync, barely visible but undeniable. Skin against skin, limbs tangled like vines in sacred space. No shame whatsoever. None in the way her fingers dug into his back, none in the way tiny beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. Her back arched, his name escaped her lips, and it rose into the rafters, echoing into the vaulted ceiling.

And the ceiling… it didn’t flinch. Jesus only watched, the holy voyeur painted deep blue and gold, his eyes cast somewhere between mercy and indifference.

No lightning. No collapse. But it hit me like sacrilege. This was a church, wasn’t it? A place meant for prayer, not—this.

I left fast, the way someone leaves a scene of crime.

Time passed.

I lived, I changed, I forgot, and then remembered.

A wandering mind brought me back. Not in daylight, but in the half-dreamt hour between midnight and morning. Because somewhere between joys and heartbreaks and a few disappointments too many, I had already begun to wonder. What had I witnessed, really?

You taught me reverence meant folding, be it your hands, your impulses, your grief. Stillness is virtue, and longing is something to master, not indulge. But what if the sacred had never been about discipline at all?

A moment so human held a kind of truth I had never found in incense or silence or sermon. Just two people turning sin into salvation, finding faith in the sound of the other’s name. Worshipping each other in the quiet where people once knelt for something larger than themselves. It was so unholy that it became holy.

Because what’s holiness, if not surrender rather than restraint? What’s prayer, if not a whisper pleading to be held, to be known?

Right there, beyond the doctrine, I found another kind of altar.

Not carved from stone, but shaped from vulnerability, from the courage it takes to be seen, to need without apology. An altar that asks for no performance, no purity. One that acknowledges there is beauty in silence, but there is so much more beauty in the cry, in human connection, in the naming of what we love.

And while you taught that salvation is earned, maybe it was never about salvation at all. The point is not to be saved, but to be felt. To love so fully that nothing of you remains hidden. To ache and not turn away from the ache. Beauty and blasphemy, intertwined like a prayer.

Maybe that’s the holiest thing I’ve ever known.

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.” This one? “Soft edges, tragic backstory, 4.5 stars.” The one just floating past there? “It’s giving… raccoon in therapy.” I have a Notes file titled Sky Stuff. People stare. I wave like royalty.

At first it was a joke. Something to do when I didn’t know what to do with myself. But then it became a ritual. A quiet kind of devotion.

Because clouds don’t ask to be perfect. They show up, they shapeshift, they fall apart mid-performance and still drift like it means something.

I think I’m learning to do the same.

Style Score: 66%

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 there because something in us was always waxing, never quite arriving.
We needed proof that becoming could be permanent.

I wonder if it’s faded now. If time has thinned its edges, made the ink blur like memory. Or if someone has ever pressed their lips to it, slow and reverent—kissed it like a poem, breathed against it like scripture. If their lips lingered there not for beauty, but for belief.

I wonder if you’ve forgotten how we used to stand before the mirror, tracing that crescent like it was a spell—like if we followed its curve with steady fingers, we might summon the parts of us we hadn’t yet grown into. That little sliver of moon was the first thing we ever claimed when everything else—our voice, our wants, our right to take up space—still felt like someone else’s permission to give.

Do you remember the words we used to whisper like a secret between ribs, like a prayer we were afraid wouldn’t be answered?

“Don’t let this be all I am.”

We wrote it everywhere—in the margins of notebooks, within late-night drafts, between sighs we never let anyone hear. We moved through the world like half-drawn maps, ink bleeding at the corners, hoping someone might take the time to chart us. To name the mountains we carried, to find the oceans we kept quiet.
I kept thinking wholeness was waiting on the other side of becoming—after the right city, the right love, the right version of our body, or our laugh, or our name.

But you—you live in the after.
So tell me: what did wholeness turn out to be?

Was it loud, or did it hum beneath your skin like a lullaby?
Did it arrive like a thunderclap, or slip in quietly, like morning light across bare feet?
Did it demand your attention—or did it just… wait for you to notice?
Do you still chase things too hard?
Do you still replay moments in your head until the words feel holy?
Do you still ask the mirror if you’re enough?

I hope not.
I hope you ask for everything now—clearly, unafraid.
I hope you sleep like you deserve to be rested.
I hope you speak like the world was made to listen to your voice.
I hope your reflection greets you like a soulmate.

I wonder who you became when no one else was looking.
I wonder if you ever danced wildly and forgot to be self-conscious.
If the moon on your back finally made sense—not because it made you whole, but because you stopped needing to be.

And if you’re reading this—then I kept going.
Somewhere beneath your ribs, I’m still curled up and watching.
Still hoping. Still cheering you on. Still trying to become the kind of woman who makes the stars look twice.

Ink doesn’t lie.
That crescent?
She’s still mine. And now she’s yours.

With love,
Your old, half-lit self.

Style Score: 79%

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 where she was just herself.

And I just stood there.
I didn’t ask if she was okay.
Didn’t tell her I knew what it was like
to sit in a room full of people and still feel alone.
Didn’t tell her that sometimes, pretending to belong
is lonelier than never belonging at all.

But here’s what she didn’t see:
I recognized that laugh because I’ve used it, too.
I’ve filled silences with words that weren’t mine,
nodded at conversations that never really reached me.
And I’ve left rooms where no one noticed I was gone,
wondering if I was ever really there in the first place.

This is how it always is.
People think loneliness is being alone,
but I promise you, it’s lonelier to be misunderstood.
It’s laughing on cue,
filling a space where you don’t quite fit,
and realizing—when the night ends—that no one saw you at all.

I feel everything at 110%,
but I only know how to show it at 10%.
And silence has never been good at explaining itself.

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 and summer sweat of too many people crammed into a space meant for one. The same people who ripped you at the seams, the tearing of your undersides unheard through their mirthful laughter.

You groaned under the weight of my best friend, legs curled up as she ranted about boys who didn’t deserve her and dreams that felt just out of reach. You carried the ghosts of our giggles and screams, our half-sung lyrics shouted over static-filled speakers, our whispered confessions at 2 AM when the roads were empty and the only light came from flickering neon signs.

You were there the first time I drove without checking Google Maps, trusting muscle memory to take me where I needed to go. You watched me fumble for the right words when I sat in the driver’s seat next to him, my first almost-love, my first heartbreak before the heartbreak even happened. You were the only witness to the way I gripped the wheel too tight when he left, my knuckles white as if I could steer myself away from missing him.

You soaked in the silences, too. The nights I didn’t pick up the phone, the times I sat in the Macy’s parking lot alone, staring at the fog on the windshield like it held answers. The long drives to nowhere just to feel like I was moving, just to let the air rush in through the open windows and carry away whatever was pressing against my ribs.

And then, one day, I left you behind.

You stayed in a driveway that wasn’t mine anymore, watching someone else take the wheel, someone who didn’t know that your glove compartment held a crumpled movie ticket from the night I first realized I was happy, or that there was a tiny scar in the upholstery from where my friend stabbed a pen into the seat during an overdramatic retelling of a story. They wouldn’t know that I once sat in that seat, staring at my hands, trying to decide whether to take a leap or stay safe.

I wonder if you miss me. If you carry echoes of my youth in your worn-down cushions, if traces of my old dollar store perfume still linger in your faded fabric, if my laughter is still tucked into your seams. I wonder if you ever feel empty without us.

Because some days, when I pass a car that looks a little too much like you, I feel empty, too.

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 for exact change. To my right, a father wrestles a squirming toddler, his voice strained but patient as she thrashes against his chest, a box of fruit snacks clutched defiantly in her tiny hands.

My breath catches. Which one? Which line will move faster? I start to step right but hesitate—just for a second, just long enough for someone else to slide into place ahead of me. Guess the choice is made. I stay left, watching as the other line glides forward, the father and child already arriving at the exit—I haven’t even gotten to set my items on the conveyor belt.

A familiar weight settles in my chest, the bitter taste of regret pooling at the back of my throat. Another wrong choice. Another small failure. Another reminder that hesitation costs me.

And maybe, in a different life, I’d shrug this off. Maybe I’d tell myself it’s just a few extra minutes, a trivial miscalculation. But it’s not just about the line, is it?

It never is. It’s about every decision that has ever pressed itself against my ribs, every moment where I wavered just long enough for life to choose for me.

I think of college—of the nights I sat in front of two screens, one filled with logic gates and algorithms, the other with half-finished stories that ached to be written. I had once dreamed of creating worlds, of spinning constellations from ink, of giving breath to characters who could carry humanity to the stars. But I went with the safer path, the one lined with job security and predictable outcomes. Computer science made sense. It was structured, logical, clear.

But at night, when the world is quiet and my laptop hums softly in the dark, I sometimes open a blank document and wonder—wonder if I had silenced something inside me that was never meant to be quiet. Wonder if I have spent years optimizing for safety at the expense of the parts of me that made life feel electric.

I think of love—the first one, the one I stayed with too long, trying to solder together something that had already melted through my fingers. I believed love was supposed to be work, that if I just held on tight enough, it wouldn’t slip away. And then the second—the one I let go too soon, mistaking fear for wisdom, mistaking silence for strength. Sometimes, in my dreams, I hear his voice like an echo in a hollow room, feel the phantom weight of his hand in mine. And I wonder: Had I been too careful? Too measured? Too unwilling to risk the messiness of the unknown?

And the dog.

The one I always meant to bring home. I pictured him curled at my feet, warm and steady, an anchor on the loneliest nights. I told myself I just needed a little more stability, a little more time. But time didn’t wait. And when I was finally ready, my body wasn’t. An allergy I never knew I had slammed the door shut, and I was left staring at a future that could never be. I think about that version of myself sometimes—the one who didn’t hesitate, who just reached out and chose life over practicality. And I wonder if she is happier.

Regret is a heavy thing to carry. But fear is heavier.

The cashier hands me my receipt, and I step out into the cold air, tucking my chin into my coat. Across the parking lot, the father is still there, kneeling beside the open car door, his daughter bundled in pink, her tiny hands gripping his sleeve. She’s no longer fighting him. She presses her face into his jacket, soothed not by explanations or reasoning, but by presence. By the simple, unshaken certainty that he is here, that he chose to be here.

And I wish that were enough for me.

I wish I could believe that it doesn’t matter what line I pick, that life is not a sequence of optimized moves, but rather a series of moments—some beautiful, some aching, all irretrievable. I wish I could embrace the waiting, trust the slowness, surrender to the unknown without needing to solve for the best outcome.

But I’m afraid. Afraid that the minutes do matter. Afraid that the wrong choices add up, that they calcify into a life that is less than it could have been. Afraid that there is a right path, just out of reach, and I will spend my life missing it by inches.

Afraid that I will wake up one day and realize I have built a life that is safe but small. Afraid that I will look back and see the moments where I should have leapt, should have loved, should have risked, should have chosen more.
The fear does not disappear. And maybe it never will.

But today, I step forward anyway. Still calculating, still unsure, still afraid. But moving.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.
Yours still, but trying,
Me.

Style score: 80%