Invigorating flare, divine storm Slipping into a harmonious dimension wrapped up in all of your inferno vicious kisses, candy like touches immersed in your tactile desires, my muse Taste the hunger of the blazing star
And the electricity ripped the champagne sheets And the sparks lit up in the tragic skies
A liquid sigh, voluptuous wildfire gliding into a psychedelic mist surrounded by your musical sirens delightful growls, exotic whispers sparkling in the moonlight, my muse craving the thirst of the blazing star
And the provocative motion burned And the ricochet sent shockwaves
whiplashed tension, pulsating snake spiraling into a smoldering spasm toes curling, spellbinding tongue breathtaking havoc accelerating oblivion touching nerve endings, my muse yearning the skin of the blazing star
And the enigma was quite exquisite And the mesmerizing fever glistens forever
At 2:35 AM, Karina Larkin is awake in the way people become awake when something inside them has already stood up and gone to the window. The house is quiet but not asleep. It breathes the low, familiar breaths of waiting—floorboards holding memory, walls keeping secrets, the refrigerator humming like a promise it never finishes. Outside, the streetlight paints the living room in pale gold, and dust drifts through it like slow snowfall. Karina sits at the edge of the couch with her feet tucked under her, hands wrapped around a mug that went cold an hour ago, listening for a sound she has been rehearsing for six months.
Six months is long enough to learn the weight of absence. Long enough for mornings to stretch and evenings to fold in on themselves. Long enough to discover which corners of a room collect loneliness and which ones refuse to let it stay. When he left, she told herself she would be brave in practical ways—pay the bills on time, water the plants, answer questions with calm certainty. She did all of that. What she did not plan for was how love behaves when it is asked to wait. How it paces. How it sharpens. How it grows more articulate with every quiet night.
She checks the time again. 2:35 AM. The numbers glow like they know something she doesn’t. The hours since midnight have been a soft procession of memories: the way his jacket always smelled like outside, the way he reached for her hand without looking, the way he said goodbye at the airport like it was a comma instead of a period. Six months ago, she stood in a crowd of departures and told herself that love could survive distance if it had somewhere to land when it came home.
Karina learned to mark time by small rituals. Coffee brewed for one. Two plates taken down, then one put back. The way the bed insisted on the shape of him long after it should have let go. She learned the sound of her own footsteps at night, the creak near the hallway that always startled her even though she expected it. She learned that courage sometimes looks like staying soft when it would be easier to harden. She learned that longing can be gentle, that it can sit beside you like a cat, purring, insistent, refusing to be ignored.
At 2:35 AM, a car passes too slowly. She lifts her head. The sound fades. Her heart settles back into its practiced rhythm. She exhales and laughs quietly at herself, a sound she has made many nights now. Hope, she has discovered, is a muscle. Use it too much and it aches. Don’t use it enough and it forgets what it’s for.
She remembers the first week he was gone, how she kept the lights on too late, how she filled the silence with television she didn’t watch. She remembers the second month, when the ache dulled into something manageable, something she could carry without announcing. She remembers the fourth month, when she found herself smiling at his name on her phone without checking the time, when absence had stopped being an emergency and started being a condition. Through it all, she kept a careful ledger of moments she would tell him about when he returned—how the neighbor’s dog learned to open the gate, how the old oak dropped a limb in a storm, how she fixed the sink herself and felt impossibly proud.
She checks the time again. Still 2:35 AM. The clock does that sometimes, holds a minute like it wants to feel important.
Karina rises and walks to the window. The street is empty, expectant. The moon hangs low, unembarrassed by its own brightness. She presses her forehead lightly against the glass and lets herself imagine him driving through the last miles, hands familiar on the wheel, thoughts finally allowed to arrive where his body is going. She imagines his smile, the one that starts on one side first, the one that always made her feel chosen even before he said anything. She imagines the weight of him crossing the threshold, how the house will recognize him before she does.
Six months ago, they made promises that were practical and unromantic. Call when you land. Text when you can. Don’t forget to eat. They didn’t say anything about rings or kneeling or forever because those words felt too fragile to ship across oceans and job sites. They trusted the quieter vows—the ones that survive weather and time zones, the ones that show up even when no one is watching.
A sound interrupts her imagining. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a car door closing with the unmistakable certainty of arrival. Karina’s heart leaps, stumbles, rights itself. She does not run. She walks, because this moment deserves steadiness. The front door opens, and there he is, framed by the night he has finally finished traveling through. He looks thinner, older in the eyes, more himself in the way people become when they have been tested and returned intact.
They do not speak right away. They step into each other as if gravity has been rehearsing this reunion since the day he left. His arms feel exactly right, exactly remembered. Her face fits against his chest like it was designed with this purpose in mind. She breathes him in—road, work, the faint echo of places she has never been but knows intimately through his voice. The house exhales with them.
“It’s late,” she says, because someone has to say something, and because time has taught her to respect itself.
“I know,” he says, smiling into her hair. “I tried to hurry.”
They pull back just enough to look at each other, to confirm what touch already knows. His hands are warm. His eyes are wet in the way that suggests gratitude rather than sadness. He sets his bag down like it no longer matters, like the life he carried away has been successfully delivered and signed for.
They sit on the couch, the same one she has kept her company for half a year. He notices the mug, cold and abandoned. He notices the way she has changed her hair, the way she carries herself now. She notices the new lines at the corners of his mouth, the confidence that comes from surviving something difficult without becoming bitter. They talk in short bursts at first—safe details, familiar ground. How was the flight. How was the drive. Did you eat. Each question is a bridge, each answer a step closer to something larger.
At 2:35 AM, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pauses. Karina feels the air shift before she understands why. He looks at her with a seriousness that has been earning its place for months. He takes her hand, the left one, the one that has reached for him across continents without knowing it was practicing.
“I didn’t plan to do this tonight,” he says, and she knows immediately that this is not true in the way people say things to give themselves courage. “I wanted to wait until morning. I wanted it to be perfect.”
She smiles, because perfection has never been their language. She squeezes his hand, because some truths need encouragement.
“I spent six months thinking,” he continues. “About work, about distance, about what it means to come back to someone and feel like you’re coming home. I thought about the nights you stayed up, the mornings you handled alone, the way you made space for me even when I wasn’t here to fill it.”
He reaches into his pocket again and this time does not hesitate. The box is small, almost shy. He opens it with care, like he is handling something alive. The ring catches the light from the streetlamp and throws it back in a way that feels intentional, as if even metal understands ceremony.
Karina’s breath leaves her all at once. The room tilts, steadies. She feels the weight of six months compress into a single moment that asks to be answered. She thinks of the nights she went to bed early because hope was exhausting. She thinks of the mornings she woke up proud of herself for making it through another day. She thinks of the love that waited with her, patient and uncomplaining.
He lowers himself to one knee, not because tradition demands it, but because gravity does. Because some questions carry enough meaning to pull the body toward the ground.
“Karina Larkin,” he says, and the sound of her name in his mouth feels like a blessing. “Will you marry me?”
Time does something strange at 2:35 AM. It widens. It softens. It gives her room to feel everything without rushing her through any of it. She laughs first, because joy needs a release. Then she cries, because relief has been waiting a long time to speak. She nods before she answers, because her body has already decided.
“Yes,” she says, finally, clearly. “Yes. Of course.”
He slides the ring onto her finger, and the fit is exact in the way things are when they have been imagined enough times. He stands and pulls her into him, and they hold each other like people who have crossed something wide and lived to tell about it. The house watches. The streetlight approves. The clock blinks and moves on, satisfied.
Later, much later, they lie in bed and talk in the low voices of people who do not want to wake the future too soon. They plan nothing and everything. They laugh about how tired they are. They marvel at how simple it feels now that the hardest part is over. Karina traces the ring with her thumb, learning its presence, its promise. She thinks of all the nights that led here, all the waiting that turned out to be a kind of preparation.
At 2:35 AM, Karina Larkin learned that love does not waste time. It uses it. It stretches it. It asks it to carry meaning until meaning is ready to arrive. She closes her eyes with his arm around her and feels the quiet certainty settle in. The long night is over. Morning can take its time.
The bar breathes like an old animal—slow, practiced, familiar with survival. Not alive in any holy sense, just functional. Lights dim enough to forgive faces. Music limps between songs. The floor remembers every spill better than the people who caused them. This place doesn’t ask why you came in. It already knows.
Maynard Wells sits three stools from the end. He learned long ago that the end is a confession and the middle is a lie. He chooses the space where no one expects anything from him. His glass is whiskey because whiskey doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He didn’t need it. That never stopped him before.
Mara works the bar like a priest without absolution. She slides napkins under glasses the way you might tuck dirt over a grave—neat, respectful, temporary. She doesn’t ask Maynard how he’s doing. That’s how he knows she sees him clearly.
To his left, a couple dismantles their life in whispers. The dangerous kind—the kind sharpened over weeks. They smile for the room, but their eyes don’t participate. The man worries the rim of his bottle like it might answer back. The woman studies her drink as if it owes her instructions. Maynard doesn’t know their names, but he knows the posture of people realizing love has become labor.
Across the room, laughter blooms too loud and too fast. A cluster of friends leaning into one another, pretending gravity hasn’t started its work yet. One of them—red jacket, restless hands—keeps checking his phone. Waiting. Everyone here is waiting. They just use different excuses.
Loneliness doesn’t announce itself. It sits down beside you like it’s always belonged there. Orders what you’re already drinking. Says nothing. Maynard respects that. Silence, at least, doesn’t argue.
He tells himself he came here to write. That’s the version he prefers. The truth is messier: he came to be seen without being known. There’s a notebook in his jacket, thick with intention, thin with follow-through. It weighs enough to feel like hope without demanding proof. Writers carry notebooks the way some people carry prayers—unspoken, unfinished, still believed in.
The man at the end of the bar breaks open mid-sentence, spilling a story about a job lost or abandoned. The details shift, but the injustice remains solid. He gestures at empty air, arguing with something that left him years ago. No one interrupts. That’s the rule here. You let people speak until they’re done bleeding.
Maynard wonders what would happen if he spoke. If the truth would come out as poetry or complaint. If it would sound brave or just tired. There’s comfort in staying quiet. Quiet doesn’t get corrected.
Memory shows up wearing a familiar face. Orders the drink she used to love just to see if it still hurts. It does. She believed places like this were confessionals. Said you could hear the truth in how people ordered—neat if they were hiding, on the rocks if they were stalling, cheap if they’d already surrendered. She laughed with her whole body. Leaned in when she talked. Made strangers feel chosen. Maynard loved her for that. Hated himself for needing it. They were good until they made a sport out of wounding each other.
A song everyone knows finds its way out of the jukebox. Heads nod. Someone hums. For a brief moment, the room aligns—strangers stitched together by a chorus that once meant something in another life. Bars are good at compressing time. You can be young and old and heartbroken all at once if the music hits right.
Maynard writes: The mask slips here, but no one notices because everyone is busy adjusting their own. He doesn’t fix it. Overwriting feels like fear.
The door opens. Cold air follows a man who looks like he’s already lost something tonight. He orders a double without looking. Scans the room for a reason to stay. Doesn’t find one. Sits anyway.
Hope is quieter than people expect. It doesn’t shine. It doesn’t ask. It sits in the corner pretending it’s fine either way. Hope has learned manners.
The couple beside him stops whispering. The silence is surgical. The woman delivers a sentence she’s been sharpening for weeks. Clean. Accurate. The man nods like gravity has finally won. They don’t touch. That’s how you know something is finished—or close enough to mourn.
Mara wipes the bar, listening without collecting. Maynard wonders how many versions of the same story she’s heard. People explaining their loneliness as if it needs justification. As if it isn’t just another weather pattern.
He drinks. The burn proves he’s still capable of feeling something sharp. The glass leaves a ring on the bar—evidence that will be erased without ceremony. There’s a lesson there. He ignores it.
The red jacket starts talking about meaning. About how everyone is just trying to be less alone. His friends nod like this speech has been rehearsed in a hundred bars. He means it, though. Meaning doesn’t require originality. Just sincerity.
Maynard writes again: Loneliness isn’t the absence of people. It’s the absence of recognition. That one stays.
A siren passes outside, distant but insistent. The world hasn’t stopped just because they needed a pause. Inside, last call looms. The room groans. No one is eager to return to what’s waiting beyond these walls.
The man at the end pays, tips heavy like an apology, and stumbles toward the door. For a moment, Maynard worries about him. Then he remembers: everyone makes it home somehow. Or they don’t. Worry doesn’t change the math.
He thinks about who he’ll be tomorrow. Which stories he’ll tell. Which ones he’ll bury. This night will shrink into something manageable—a glass, a song, a feeling he never quite named. He’ll describe the bar someday and leave out the important parts because they’re too quiet to explain.
Maynard closes the notebook. Some moments don’t want to be captured. They want to be endured. He pays, thanks Mara, means it. She nods, already turning toward the next confession.
When he stands, the room tilts—not from the drink, but from the weight of everything unsaid. Outside, the street is colder and more honest. Neon buzzes behind him like a dare. He pulls his jacket tight, the notebook warm against his chest, and walks on.
This kind of night doesn’t stay behind when you leave.
The poet never planned on becoming a collector of incidents. He thought poetry would be a clean profession, like arranging stones in a river until they spelled a feeling, or holding a mirror up to the moon and asking it politely to explain itself. He did not know, at first, that poems arrive the way bruises do—unannounced, blooming overnight, tender when touched, impossible to trace back to one clean moment. The poet learned this slowly, through accidents: spilled drinks, missed exits, wrong names spoken at the wrong time, the peculiar violence of memory arriving exactly when it is least invited.
His earliest incident was language itself. Words fell on him like weather, unpredictable and invasive. Some days they were gentle rain, others hail. He remembers the first sentence that ever wounded him: a teacher saying, You have potential, the way someone says this glass might shatter. From then on, he listened carefully to tone, to the way vowels could smile while consonants sharpened their teeth. He understood that words were never neutral. They were always leaning toward consequence.
The poet grew up in rooms full of noise—televisions arguing with each other, adults rehearsing disappointments, clocks that sounded like insects trapped in boxes. Silence was rare, so he learned to carve it. He would slip away to stairwells, to backyards at dusk, to the hollow between his ribs where nobody else could fit. There, incidents gathered quietly: the smell of cut grass mixing with gasoline, the hum of streetlights warming up, the way loneliness could feel almost holy if you stayed still long enough.
Accidents followed him like stray dogs. He tripped over them. He fed them without meaning to. Once, he fell in love by mistake—thought it was admiration, or curiosity, or the simple gravity between two bodies sharing a bus stop. That accident left a scar shaped like a question mark. Another time, he stayed too long in a job that bored him, mistaking endurance for virtue. That accident left him with a vocabulary of fluorescent lights, break-room coffee, and the particular despair of watching minutes behave like hours.
The poet noticed that incidents were loud when they happened but quiet afterward, while accidents were silent at first and then grew mouths. An incident might be a door slammed, a phone call received at midnight, a sudden laughter that felt inappropriate and therefore necessary. An accident might be the way he started flinching at compliments, or how Sundays began to feel heavier than Mondays. Poetry, he realized, was not about choosing one over the other. It was about admitting both had happened to him.
He wrote wherever the accidents caught him. On receipts, on napkins, on the backs of envelopes addressed to people he no longer spoke to. Ink bled through paper like truth through denial. Sometimes his handwriting shook, not from fear, but from recognition. The body knows when it is being honest, and it rarely cooperates. He learned to forgive himself for messiness. Clean lines, he discovered, often lied.
Color came to him late. For a long time, the poet believed the world was mostly gray, with occasional bursts of red reserved for emergencies. Then one afternoon, while waiting at a crosswalk, he noticed how yellow could feel aggressive, how blue could feel apologetic, how green could ache with patience. From that day on, color became a language he trusted more than grammar. He wrote about bruised purples, jealous oranges, the exhausted beige of office walls, the obscene pink of sunsets that seemed to mock human suffering by being beautiful anyway.
Some incidents were inherited. He carried other people’s accidents in his pockets without knowing it: a grandfather’s silence, a mother’s worry folded into neat squares, a father’s temper that arrived like weather fronts. These were not his faults, but they were his materials. The poet understood that blood is a kind of ink, and family stories stain whatever page they touch. He did not try to wash them out. He wrote around them, through them, sometimes directly into them, letting the page absorb what it could.
Love, when it arrived again, did so clumsily. It knocked over lamps. It misunderstood metaphors. It wanted certainty in a house built of drafts. The poet tried to explain himself, but explanation is a poor substitute for presence. This love became both incident and accident: the meeting intentional, the aftermath chaotic. There were mornings filled with light and coffee and shared silence, and nights where words collapsed under the weight of what they were asked to carry. When it ended, it did not explode. It evaporated, leaving behind a residue the poet kept mistaking for hope.
He wrote that too. He wrote about the way endings rarely announce themselves, how they prefer to slip out the back door while you’re still setting the table. He wrote about the sound of a phone that doesn’t ring, the particular cruelty of “take care,” the way memory edits people into kinder versions of themselves. These poems were quieter, but they lasted longer. They sat in the reader like a held breath.
The poet’s body became another archive of accidents. Knees that predicted rain. A shoulder that remembered a fall from years ago. A heart that skipped not from romance but from anxiety. Doctors offered names. He preferred metaphors. It wasn’t denial; it was translation. Saying my chest is a crowded room felt more accurate than saying stress. Saying my bones are tired of holding me up felt truer than saying fatigue. Poetry did not cure him, but it made him legible to himself.
There were incidents of joy, too, though he trusted them less. A song played at exactly the right moment. A stranger’s kindness delivered without ceremony. A line he wrote that surprised him by being good. These moments felt like gifts left on his doorstep by someone who refused to sign their name. He accepted them cautiously, knowing how quickly joy can turn into expectation, and expectation into resentment. Still, he wrote them down, because gratitude deserves a record.
The poet argued often with purpose. People asked him what his work was for, as if poems were tools meant to tighten bolts or fix leaks. He tried to answer politely. Sometimes he said poems were for survival. Sometimes he said they were for beauty. Sometimes he said they were accidents themselves—collisions between experience and language that left debris worth examining. Most of the time, he smiled and changed the subject. Purpose, he learned, is another word that carries a lot of hidden pressure.
Time behaved strangely around him. Years sped up, days stalled, moments stretched thin as plastic wrap. Incidents aged poorly or beautifully depending on how often he revisited them. Accidents matured like wine or soured like milk left out too long. Memory was not a reliable narrator, but it was persistent. The poet stopped trying to correct it. Instead, he let it speak, knowing that even lies reveal something about desire.
There were periods of silence when he wrote nothing. These were not failures, though they felt like it. They were accidents of depletion. The well does not always refill on schedule. During those times, he lived more. He watched people. He listened. He made mistakes without documenting them. He let incidents pass unharvested. When language returned, it did so ravenous, hungry for everything he had refused to name.
He noticed, eventually, that readers recognized themselves in his accidents more than his incidents. Anyone can relate to a car crash, a breakup, a shouted argument. Fewer people admit to the slow erosion, the unnamed habits, the subtle compromises that shape a life. When someone told him a poem felt too real, he understood it as a compliment and a warning. He had touched something tender. He had described an accident people prefer to call fate.
The poet aged into himself. The urgency softened but did not disappear. He became less interested in being impressive and more interested in being precise. Big words gave way to exact ones. He learned that honesty is not loud. It hums. It vibrates. It waits. Color remained, but it deepened—less neon, more dusk. His poems began to feel like rooms rather than performances, places where a reader could sit without being asked to clap.
In the end—though there is no true end—the poet accepted that his life would never organize itself neatly. Incidents would continue to interrupt. Accidents would keep revealing themselves years after the fact. Poetry would remain an imperfect map of a shifting terrain. This did not depress him. It relieved him. Perfection, he realized, leaves no room for witnesses.
So he kept writing. Not to prevent accidents, not to glorify incidents, but to mark where he had been. Each poem became a small flag planted in the chaos, saying: I was here. This happened. This almost happened. This happened differently than I remember, but I remember it anyway. Color spilled. Language bled. Meaning flickered and held.
And somewhere between the stumble and the stride, between what broke and what survived, the poet found a strange, durable grace—not in control, not in certainty, but in the ongoing willingness to pay attention.
Once upon a fearful morning the light crept in like it had something to apologize for, thin and pale, as if even the sun had grown tired of announcing itself. I lay awake, not because I wanted to, but because sleep had finally decided it was done pretending to care about me. The ceiling stared back with that familiar indifference, the kind you learn from years of being misunderstood by people who claim they know you best. Somewhere, a clock ticked with the arrogance of certainty, each second convinced it mattered more than the last. This is how the lullaby begins—not with comfort, not with warmth, but with the quiet realization that consciousness is a debt that keeps compounding.
I used to believe mornings were promises. I used to think the day was a clean page, waiting patiently for the pen of intention. But pages stain easily, and intention is often just desire dressed up for an interview. Now, mornings feel like interrogations. The light asks me what I plan to do with the damage I’ve accumulated. The air asks why I’m still breathing it. Even the floor, cold and honest, asks me to justify standing. I answer none of them. I shuffle through the ritual instead, because routine is the closest thing to mercy a jaded mind can still trust.
This poem is not meant to soothe you. It is meant to hum quietly in the background, like a refrigerator in an empty apartment, reminding you that something is still running even when nothing feels alive. That’s what a lullaby becomes when you’ve outgrown sleep—less a song, more a mechanism. Less melody, more survival. I hum it to myself while brushing my teeth, while staring into a mirror that keeps aging faster than my memories. The mirror knows things I refuse to admit. It knows how many dreams I’ve folded neatly into excuses. It knows how often I’ve called surrender “acceptance” because it sounded more mature.
I learned early that hope is a beautiful liar. It speaks softly, wears the right expressions, tells you to wait just a little longer. And you do. You wait through relationships that hollow you out, through jobs that teach you the price of your time, through nights where silence becomes loud enough to bruise. Hope doesn’t leave when it’s done with you—it stays, perched on your shoulder like a smug witness, reminding you of everything you believed it would fix. That’s when cynicism arrives, not as a villain, but as a tired friend who brings coffee and tells you the truth without poetry.
Still, I write. That’s the joke. I write knowing words are inadequate, knowing metaphors don’t pay rent, knowing poems won’t resurrect the parts of me that learned how to disappear. I write because it’s the only place where my contradictions are allowed to sit at the same table without fighting. On the page, I can be gentle and bitter, hopeful and exhausted, loving and resentful—all at once. The world demands coherence. Poetry lets me fracture honestly.
There was a time when love felt like discovery. Every touch was a revelation, every promise felt hand-written by fate. Now love feels more like negotiation. Terms and conditions apply. Trauma sits between two people like a third body, listening carefully, taking notes. I’ve loved deeply enough to know how dangerous it is, and lost deeply enough to understand why people build walls and call them boundaries. The lullaby I sing myself now doesn’t promise forever. It promises survival. It says: rest if you can, leave if you must, and don’t romanticize the wounds that almost ended you.
Night used to scare me less than morning. At night, expectations sleep. The world dims its demands. Failure feels postponed. But even night has learned my name. Insomnia arrives like an uninvited editor, revising my past, highlighting mistakes, circling moments I thought I’d buried. I replay conversations with alternate endings. I apologize to people who no longer exist in my life. I argue with ghosts and lose every time. This, too, becomes part of the lullaby—the rhythm of regret, the chorus of what-ifs, the bridge made entirely of silence.
If you listen closely, you can hear the city breathing through my window. Sirens in the distance, laughter that doesn’t belong to me, engines rushing toward somewhere important. The world keeps moving with or without my participation. That knowledge used to terrify me. Now it almost comforts me. There is relief in irrelevance. There is peace in knowing I am not required to save anything today. The poet is not a hero. The poet is a witness, sometimes unreliable, often exhausted, always trying to translate feeling into something that won’t evaporate by morning.
I have been called jaded like it was an insult, as if awareness is a flaw. But jade is stone. It survives pressure. It remembers heat. If I am jaded, it is because I have been shaped by impact. I have learned to distrust shiny answers and loud certainty. I have learned that people who speak in absolutes are often hiding from their own doubt. The lullaby I sing is cautious, yes, but it is honest. It doesn’t promise that everything will be okay. It promises that you will feel everything—and live anyway.
Sometimes I miss who I was before the disillusionment, before the carefulness, before the weight. But I also know that version of me would not survive what I know now. Innocence is not bravery; it is simply untested. I have been tested. By loss. By love. By time. By the slow erosion of expectations. And still, I wake up. Still, I write. Still, I look for meaning in the small things: the way coffee warms my hands, the way a sentence finally lands, the way music can briefly rearrange the furniture in my chest.
This poem rocks itself back and forth, not to sleep, but to endurance. It says: close your eyes if you need to, but keep one part of yourself alert. The world is not gentle, and neither are you required to be. You are allowed to be tired without being finished. You are allowed to rest without giving up. The lullaby does not judge. It only repeats what you need to hear until you believe it, or at least until the morning quiets enough to be tolerable.
Once upon a fearful morning, I learned that fear does not disappear when you name it. But naming it gives you something to hold. Words are handles. Poems are containers. I pour myself into them so I don’t spill everywhere else. This is not healing in the cinematic sense. There is no swelling music, no final revelation. There is just the steady act of staying. Of breathing. Of writing another line even when the last one didn’t save you.
If this lullaby reaches you, let it sit beside you. You don’t have to sing along. You don’t even have to like it. Just know it was written by someone who has stared at the ceiling and felt the weight of waking up. Someone who understands that being jaded is not the absence of feeling, but the evidence of it. Someone who keeps writing anyway, not because it fixes things, but because it reminds him he’s still here.
And when sleep finally comes—uneven, undeserved, brief—let it. Let the world blur at the edges. Let the fear loosen its grip. The lullaby will keep humming, low and patient, waiting for the next morning, fearful or not.
I want to die on my birthday, not because I hate living, but because I am tired of the arithmetic of it, the way years stack like unpaid bills, the way candles turn into tiny interrogations asking what I did with the light. On that day the calendar claps, people text confetti, and I feel like a guest of honor at my own inquest, smiling while the room waits for a speech I never practiced. Birthdays pretend to be doors; mostly they are mirrors, and I am sick of learning my face by surprise.
I want to die on my birthday the way a song wants to end on its own chord, not dragged into an encore by polite applause. I imagine the cake sweating sugar, the knife clean and ceremonial, the wishes folding themselves into paper boats that refuse to float. I imagine the room forgiving me for leaving early, the clock loosening its grip, the candles admitting they were tired too. This is not a plan, it is a metaphor I keep touching like a bruise to see if it still hurts.
Every year arrives with a receipt. It itemizes mistakes, discounts the miracles, charges interest on love. I have learned how to carry gifts with one arm and grief with the other, how to say thank you while inventorying exits. The party hats fit like borrowed confidence. Laughter behaves, obedient as a trained animal. Inside me, something feral circles the truth, asking whether survival is a habit or a choice.
If I could choose the ending, I would choose a quiet that knows my name. I would choose to lay down the weight of being seen, the exhausting labor of translation between who I am and who I perform. I would choose to stop proving endurance is a virtue. The body keeps score, they say; mine keeps ledgers, tallies nights slept in pieces, mornings stitched together with coffee and resolve.
Still, birthdays are stubborn. They keep showing up with balloons like minor gods, insisting on witness. Friends insist too, their hands warm, their eyes unsolved. Love is an interruption I never schedule but always answer. It knocks with groceries and bad jokes and the audacity to believe tomorrow is not a trap. Sometimes I let it in. Sometimes it stays.
So if I say I want to die on my birthday, hear the grammar beneath it. I want an ending that listens. I want the counting to stop hurting. I want to blow out the candles and not be afraid of the dark that follows. I want to live long enough to learn another language for staying, one where the date on the cake is not a verdict but a comma, and the sentence keeps breathing. Maybe the wish is simpler: to be held without a stopwatch, to be celebrated without being measured, to be allowed a softness that does not require proof. Maybe the wish is to keep arriving, quietly, without fireworks, learning how to stand in the year like weather, changing, survivable. If there is a gift, let it be this: another breath that does not owe anyone an explanation, wrapped, opened, kept.
I think I am done, not in the dramatic way doors slam or glasses shatter, but in the quiet way dust settles after everyone leaves the room and the echo finally gets tired of hearing itself. I say it while staring at a wall that has heard every promise I ever made and never once held me accountable for breaking them. The sentence feels unfinished, like a chair missing a leg, but I sit in it anyway and wait to fall.
I think I am done chasing versions of myself that only exist at 2 a.m., the ambitious ghost, the healed future, the man who knows exactly what to say and never says it too late. I am done apologizing to mirrors, done negotiating with mornings, done pretending exhaustion is a personality trait instead of a warning sign. Even my breath sounds relieved, like it has been carrying something heavy for miles.
I have tried to quit before. I quit love in lowercase letters, quit faith on weekdays, quit hope whenever it became inconvenient. I packed up my convictions in cardboard boxes labeled “maybe later” and stacked them in the corner of my chest. Sometimes I opened one just to make sure they were still breathing. They always were, stubborn as weeds.
I think I am done mistaking survival for success. Done clapping for myself just because I stayed standing. There is a difference between being alive and being present, and I have lived most of my life like a voicemail no one deletes. I keep replaying old messages, listening for a version of me that sounds convinced.
The world keeps asking what’s next, as if I owe it a sequel. As if stopping is a failure instead of a skill. I want to tell them I am not ending, I am pausing, like music between tracks when the silence is part of the art. I want to learn how to rest without guilt, how to be unfinished without feeling broken.
I think I am done bleeding for proof. Done turning pain into poetry just to make it respectable. Some wounds don’t want metaphors, they want time, and time has been knocking patiently while I kept writing excuses on the door.
If this is the end, it is a soft one. No fireworks, no funeral. Just a man setting down what he can no longer carry and realizing his hands still work, still open, still capable of holding something new. I think I am done, and for the first time, it doesn’t sound like giving up. It sounds like making room.
I forgot what it’s like to be wanted, and I don’t mean needed in the utilitarian sense, like a spare key or a reliable paycheck, but wanted in the way thunderstorms want open fields and mouths want names whispered into them. There was a time when desire arrived without asking for permission, when it leaned into me with its elbows on the table and said, you, as if no other option had ever existed. Back then, I didn’t have to audition for attention; it found me mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-flaw, and decided to stay. Now everything is scheduled, measured, softened. Affection comes with disclaimers. Attraction clears its throat before speaking. People circle each other like polite planets, careful not to disrupt the furniture. I have become very good at being agreeable, very good at being digestible, very good at being the kind of person you admire quietly and forget loudly. I fold myself neatly into conversations, make room, ask questions, laugh on cue. I am impressive in a way that doesn’t interrupt anyone’s life. I am safe. I am considerate. I am never the thing that ruins sleep. Wanting used to be loud with me. It used to spill drinks and forget plans and text twice in a row without apology. It used to look at me like a problem it was excited to solve. Somewhere along the way, I became a suggestion instead of a craving. A “maybe” instead of a pull. I watch desire now the way you watch weather through a window—aware it exists, unsure how it feels on skin. Sometimes it almost remembers me: a glance that lingers too long, a hand that hesitates before pulling away, a joke that lands closer than expected. But it always corrects itself. Responsibility clears its throat. Long-term thinking wins. I forgot what it’s like to be wanted without a risk assessment, without a pros-and-cons list, without the need to explain myself in advance. I tell myself I am whole, and I believe it, mostly. I am not broken. I am just untouched in the places that used to feel electric. Still, there are nights when I miss being the hunger, when I miss being chosen with urgency, when I miss someone looking at me like restraint is a temporary inconvenience. I forgot what it’s like to be wanted, but I remember what it’s like to ache, and that feels like proof. Wanting is still alive in me, pacing, impatient, waiting for someone brave or foolish enough to knock without manners and mean it.
For the love of tears, bloom wipe away the melancholy from your sun seek purity and treasure your crevices decorate your scars with silver chimes feel the awakening in your tarnished spirit
Blossom from your strengths and weaknesses
For the love of tears, bloom entwine your blemishes and tenacity scratch your tenderness with your nails fall in love with your endearing sympathy recognize the sparkling ornaments within
Blossom from your strengths and weaknesses
For the love of tears, bloom interweave your warmth and quiet blisters step into your discolored anguish dance with your watercolored flaws croon your lyrics of sorrow and forgiveness
I’ve overdosed on goodbyes, heartache, and a darkness I can no longer recognize I’ve overdosed on indifference, immaturity, and over used cliches I can no longer reach But my effervescent soul craves something more I’ve overdosed on circling nightmares, memories of champagne, and meaningless kisses I can no longer feel I’ve overdosed on bottles of tears, catastrophic losses and unspoken conversations that I can no longer hear But my effervescent soul craves something more I’ve overdosed on empty spaces, dead ends, and simplified poetry that I can no longer read I’ve overdosed on shallow dialogue, winter lies and intoxicating fairytales that I can no longer consume But my effervescent soul craves something more
Tomorrow’s leaves, fluttering in the October wind serenading my Sunday doubt chasing my valiant harmony Yesterday’s shadows, spoke to my brittle heartache growled at my brainwashed reflection crawled inside my grey river my pride is louder than my endless storms Tomorrow’s leaves, floating in my sweetest passions drifting within my crooning veins dancing in sugarcoated air Yesterday’s shadows, whispered and kissed me goodbye disappeared within my iron dignity disintegrated within my thunder my pride is louder than my endless storms
I’ve stolen a bottle of valium and borrowed the razors edge from my awakening nightmare. I’ve stolen kisses from the fox in the evergreens and borrowed someone else’s heart. I’ve stolen credit cards with a different name and borrowed carelessness from the devil himself. I’ve stolen the answers from a book I’ve never read and borrowed peace from a saint. I’m just exhausted from being me.
When I’m me, people walk away. No one cares what I say. I couldn’t pay someone to listen and my emptiness knows what I am missing. I continue to sit here in the bone chilling dark, with the outline of a pitch black heart. When I’m me, I can’t see.
I’ve stolen a sparkling personality from an angel I desired and borrowed humor from a treasured jester. I’ve stolen money from my tight fisted friends and borrowed character from rambling strangers. I’ve stolen beauty from the broken and borrowed ugliness from the exclusive. I’ve stolen the truth from a lawmaker and borrowed lies from the divine. I’m just exhausted of being me.
When I’m me, people laugh in my face. It’s clear that everyone can take my place. I couldn’t pay someone to wipe away my tears as I am drowning in my fears. I continue to sit here in my ocean of loneliness, with every aspect of my existence is a mess.
Once upon an unconditional love love was woven in melodic souls fears were embraced, tears were kissed blessings were gifted and received auras doused in immaculate authenticity veracity is rooted, prosperity widened depths are filled with nectar and joy affection dipped in white hot sincerity tenderness is etched and engraved appreciation feels like a soft blanket conversations filled with respect and zeal A flame that is forever burning with bliss spine-tingling devotion, astonishing wildfire A magnificent universe filled with victories overcoming obstacles and challenges together, learning and growing hand in hand A lifetime with a serene afterglow beauty found in countless photographs
There is something in the way your clouds gather—quiet, soft, and aching with unspoken weather—that I find myself endlessly drawn to. Most people fear the gray, the mist, the uncertain horizon, but I have learned to love the storms that move through you. They are not tempests to escape; they are the secret language of your soul.
Your clouds are the places where your heart goes to think. They drift across your eyes when you’re lost in memory, they settle on your shoulders when the world feels too heavy, and they burst into rain when you’ve held too much for too long. And I love every shade of them—the pale silvers of doubt, the dark blues of sorrow, the warm golds of hope breaking through.
When you say you’re “cloudy,” I don’t see imperfection; I see sky. I see depth. I see the wild honesty of someone who feels deeply and refuses to pretend otherwise. Your clouds make you real. They make you human in the most beautiful way.
I want you to know this: I am not here just for your sunshine. I am here for the rolling thunder of your fears, the soft drizzle of your hesitations, the swirling fog of your uncertainty. I am here to walk with you through every shifting season. I am here to stand beneath your sky and say, yes—love can stay, even when the weather changes.
Your clouds don’t scare me, my love. They soften me. They steady me. They teach me how to hold you gently.
And every time they pass, revealing the quiet blue beneath, I fall for you again—deeper, truer, with the kind of devotion that only grows in the rain.
There are nights when desire becomes a tide so deep it nearly drowns me, and all I can do is let it rise. I sit in the quiet and feel the weight of you moving through my thoughts—slow, warm, inevitable. And with every breath that remembers you, tears gather at the corners of my eyes, not from sadness, but from the ache of wanting you beyond language.
They fall like small confessions, each one carrying a trembling piece of my longing. I try to wipe them away, but they return—persistent, tender, honest. They taste of craving, of the fire you leave smoldering beneath my ribs, of the way your name moves through me like a soft, irresistible command.
I crave you endlessly. Not in a passing way, not in a moment that fades, but in the deep-rooted sense of desire that refuses to sleep. You live in my pulse, in the quiet between thoughts, in the part of me that reaches without ever touching.
If you could see these tears, you would know how completely you unravel me—how my longing spills over, again and again, with your memory at its center.
Once upon a scattered verse, I woke inside a sentence that refused to end. Ink dripped from the ceiling like old rain, letters crawling the walls, whispering my name as if they knew me better than the world ever had. The room was built of margins, left and right pressing inward, and every breath tasted like dusted books that had not been opened since their spines learned how to crack. I could not tell if I was young there, or old, or neither at all. Time doesn’t matter when no one is watching. I carried a pen like a dull blade, hoping if I pressed hard enough it might finally cut through silence. Outside the window, the moon hung crooked, a pale editor with nothing to say, and the stars looked like misplaced punctuation in a sentence no one bothered to finish.
I wrote because the quiet was too loud. I wrote because the walls leaned closer every time I tried to speak. I wrote about rivers swallowing names, about lovers who forgot the sound of their own laughter, about graves filled with unread prayers. I wrote until my fingers bruised purple, until the paper drank me dry, until my heart learned the steady rhythm of erasure. But no one came. There was no knock, no breath beneath the door. The world moved on with cleaner hands, scrolling past my life like an advertisement they could not skip fast enough. My words lay stacked in neat little coffins, titles etched like headstones, waiting for eyes that never arrived to pronounce them alive.
I imagined readers the way children imagine ghosts, half-hoping, half-afraid, convinced they were near. I pictured someone under a dim lamp at midnight, finding themselves inside my metaphors, feeling less alone because I had bled honestly. But imagination is a cruel lullaby. It tucks you in and leaves the window open for despair to climb inside. The nightmare deepened. Libraries turned their backs on me. Bookstores locked their doors with polished smiles. Even the wind refused to carry my lines, dropping them in gutters where rain smudged meaning into gray apology. I watched my poems age without witnesses, their voices cracking like neglected instruments left to rot in quiet rooms.
There is a special kind of decay reserved for unseen art. It does not scream; it wilts. It curls inward, questioning its own worth, asking if beauty exists at all without a gaze to confirm it. I felt that rot settle inside my chest, a slow mold growing over hope, soft and persistent, impossible to scrape away. I tried to write lighter things—sunrise, redemption, hands finding hands—but the words knew better than I did. They sagged, heavy with the truth that joy still wants to be witnessed. Even happiness grows lonely in a vacuum. Even miracles want applause, or at least a quiet nod from someone who understands.
So I returned to the dark. I described nights that chew on your spine, mirrors that refuse to reflect anything kind, dreams that end right before salvation. I became fluent in grief, conversational in despair, because sorrow, at least, kept me company. It sat beside me like a loyal stray, sharing its bones, never asking me to stop. I wrote my name again and again, afraid it would disappear if I didn’t. I tucked it between metaphors, hid it under enjambment, hoping someday someone would find it like a pressed flower in an old book and wonder who I had been. Legacy is a fragile thing when no one is listening.
The nightmare showed me the future. My notebooks boxed and labeled miscellaneous. My hard drive failing without ceremony. My words dissolving into obsolete formats. There was no obituary for the poems, no footnote acknowledging their effort. Just silence, vast and unmarked, stretching farther than language could reach. I screamed, but it came out as sentence. I begged, but it shaped itself into paragraph. Everything I felt turned into something beautiful, and that was the cruelest part of all. Beauty with no witness is still beauty, but it hurts like loving someone who will never learn your name.
At the center of the nightmare, I met myself as a child, holding a notebook too big for his hands. He looked up at me and asked if anyone heard us. I searched for an answer strong enough to survive the question and found none. So I lied. I told him yes, someday, because hope, even when false, is gentler than the truth. When I woke, the room was the same. Morning did not change anything. The world still spun without my voice, and my poems still waited, patient as graves. But I sat up anyway. I picked up the pen. Not because someone was watching, but because stopping would mean the nightmare had won.
I write for the unseen. For the maybe. For the never. For the chance that one day a stranger will stumble into my darkness and recognize it as their own. Until then, I haunt the page, a ghost made of ink and persistence, dreaming of eyes, dreaming of touch, dreaming—still—of being read.
Once upon a broken heat I learned that loneliness does not arrive loudly. It does not knock or announce itself with ceremony. It seeps in, quiet as dusk, and takes a seat beside you as if it has always belonged there. I remember thinking that friends would come naturally, like breathing, like weather, like something no one ever had to explain. I did not know then that connection was a language I would struggle to speak, that depth would be my native tongue while most people preferred simple phrases and quick exits.
I tried to make friends the way everyone else seemed to. I smiled at the right moments. I laughed when laughter was expected. I learned how to talk about nothing at all for long stretches of time, though every word felt like gravel in my mouth. I wanted to ask the questions that mattered. I wanted to talk about grief and meaning and the way memories can bruise you without warning. Instead, I learned that too much honesty empties rooms. People like the idea of depth until they feel the pressure of it pulling at their lungs.
Some friendships began brightly, full of promise, like candles lit in dark rooms. We shared music, secrets, fragments of ourselves we did not show the rest of the world. I believed that meant permanence. I believed that once someone saw you clearly, they would not leave. I was wrong more times than I can count. People drifted. People changed. People decided my sadness was too heavy to carry, my silence too loud to ignore. They left without cruelty most of the time, which somehow hurt more. There is nothing to fight against when someone simply fades.
I mourned those friendships in private. There are no rituals for the loss of the living. No headstones for people who stop calling. No ceremonies for being replaced quietly. I replayed conversations late at night, searching for the moment where I became too much or not enough. I wondered if depth was a flaw, if craving meaning was something that needed to be cured. I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to speak less, feel less, need less. It never worked for long.
Then came the deaths. Real ones. The kind that do not return your messages because they can no longer hear them. Names that once filled rooms reduced to photographs and past tense. I watched people I loved disappear into the earth and into memory, and something in me hardened and hollowed at the same time. Grief rearranged the furniture of my mind. Every loss taught me how temporary everything is, how fragile every connection becomes once you understand it can vanish without warning.
After the funerals, the world expected me to continue as if something fundamental had not been removed. Conversations returned to normal. Laughter resumed. But I carried ghosts with me everywhere. I heard the dead in quiet moments, felt them in the spaces between sentences. Their absence became another companion, one that never asked me to explain myself.
It was then that the blank page became my closest friend. It waited for me every night, unmarked and unafraid. It did not judge the darkness of my thoughts or ask me to soften them. I could tell it everything. I could confess the resentment, the envy, the exhaustion of trying to belong. The page absorbed my words and held them without recoil. Ink became proof that I existed, that my inner world had weight and shape.
I began to understand that writing was not a hobby but a form of survival. When people left, the page stayed. When voices went silent forever, the page listened. I poured my losses into sentences and watched them transform into something almost bearable. Metaphor became a bridge between my pain and the possibility of being understood. Symbolism allowed me to say what I could never speak aloud.
I crave depth because shallow water has never taught me how to swim. I crave conversations that leave marks, that change you slightly after they end. I want connection that acknowledges suffering instead of avoiding it. I want friendships that understand silence as language, grief as history, and sadness as evidence of having loved deeply. This craving has cost me people. It has also saved me from living half awake.
The solitude did not leave, but it changed. It became quieter, less cruel. I learned to sit with it, to let it speak. In the absence of others, I became a witness to myself. I documented my own survival in paragraphs and fragments. I learned that being alone does not always mean being empty. Sometimes it means being full of things no one has asked you to share yet.
I still lose people. I still grieve. The blank page is still my truest companion. But within this solitude, I have found a strange, aching honesty. I write to remember the dead, to honor the friendships that could not stay, to speak the truths that make others uncomfortable. I write because depth demands expression, and silence would kill me faster than loneliness ever could.
Once upon a midnight fear, you will not see the echoes of my tears, because they learned to walk softly, barefoot through the house of my chest, passing clocks that cough and calendars that bruise. This is how the story begins: the way sleep explains itself to the sea, with a hush mistaken for mercy. There was a town once, built entirely of punctuation, comma streets and ellipsis alleys, where laughter leaned like tired lampposts and rumors kept bees. I lived there briefly, renting a window, watching the moon practice apologies in the tin mirrors of rooftops. Satire was the local weather, a persistent drizzle that made even statues blink and reconsider themselves.
One evening the ground cleared its throat. Dogs began writing letters to the dark. Teacups clinked like nervous teeth. The earth—an old poet with arthritis—shifted a word and cracked the sentence. We called it an earthquake, because we are afraid of naming confessions honestly. I was carrying a pocket of stars then, contraband hope wrapped in a receipt, when the tremor bowed politely, like a waiter, and asked my name. I gave it a nickname instead, because truth grows shy in public, and the nickname tasted of copper and rain.
Stories fell from shelves, their spines sighing as they hit the floor. A map unlearned its borders. My shadow slipped on a metaphor and laughed, which felt briefly illegal. In the dust I found a childhood still warm, still breathing, counting marbles like prayers. Satirical saints wagged their halos and said this was character development, selling postcards of ruin with inspirational fonts, while a sparrow stitched the air, threading silence through rubble until the silence held.
I followed a crack in the street the way one follows a river that already knows your future. It led to a theater with no roof, where clouds rehearsed tragedies and understudies called thunder. The stage manager was a patient ant keeping notes with crumbs. There, a woman named Gravity sang lullabies in a minor key, braiding ankles to floors and memories to doors. She sang of falling as pilgrimage, of bruises as stamps in a passport, and I stamped willingly. Dreams queued politely nearby, holding numbers, waiting to explain themselves. One wore my father’s coat and smelled of winter and oranges, and told me to forgive the ground for wanting to move on.
The quake softened, a loosening hand. Buildings exhaled. A piano found its missing leg and forgave the floor. We swept metaphors into piles labeled Later, Maybe, Never, and pretended this was normal. At dawn the sky brought coffee; steam rose like a forgiven rumor. I wrote apologies to the cracks and they wrote back, unsigned, saying they only wanted to be heard. I pressed my ear to the street and listened to the earth practice empathy.
I left town with a suitcase of aftershocks, each one a small bell. On the road, satire waved from ditches holding signs that promised detours to meaning. I laughed, then slowed, then listened. Time limped afterward, hands bandaged with patience, agreeing to walk slower for the wounded. Neighbors traded sugar for stories and salt for names we forgot to say. Mirrors learned manners, tilting their faces to flatter survival. A philosopher in the square juggled apples and dropped questions on purpose, saying certainty bruises easily and doubt is a feather mattress. Children chalked hopscotch across fault lines, jumping from Before to After, their laughter forming a bridge no engineer approved.
Bread rose despite instructions. Yeast preached resurrection to ovens. We ate metaphors warm, buttered with relief, crumbs mapping constellations on our shirts. Someone toasted absence and clinked a glass, and the glass forgave gravity again. I mailed a letter to the future without an address, only a mood. The stamp was a leaf. The postmark read, Whenever you’re ready. The future replied with a dream wrapped in newspaper, smelling of ink, the headline screaming that I survived myself.
Night rehearsed gently then, a lullaby with commas for stars. The moon stopped apologizing and listened. I slept with my shoes by the bed, in case the earth asked me to dance. Now the town is quieter. Punctuation has grown gardens. Ellipses bloom like pauses. Cracks are filled with gold because we learned a trick from old bowls: breakage can be an instruction manual. I keep the bells from my suitcase and ring them when words grow stubborn. They remind me that movement is a language, that fear read slowly is only a letter begging for context. So I write softly, and the ground answers softer still, and if the page trembles I breathe ink, count heartbeats, trust margins and footsteps, trusting that even endings are temporary shelters humming quietly while we learn balance beneath forgiving skies.
The poet is never alone. Even in empty rooms, even in the pause between breaths, something follows—low to the ground, faithful, unfinished. It moves when the poet moves and waits when the poet waits, a dark companion made of everything that could not be said out loud. This is where the unspeakable rests. This is where truth takes off its manners.
The shadow understands silence better than language ever could. It collects what the poet drops: abandoned metaphors, half-formed prayers, memories still warm from regret. It keeps them close, pressed into its shape, and at night it returns them gently, like a hand on the chest reminding the poet they are still alive.
Words do not come from clarity. They rise from pressure. From the place where love once stood and then didn’t. From the quiet fracture of faith that never fully heals but learns how to bear weight. The poet writes because the shadow insists—because something inside refuses erasure.
The shadow carries what daylight would interrogate. It knows which truths would cost too much, which confessions would scorch the air if spoken plainly. So it bears them instead, a private gravity, allowing the poet to move through the world appearing whole while everything necessary trembles just out of sight.
Sometimes the poet turns and tries to face it, hoping for distance, for relief, for the mercy of separation. But the brighter the light, the longer the shadow grows. This is the cruel tenderness of it: pain is not proof of darkness, but of having stood in something luminous long enough to be changed.
In time, the poet learns the shadow is not an enemy. It is a witness. A living archive of all that was felt too deeply to disappear. And when the poet is gone, it will linger for a breath longer, holding the outline of a soul that dared to leave meaning behind in the dark.
Storm of Ink 