What I would do to feel your hands on parts of me.

just because you feel and not just touch.

you caress my cheeks in the softest ways,

and other parts at a harder pace,

but in the right ways.

you look at me,

Shyly most times

Other times determined.

I hear sounds and immediately think of you

And even in the silence, I see you

Then I imagine if things remind you of me this way

i dread being away from you

you heal me in ways unknown

you’re a part of me

And my only fear is carrying this much love for you

and you don’t get to experience it fully.

“It’s just loud music and sweaty strangers.” Sure. And the ocean is just water.

I want to tell you what happens to me on a dance floor in Lagos at 2am, because I don’t think I can ever emphasize it, and because I think more people need to hear it before they write the whole thing off as noise.

Everyone starts to arrive.

The room starts to get less empty.

Some people are half dressed but they seem very comfortable.

Others are fully clothed but with a motive of getting naked in a few hours.

But that’s want the music does to you.

You walk in and look around, taking in the scene, the lights, the people.

The music finds your chest before your ears even catch up. Your friends kiss your cheek cause they’ve missed you since the last rave (which was two days ago by the way)

You start dancing and someone you’ve never met grabs your shoulder because the drop just happened and they need a witness. You give them one. Neither of you says a word.

You don’t need to — “oh, it’s just dancing,” people say, like dancing hasn’t been how humans have processed grief or joy for centuries.

I started raving in Lagos almost by accident. I went back the next week. And the next. Not because the music got better. Because I did.

“It’s a phase, you’ll grow out of it.” I’m still waiting.

Nobody tells you how addictive raving is until you’re already in it.

It’s not actually only about the music. The music is the excuse. What I’m really there for is the room full of people who, for six or eight hours, have agreed to stop performing or pretending.

Nobody’s checking their phone for the next thing. There’s no next thing. There’s just strangers becoming family by sunrise.

I’ve had more real conversations at 4am on a dance floor than I’ve had at work, and even therapy. People say things at the edge of exhaustion they would never say sober.

Someone once told me, mid-dance, eyes half-closed, that this was the only place in Lagos she felt like herself. I knew exactly what she meant, because I felt the same way.

People be like; “I know life’s hard but maybe you need a hobby that isn’t ruining your sleep schedule.”

Respectfully, this is my hobby. The sleep is the sacrifice and my sweat is the sermon.

For a long time, raving was something you didn’t really talk about outside a group chat. It lived in the same category as a guilty pleasure, fun, sure, but not something you would disclose to everyone.

Now it’s a culture that’s fast growing.

People said “It’s just a trend, give it a year.” It’s been years. And it’s still here.

Raving gave me a body that could feel good without an agenda attached. No goal, just movement which in a city that runs on grind and hustle feels like the break that it is.

So yes, it’s an addiction, but the kind that heals more than it harms. I don’t crave the after-effects, I crave the during. The exact moment the whole room moves as one.

I’m not trying to convince anyone that raving is therapy with better lighting, though some days it genuinely feels that way. I’m trying to say something simpler: this thing that looks, from the outside, like noise and sweat and chaos, is actually one of the most honest spaces I’ve know. It’s where I’ve felt the most unbothered by everything waiting for me outside those doors.

When people ask why I keep going back, why I would choose a sweaty room full of strangers over literally anything else on a Saturday, I give the same reply: “You have to feel it to understand.”

And if you already feel it, you already know there’s no version of this story where you stop.

My house music playlist…enjoy💌

“I don’t want to know what you look like going.”

There is something fiercely protective in that sentence, and something a little cowardly too, and somehow both of those things are true at once, the way they so often are when love has asked more of us than we knew we had.

This isn’t about any one love story. It’s about a particular Wednesday. It’s about the way a hand felt different on your skin the last time, lighter, as if already practicing how to touch you less. It’s about realizing you have catalogued every other version of this person and the one image you cannot survive having is the one where they are deciding to stop choosing you.

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There’s a reason we say I don’t want to know instead of I’m afraid to know. Wanting implies a kind of control we don’t actually have. You can ask someone not to let you watch them leave, and they can promise, and the leaving will happen anyway, because departures rarely announce themselves with the decency of a closing scene. Most of the time there is no doorway. There is silence that stretches a day too long. A message read and not answered. The specific quiet of a phone that used to feel like a second heartbeat.

So what we’re really asking for isn’t blindness. It’s mercy. Let me keep the last good memory instead of the true one. Let the final image be them in your tee smiling at you before they walk into the bathroom or their cheeks flat on the counter in the kitchen singing something off-key and wrong on purpose, instead of them packing a bag while you pretend to be asleep or them storming out while no words were uttered.

We realize that seeing them leave in real time hurts so much that we plea for them to stay in our lives long enough to be unforgettable, rather than turn their backs on us on a random day. Let the goodbye be a rumor I never confirm.

Maybe that isn’t a fair thing to ask of anyone but I don’t think it’s fair on the one being left behind either.

If they ever do go, I hope I am somewhere else when it happens. I hope I find out the way you find out a season has changed, not by watching the leaves fall, but by noticing one morning that the air is different.

I only want to remember what you looked like staying.

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song—Lions, Tigers and Bears by James Sullivan

There’s a version of this where I apologize for the easy things. For being late, for forgetting your favorite order, for the small failures that come standard with being a person someone else has decided to love. That version would be shorter. Kinder, maybe. But it wouldn’t be honest, and if I’m going to write this at all, I want it to be true.

I’m sorry I made you love me. Not because loving me was the mistake. Because I knew, somewhere underneath the parts of me that wanted to be wanted, that I was going to be hard to love well. I have a gift for becoming exactly what a woman is looking for, and a worse gift for never wanting to leave, regardless of how hard that becoming gets.

I didn’t lie to you. I never told you a single thing that wasn’t true. I told you the truest things in the order that would make you stay.

I was going to consume you slowly, and bury my devotion so deep in you that you’d mistake it for your own idea.

I knew you never wanted it to go this way.

You wanted easier. Temporary. Lower stakes than a woman who loves like she’s never going to be asked to stop.

I led with the parts of me that read like poetry, and buried the warning label underneath: she’s going to love you so hard you won’t be able to leave.

You have a type. I know that now. I think I knew it the second we talked, when you told me about the others, not their names, just their features.

The ones who made you feel like the only interesting woman in the room, and then, just as fast, like the only thing standing between them and whoever was next.

You told me this casually but it felt like a confession. Like you were warning me about yourself before I could get attached. And I remember thinking not in your words, but somewhere underneath that “that’s going to be me in a few weeks cause you’re going to ruin me, and I’m going to let you.”

I’m sorry if I made myself your type. Not for who I am. For how easily I could see what you wanted, and let myself become it, but because i rather have some of you than none of you.

There’s a kind of love that’s really just two people recognizing their own wounds in each other and calling it chemistry. That was us, some days. You loved the way I stayed in rooms even when no one asked me to stay. I loved the way you kept reaching for me anyway, like maybe I was the one exception to a rule you would otherwise have to learn the hard way, over and over, than with someone else.

We mistook the reaching, the leaving, the reaching again for something rare. It wasn’t rare. It was just familiar. It only took this long to see it for what it was.

I used to think the cruelest thing a person could do was lie about loving you. I don’t think that anymore. I think the cruelest thing is to love someone accurately, to see exactly what she needed and become it, knowing the whole time that you’re only renting the space. You don’t lie. You just don’t mention that the lease has an end date. And when it ends, the other person doesn’t feel deceived, exactly. She feels something stranger: like the version of her that was being loved was a stranger, too. Like even her happiness was borrowed.

You gave me that. And I know you’re not proud of it. I’m not entirely ashamed of it either, because some of it was real; the laughter that came too easy, the way you said my name like it was a small kindness you were doing yourself. But underneath the real things, there was a thought I didn’t fight hard enough against. Words that said: “be what she needs, be it perfectly, and worry about whether you can sustain it some other day.” I never got around to that other day. I made sure of it, by never admitting that’s what I was doing.

People will tell you that you can’t make someone love you. That’s true the way most comforting things are. Technically, and not at all where it counts. You can’t force it. But you can build a door exactly like the one a woman’s been standing in front of her whole life, and you can stand in that doorway, and watch her walk through it like it was always meant for her. Is that chemistry or design?

I designed myself for you. I don’t say that to flatter either of us. I say it because you deserve to know that the version of me you fell for wasn’t an accident and that matters, because it means the falling wasn’t your failure of judgment. You didn’t choose badly. You chose exactly what was offered. And what was offered was built to love you forever, even though forever was never what you said you wanted.

So when I say I’m sorry I made you love me, I mean: I’m sorry I was good at this. I’m sorry that the thing I’m best at — reading a woman, becoming legible to her, turning myself into a mirror that flatters — is the exact thing that ends up hurting her most.

You weren’t wrong to fall for that version of me. Maybe the other version, the truer one, would have made you fall too. The mistake was the two of us, falling for each other while fully, clearly that neither of us was what the other one needed. I took on a form telling you constantly I was doing it for us. Just because I needed one more week of you.

Here’s what I won’t do: I won’t tell you that you’ll find someone better suited, someone who won’t perform for you, who’ll show up and never need to stay, who’ll love you the plain, unglamorous, daylight way you actually want. Not because it isn’t true. It probably is. But that kind of line is its own kind of performance, and here I am, still trying to be the best version of myself even inside an apology. I’m tired of being good at that.

So I’ll just say this instead: I made myself into someone you fell for, and I’m not sure I know how to undo that, and I’m not sure it’s mine to undo.

I hate that I made you love me. Not because loving me was hard for you. Because I did it knowing, the whole time, that you weren’t going to stay and some part of me thought I could love you hard enough to change that anyway.

I’m sorry if I made myself your type.

I’m sorrier that I knew how.

It’s never peaceful.

A girl listening for her own heartbeat, terrified of what she’ll find beneath it.

This is where the story begins.

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And love will die when it begs to be fed.

The line sounds poetic.

words shaped the way a eulogy sounds, tender but underneath it is something closer to a warning carved into the bark of a tree.

It says: love is not a thing that survives on demand. It cannot be summoned by asking, proven by pleading, kept warm by the sheer force of wanting it to stay. The moment it turns from an offering into a request, the moment a woman starts to beg the woman she loves to simply keep loving her…something in it has already begun to die.

We do not beg for what we don’t love. We beg because the thought of losing them feels like losing the only language we ever spoke fluently.

This is not an easy thing to sit with. Almost everyone who has loved has, at some point, begged quietly, loudly, solemnly with their whole chest, in the dark, in front of a bathroom mirror, in a text message typed and deleted four times before being sent. We have waited by phones. We have memorized the cadence of their voice for the exact half-second where warmth might be cooling into distance. We have searched their face hungry for any sign that the shape we love is still coming toward us and not turning away.

And so to say that begging kills love, it can feel cruel like blaming the thirsty for their thirst. It’s a kind of grief, spoken plainly. It is not condemning the woman who begs. It is describing what happens to love itself when it is forced, again and again, into that scene, with no one answering back the way it needs to be answered.

Love and need wear the same face but they are not the same animal.

Need is a closed loop — fill me, or I will not survive the night and it does not really see the woman in front of it, only the shape of what she might give. Love, in its truer form, is a loop left open — I want to give you something, and I want something back, but I will not come apart at the seams if tonight you have nothing left to give me.

It can rest in the quiet. It does not require an echo to know it is real.

But there is a point, a place where the pain stops being one thread in a braid but becomes an entire rope, and when that happens, love stops giving and starts pleading. It starts to ask in that small, devastating voice so many of us know by heart — are you mad at me, are you pulling away, did I do something, do you still — sent twice, then again an hour later, softened the second time so it doesn’t look like panic even though it is exactly that.

None of this is a sin. It is a girl trying to find solid ground on a floor that no longer feels like it will hold her.

The cruel part? the more she asks, the less any answer satisfies her. If she asks do you love me and she gets told yes, the yes will warm her for an hour, maybe a day, and then the old fear creeps back in on its feral feet, because the fear was never really about that one moment of reassurance. It was about whether love, this particular, specific, irreplaceable love, could be trusted to stay without being chased down and pinned to the page. No answer can permanently cure a fear that old, because the fear isn’t listening for an answer. It’s listening for a guarantee. And love was never built to hand out guarantees. It was built to offer presence, which is smaller, more fragile, more human, and far less satisfying to a heart that has already been left before.

She is lying in someone’s arms and still feels like she is shouting across a canyon. That is the loneliest kind of love there is, starving at a table someone else has already set for you.

This is the part that aches the longest: a love that begs is so often a love that is desperately lonely while still being held. You can have her beside you every night, her hand finding yours under the blanket without even looking, her breath slow and certain against your neck, and still lie awake composing the speech that will finally make her understand how much you need her not to leave. This is one of the strange cruelties of loving with your whole undefended self: the people we love most are often the people whose leaving would undo us most completely, which means they are also the people in front of whom we are most likely to fall apart asking to be chosen, over and over, like the first time wasn’t enough.

The loneliness of begging is sharper than the loneliness of having no one, because it happens in the presence of the very thing you’re starving for. It is standing in front of the one woman who has ever truly seen you and still feeling unseen, because what you’re really asking for, permanent, undoubtable safety was never something a single human being could hand you, no matter how much love you got, no matter how many times you were told in return.

It would be easy, and wrong, to call this neediness, as if the fix were to scold ourselves into self-sufficiency. The truth is softer and sadder than that. We learn to beg because somewhere, long before her, we learned that love could be conditional, or fickle, or gone without warning just like a mother’s affection that came and went like weather, a girl before this one who left, a childhood spent figuring out exactly how good you had to be to be kept. The body doesn’t know the difference between this woman might leave and love itself is unreliable. It generalizes. It braces. And bracing, held long enough in the body, starts to look like begging, even when the woman in front of you has never once given you a real reason to be afraid.

Begging is grief wearing the costume of desire, it’s reaching for whoever is closest, hoping this time the ground will finally hold.

When love dies this way, it rarely happens with a slammed door. It happens the way drought kills an orchard…slowly, from root to branch, long before anyone notices the leaves have stopped coming back.

The first thing to disappear is spontaneity.

“I love you” begins to wait for permission.

Trust goes quieter.

No one notices the moment it leaves.

The I love you that used to rise up on its own, unprompted, in the middle of folding laundry or watching her laugh at something stupid, now only arriving because the silence after not saying it has become unbearable for both of you to sit inside.

If begging is love starving itself slowly, it’s worth asking what it looks like to actually be fed not by asking, but by simply being given to, the way moonlight falls on water without the water having to reach up for it. It looks like her quiet moods not feeling like a verdict on you. It looks like being able to disagree with her about something small and not spend the night recalculating whether you are still wanted. It looks like leaving the room literally, or for a weekend, or just retreating into your own head for an evening and trusting the bond will still be exactly where you left it when you come back, unguarded, unchanged, still warm.

This is not a smaller love than the begging kind. If anything it is freer to be enormous, because desire that isn’t shadowed by terror has so much more room to actually feel like joy instead of dread. It has simply stopped checking its own pulse every five minutes and learned, instead, to trust that the heart is beating whether or not it’s being watched.

And maybe that’s the deepest ache hidden inside all of this: it is so often the very intensity of how much we love a woman that becomes the thing endangering the love itself. We don’t beg for the things we don’t care about losing. We beg precisely because the stakes feel unbearable because losing her, this particular mouth, this particular laugh, this particular way she says your name like it’s something she’s still getting used to being allowed to say feels like losing something the rest of your life will not replace. The tragedy is that the desperation born of loving someone this much is the very thing that can wear that love thin, asking it to prove itself so many times that it forgets how to simply exist.

Love that begs has not failed. It is only frightened, reaching for the one thing no amount of reaching can secure: her choosing, freely, to stay.

There is no clean ending to offer here, no five-step way to turn hunger into ease overnight. But maybe there is a softer way to hold all of this, not as a verdict against any woman who has ever begged the one she loved to stay, but as a quiet permission to notice, gently, without shame, the exact moment love slipped from offering into pleading, and to meet that moment the way you’d meet a frightened girl in the dark: not by telling her to stop being afraid, but by staying anyway, long enough and steady enough that her hands finally unclench from the asking, and she remembers slowly, the way feeling comes back into a numb limb, what it is to simply be loved, without having had to beg for a single second of it.

Song- Sand drawing by Judah Earl

I live the way it flowed with this piece.

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While searching for her paprika, Ada had come across sparklers from last Christmas in the cupboard.

"You love to play babe" Chi said.

"It's just a sparkler."

"Even though."

It caught with a hiss, throwing sparks across the tiles, and the smell hit first— that sharp tang of scorched metal and burnt out matches, cutting clean through the smell of smoke grilled beef still drifting up from the seller across the street.

"Make a wish," Ada said, holding it up between them like a torch.

"On a sparkler? Ah, since when?"

"Since now. I just decided."

Chi laughed, as the light threw rays of gold across half her face.

Ada kept watching her instead of the flame, lost in her eyes.

"Fine," Chi said. "I wish—"

"Don't say it out loud, you'll jinx it."

"You literally just told me to make a wish."

"Inside your head. God! you ruin everything, who are you?" she laughed as she said it mockingly.

Chi rolled her eyes, smiling anyway, while the sparkler spat its way down the wire toward Ada’s fingers.

"Five seconds," Ada said. "Hurry and wish."

Chi closed her eyes. Smoke curled past her face. She opened them just as the flame reached the end and Ada dropped to one knee.

"Ada—"

"Wait — no — fuck! I dropped it—"

Ada was looking into the pot of freshly cooked sauce, not proposing, just hunting for something before the last of the light went out.

"What are you doing?"

"There was a — I had a—"

The sparkler gave one last violent spit and died.

Just the smell of smoke hanging soft between them.

"I dropped the ring in the sauce, bring the torch, please."

Chi stared at her without saying a word, without moving an inch.

Still shocked Ada was just about to propose to her and she would have definitely said yes.

She loved this woman with her whole heart.

"I love you," Ada said nervously, already digging through the sauce, "but please help me find the ring first."

A flower in the hands of a gorilla is stupid, they say.
As if that proves the flower was ever the problem.
It only proves that beauty can arrive
before its witness learns how to see.

I once gave my softness
to those who only understood sharp, toxic things.
They held my heart like something useless,
waiting for it to become something else.

What a terrible thing it is—
to be reduced to weight.
A poem in a room of hammers,
a match in a city of rain.

Some people inherit sunsets
and complain about the heat.
Some are kissed by miracles
and mistake them for ordinary days.

I hope I get to bloom again
where flowers are understood.
In the quiet of roses and lilies,
without having to explain my becoming.

So the soil recognizes my roots,
and the rain no longer feels like punishment.
So I stop calling survival
a form of living.

I hope I learn again
that softness is not a flaw.
That I am not a flower
asking a gorilla for belonging.

A flower in the hands of a gorilla
is not stupid. The gorilla is.

Author’s Note 🍀

The phrase “a flower in the hands of a gorilla is stupid”. It asks us to question the flower’s existence instead of the hands holding it.

While writing this poem, I kept thinking about how often tenderness, love, vulnerability, and even people are called foolish simply because they were offered to someone incapable of recognizing their value. We rarely question the recklessness of the recipient but question the giver and the gift.

This poem might just be a metaphor that speaks about flowers, but it’s about soft hearts given to hard people, art given to those who cannot understand it, and love offered where it cannot be understood.

I refuse to blame the flower for blooming. Instead, i ask a different question: what responsibility belongs to the hands that failed to see what they were holding?

There’s something I do that I’ve agreed is a form of self harm..cause why do I wait till I’m so frustrated to cum. I end up rage baiting my clit by stopping each time I’m about to cum and starting all over again?

My pussy probably thinks I’m a psycho and that it belongs to a woman who enjoys seeing others suffer.

But listen, the tension it builds creates this ridiculous pent-up ladder of anticipation that eventually leads to a toe-curling, rib-popping, “I need to rethink several life choices” kind of climax.

And yes, that’s an aggressive amount of description.

Stay with me.

I don’t masturbate often, cause why do that when I could just have sex right?

But each time I do, I realize why it exists.

That moment when it’s placed on the right spot after moments of scanning through the yard like looking for your AirPods in the dark...

For a brief moment, I understand why people disappear into the mountains to seek enlightenment. Turns out I didn’t need spiritual awakening. I needed better battery life.

And the thing is, edging yourself is a dangerous game. Because after the third restart, it stops feeling like self-pleasure and starts feeling like a hostile work environment.

Everything changes.

Your breathing changes.

Your posture changes.

And suddenly I’m thinking:

“You know what? Maybe life isn’t attacking me personally.”

I become the happiest woman alive.

I think nobody can tell me anything.

My future is bright.

My enemies are unemployed.

My body is tea.

I am healed.

But let’s return to the real issue.

The edging.

Because why am I doing this?

Who taught me that every orgasm needs a dramatic plot?

Why can’t I just cross the finish line like everyone else?

At some point it stops being masturbation and becomes emotional abuse.

The funniest part is that I know exactly what’s going to happen.

I know the ending.

I’ve read the script.

I’ve seen this episode before.

Yet somehow every single time I’m shocked by how good the climax feels.

Like girlllll.

You’ve been building suspense for forty-five minutes.

Of course the finale has fireworks.

And afterward I just lie there staring at the ceiling ruined and exhausted.

Just because my soul temporarily left my body and is currently circling back.

Masturbation is one of the few experiences where I can be both the problem and the solution.

And honestly?

My relationship with my clit has taught me one thing:

Maybe we create unnecessary obstacles for ourselves because we’re convinced the ending will be more beautiful if we’ve suffered a little for the plot.

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Sure, getting naked is incredibly sexy.

Most people think attraction starts and ends with the obvious things.

The curve of her waist. Her lips. The hair that looks expensive even when she’s been in bed all day. With a face card that could probably stop a war if need be.

Those are the things movies obsess over. The things most love songs don’t shut up about. The details everyone agrees are attractive before they’ve even “met” the person.

But if we’re being honest, those things rarely stay.

Long after an encounter those details fade. The perfect face becomes blurry. The carefully styled hair disappears from memory. Even the things that first caught your attention eventually lose their sharp edges.

What lingers are the smaller things.

It’s about those unexpected things people do that make you pause and look at them differently. The habits, gestures, and tiny acts of kindness that somehow become more compelling than any grand gesture ever could.

Abstract details that might sound insignificant but somehow burrow into your brain and stay there.

Those are the things that catch me off guard.

Because attractions doesn’t always have to sexual. Sometimes it’s just noticing something ridiculously specific about someone and realizing, three days later, that your brain has refused to let it go.

That’s what this piece is about.

Not love. Not sex. Not even romance, really.

They just have a way of slipping past logic and going straight for the heart.

These are the things I find somehow sexier than being naked:

• Being genuinely excited about something

Nothing is more attractive than watching someone forget they are being watched.

The way she laughs at her own joke before finishing it. How she rolls her eyes when she’s pretending not to be amused.

The way her voice gets louder because she’s excited.

That moment when she starts speaking faster because her thoughts are arriving quicker than her mouth can keep up with.

For a few minutes she doesn’t perform.

She’s not trying to be cool or impress anyone.

She’s simply herself and you can tell.

And I think that might be one of the most beautiful things a person can be.

• Remembering tiny details

It doesn’t have to be the big things.

The small things matter too.

The kind of details that are easy to miss.

Remembering how I like my pasta.

Knowing which songs I’ll skip every single time.

Sending me a picture of something random because it reminded them of a conversation we had three months ago.

Creating a playlist with all our favorites songs.

There is something incredibly intimate about being remembered.

Not because the information matters.

But because it means you mattered enough to keep it.

It’s them caring enough to want to know why you like stuff.

• Making me laugh at the wrong moment

Especially when I’m trying not to.

Especially when I’m annoyed.

Especially when I’ve convinced myself that today is going to be miserable.

I don’t know how to explain it.

There is something powerful about someone who can gently pull you out of your own head.

Someone who can make you forget your bad mood long enough to laugh.

For a moment the world becomes lighter.

And so do you.

Grocery shopping together

This sounds ridiculous.

I know.

But there is something deeply romantic about wandering through aisles debating whether you actually need snacks.

I love walking through aisles with my person.

The loud chaotic malls but y’all are there together, blocking out the noise with thoughts of each other.

Arguing over which chocolate is superior.

Watching them carefully inspect fruit as though they are conducting research.

Love looks dramatic in movies.

In real life, it often looks like two people walking and holding hands moving through aisles.

even though it’s not a wedding it sure does feel like one right now.

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• The “I got home safe” text

Maybe this is adulthood.

Maybe this is anxiety.

Maybe this is love.

I don’t know.

But there is something about receiving that message that makes my chest soften.

Not because the text itself is romantic.

Because concern is.

Someone remembering you after you’ve left.

Someone making sure you’re okay.

Someone choosing to care even when they don’t have to.

That will get me every single time.

• Being kind when nobody is watching

  

I think life has humbled me.

There was a time when I thought confidence was the most attractive thing in the world.

Now I think kindness is.

Not performative kindness.

Real kindness.

The kind that happens when there is nothing to gain.

When they’re patient with staffs.

Helping strangers.

Checking on friends.

Offering grace.

Anyone can be charming.

Kindness requires character.

And having that would only make me get you more.

• Looking at me before laughing

  

Have you ever been in a crowd and you spot your person from across the room?

And then they give you that look and smile or laugh cutely.

Ughhhh

Need that all the damn time.

This one is so specific.

But if you know, you know.

they look at you.

Cause your reaction matters.

Cause sharing the moment with you makes it better.

I don’t know what science says about that.

I only know that it absolutely destroys me.

• Enjoying alone time “together”

When I was younger I thought connection meant never running out of things to say.

Now I think connection is being able to say nothing at all.

To sit beside someone.

To exist in the same space.

Feel their aura in the room.

To let silence arrive without immediately trying to fill it.

There is an intimacy in that.

A sense of safety.

And safety, I’ve learned, is incredibly attractive.

• Building ordinary moments into memories

Some people have a gift for this.

They exist to turn anything into an experience.

A random drive becomes an adventure.

A boring errand becomes a story.

A rainy afternoon becomes a memory you’ll revisit years later.

I think that’s one of the rarest forms of magic.

I love a person that can be adventurous and spontaneous enough to make me the same way.

Not only making extraordinary moments feel special.

But making ordinary ones impossible to forget.

• Choosing me consistently

  

Maybe this should have been number one.

Because after enough heartbreak, enough disappointment, enough life, my definition of attraction changes.

I stopped being impressed by potential.

And even chemistry alone.

Choose me because I’m going to choose you against all odds.

Having the best sex doesn’t mean you’re going to be together forever.

Might not even last a month.

So I stopped romanticizing inconsistency.

And started falling for things that are way more important.

The people who show up.

The people who stay.

The ones whose actions sound exactly like their words.

The people who make love feel less like a storm and more like a home.

And if I’m being honest, that might be the sexiest thing of all.

Not beauty or mystery.

Not even perfection.

Just someone who wakes up every day and continues to choose you and make you feel good way before sex comes into the equation.

Even if it’s not for a lifetime.

Most people confuse my constant motion with a deeper purpose.

But I’m just not comfortable being left alone with my own thoughts.

They look at the long hours at work, the never-ending transportation, the crowded weekends, the nights that blur into early mornings, and they assume they are watching me unfold.

Watching me rebel and live my best life.

They call it drive. They call it passion.

Don’t be fooled! I’m not thriving.

Well sometimes I let them believe whatever.

It is easier than explaining the truth.

The truth is that some people run toward a future.

I run away from a feeling.

I do not remember when it started.

Maybe it began the first time I realized my mind was not always a safe place to be. Maybe it started when disappointment became a recurring character in my life. Maybe it arrived slowly through grief, heartbreak, loneliness, failure, or all the little wounds that never seemed important enough to acknowledge individually but somehow gathered together and built a home inside me.

At some point, being busy stopped being a choice and became a form of self-defense.

Because when I stop moving, the voices catch up.

Not actual voices.

The kind that sound like your own.

Sometimes slurred and aggressive and other times low and evil.

The ones that know exactly where to hurt you.

The ones that whisper that you are falling behind.

That everyone else has figured life out.

That you are forgettable.

Replaceable.

Unremarkable.

The ones that collect every mistake you have ever made and present them as evidence.

The ones that convince you your future has already been decided and somehow you have already failed it.

Those voices are patient.

Waiting for me to come undone and fall apart.

They do not need to chase me.

They know eventually I will get tired.

So I learned to stay ahead of them.

I fill my calendar until there are barely any empty spaces left.

I work.

I write.

I go out.

I make plans.

I answer messages.

I find new music.

I attend events.

I throw myself into conversations.

I stay occupied.

I stay visible.

I stay moving.

Because movement creates noise.

And noise drowns out the things I do not want to hear.

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The strange thing about depression is that people expect it to look like stillness.

They expect it to look like closed curtains and unanswered texts and days spent unable to leave bed.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes depression learns how to wear running shoes.

Sometimes it becomes incredibly productive.

Sometimes it smiles in photographs.

Sometimes it becomes the person everyone describes as energetic.

Sometimes it learns how to hide inside momentum.

The world celebrates people who never stop.

Nobody asks too many questions when you are constantly doing something.

Nobody notices how exhausted you are when your exhaustion looks productive.

People admire it.

They congratulate it.

They tell you how inspiring it is.

Meanwhile, your body is slowly sending distress signals.

Your mind is begging for rest.

Your soul feels like an overworked machine operating without maintenance.

And still you keep going.

Because stopping feels worse.

You know what’s sad?

Realizing that your coping mechanism is also the thing destroying you.

I know I am tired.

Not ordinary tired.

Not the kind sleep or power nap fixes anymore.

I am tired in places sleep cannot reach.

My bones feel exhausted.

My thoughts feel overused.

My emotions feel stretched thin.

There are days when I wake up already depleted.

Days when even breathing feels like another responsibility.

Days when my body asks for mercy and my mind responds with another task.

But I keep moving.

Because exhaustion feels familiar.

Exhaustion feels manageable.

Exhaustion has rules.

You work.

You get tired.

You rest eventually.

Depression is different.

Depression is unpredictable.

It changes the shape of reality and makes joy feel suspicious.

It convinces you that nothing matters and then punishes you for believing it.

To be honest, I only know how to function while exhausted.

I do not always know how to survive my own mind.

So I choose the thing that feels safer.

I am not proud of how much I avoid myself.

I am not proud of how many nights I spend searching for louder rooms because I cannot tolerate the volume of my own thoughts.

I am not proud of how often I trade rest for distraction.

But I understand why I do it.

There are memories I am not ready to sit beside.

There are disappointments I have not fully buried.

There are losses that still feel fresh despite the passing years.

There are versions of myself I mourn quietly.

Versions that believed life would be easier by now.

Versions that believed hard work would automatically become happiness.

Versions that thought love would stay.

Versions that thought pain would eventually explain itself.

Sometimes I think I am still running from all of them.

The younger, broken and disappointed versions.

All of them waiting somewhere inside me.

All of them wanting to be acknowledged.

All of them asking questions I do not know how to answer.

So I stay busy.

Not because I am strong or ambitious.

I stay busy because there are days when it is the only thing standing between me and a darkness I do not trust myself to entertain.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I finally stopped.

Not for an hour or a day.

But truly stopped.

Allowed every feeling to arrive and every wound to reveal itself.

Maybe I would finally heal.

But what if I drown?

And if I am honest, I still do not know which possibility scares me more

I have met people who were certain about everything.

Certain about God and life.
Certain about where they were going and how they would get there.

Their faith filled rooms and made them brave.
It carried them through things that should have broken them.

I've seen them pray and somehow they found the strength they didn't know they had.
I've seen closed doors open.
I've seen hope survive situations that looked hopeless.

And sometimes I think,
if strength was all that mattered,
and miracles were the measure of a person,
then maybe that would be enough.

But then I think about the people who hurt.

Endlessly.. each day

The ones who sit alone and grieve quietly.
The ones who didn't need a sermon or a miracle, just someone willing to stay.

Because what good is faith
if it doesn't make us feel safer and at peace?

What good is believing in great things
if we struggle to love the people right in front of us?

Mountains are moved every day.

People overcome impossible odds.
Dreams come true.
Lives change.

But love is different.

Love is the person who saves you a seat.
The apology that comes without excuses.
The decision to remain when leaving would be easier.

And the older I get,
the less impressed I am by power
and the more moved I am by kindness.

Because long after the miracles are forgotten,
long after the victories stop mattering,
what people will remember is how we made them feel.

Who we held.
Who we forgave.
Who we chose to love.

And in the end,
I may have faith to make mountains fall
but if I lack love I’m nothing at all.

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The kind of foolishness that only makes sense when it is done in the name of love.

A lover staying awake past midnight just to hear one voice say, “I got home safe” but gets “I’m sorry I slept off” instead.
The one that memorizes tiny details no one asked them to remember; favorite snacks, childhood stories, the name of a dog that died when they were twelve, the exact tone of “I’m fine” that actually means I’m not okay.

Love has made fools of us all.

Not always the humiliating versions.

But the type that turns people into soft things in a hard world.

The one that sends “Did you eat?” texts to someone who never asks the same.
The kind that sits through boring hobbies because “you love it, so I will learn to love it too.”
The kind that keeps screenshots of past messages like relics still secretly practiced.

Lovers do ridiculous things.

They relive flashbacks in the shower and reread texts just to blush at three am while the world sleeps.
They save money just to buy gifts at any moment just to make your face light up.
They remember anniversaries you forgot.
They defend you in rooms you never stepped your feet in.
They become translators of your silence.

And the worst part?

Sometimes the people they do this for barely notice.

A lover will cross oceans emotionally for someone who wouldn’t get past the street.

A lover will write poems for someone who has never once thought to write them back.

That may be the saddest genre of love there is.
The one who can make words kneel at the feet of another person, yet goes home to an empty page.

How many lovers have become archivists of affection?
Wearing hoodies that still smell like someone who has already moved on.
Holding onto pet names long after they’ve expired.

How many have learned someone else’s triggers by heart while that person still gets theirs wrong?

How many have waited by windows?
How many have checked locations?
How many have rewritten messages before sending them so they don’t seem like a lot?

How many have become smaller, quieter, softer, easier to love, just to remain loved?

Lovers forgive things they swore they never would.

They excuse lateness.
They rationalize distance.
They make poetry out of crumbs.

Maybe they’re busy.
Maybe they didn’t mean it.
Maybe tomorrow they’ll love me louder.

Love can turn dignity into devotion so subtly you hardly notice.

A simp if we’re being unserious about it, is just someone who keeps choosing tenderness in places where tenderness is not always returned.

Someone who sends paragraphs to communicate and gets “ok.”
Someone who studies a heart that has never once studied theirs.

And yet they stay.

Not because they’re foolish.

But because hope is one of the most delusional emotions a human being can carry.

It says: try again, maybe this time they love me, they just don’t know how to show it.

And sometimes… hope lies.

Still, lovers keep doing what lovers do.

They pray for people who hurt them.
They answer calls they swore they’d ignore.
They send “text me when you get there” to people who would let them disappear quietly.

They become witnesses to someone else’s life while no one is taking notes on theirs.

That is the fool in love.

The one who remembers.
The one who notices.
The one who gives without accounting.
The one who keeps pouring from a cup no one checks to refill.

What a wild thing it is to love so much that you become ridiculous.

To care beyond logic.
To show up beyond reason.
To yearn like poets.
To write people into permanence even when they only penciled you in.

buymeacoffee

Maybe that is foolish.

Maybe it always will be.

But I’ll rather be a fool than pretend I didn’t care.

Rather be a fool than start with someone new.

Because real lovers would rather ache honestly than love halfway.

And maybe that’s a tragedy and proof that even in a world full of people who do not return love properly, there are still people brave enough to give it anyway.

I just watched a TikTok at four am that emotionally rearranged me for no reason.

It was this couple on a Ferris wheel.

check out the TikTok

And one of them goes, “I know we’re already on a ride, but you know how I’m always saying if you like someone, you should say it?”

I knew what was coming, yet I stayed.

Expectant.

Then she starts listing the things she loves about her.

Not generic things either. Specific things. Soft things. The kind of details you only notice when you’ve spent real time loving somebody. You could hear it in her voice too..ugh that nervous excitement people get when their feelings are too big for their body.

She spoke loudly due to the noise from the ride but it sounded so soft and pure.

Just because lips need to be delicate to say the words that were coming.

The Ferris wheel was in motion the entire time.

That’s what destroyed me.

Because imagine being suspended in the air while someone confesses love to you. Imagine the world turning slowly beneath you while somebody tells you all the reasons they choose you.

The lights.
The height.

The thrill.
The noise of the carnival below them.
The vulnerability of it all.

Everything about it felt so alive.

And then she proposes.

Actually proposes.

And I swear the part that made me emotional wasn’t even the ring.

It was what happened after.

They both started screaming.

Not scared screaming.
Not rollercoaster screaming.

Just pure joy.

The kind that escapes your body before you can contain it.

They screamed like happiness physically hurt.
Like love had become too overwhelming to hold quietly.
Like for one tiny moment they forgot other people existed.

And I don’t know why that part hit me so hard.

And I know we’re used to seeing love filtered through aesthetics. Perfect captions. Soft background music. Carefully curated romance.

But this felt human.

And even if they aren’t the perfect couple, I promise they looked otherwise.

Even in the messy, loud, scenario you could literally hear the shock and joy of being loved out loud by her partner.

And suddenly I was emotional over people I have never met in my life.

Just sitting there staring at my screen thinking wow.

Some people really get to experience this.

Some people get to hear a list of everything lovable about them while suspended above a carnival.

Some people get chosen publicly.
Without hesitation.

And maybe I’m dramatic, but there was something about the Ferris wheel itself that made it even more intense.

Because love already feels like that, doesn’t it?

Beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

One second your stomach drops.
The next second you’re weightless.
Everything spins.
Everything glows.
You’re scared.
You’re excited.
You’re laughing so hard you almost cry.

And then there they were at the top of it all, screaming because they were in love.
Not almost-love.

Real joy.

The kind that makes you loud.

The kind that makes strangers on TikTok stare at their ceiling afterward wondering if being loved like that would heal something inside them.

I get distracted for a second

and there you are.

In my thoughts.

Consuming my soul. My heart. My mind

I think of you in ways i can’t name.

I want to be yours entirely.

I want to touch you and only feel me down each trail.

Your lips, mouth, insides, your heart.

I want to make love to you the way poets write about intensities.

Slow.

Then fast,

but only at your command.

There is that look you give me
the one where your stare and bite your lip,
and something electric shoots through me,
a heat so sudden it makes my body remember itself.

how a single teasing gesture from you
can undo me more than chaos ever could.

How you make anticipation feel like its own kind of pleasure,
like standing at the edge of something wild
and wanting to fall while thinking I could outrun the world on nothing but the rush of you.

I want to push you against the wall while I take you in my mouth and hear you let out cries of pleasure.

That sound that destroys my senses,

renders me weak, leaving me helplessly in love with you.

I want your hand tangled in mine,
your breath unsteady against my skin,
your laughter mixing with the kind of tension that makes the air feel too small for us.

I want kisses that start gentle
and become confessions.
Touches that say everything words are too shy to hold.
I want to learn every language your body speaks, the way you melt and then rise again,
like desire is both fire and prayer.

I want you to lean on me for comfort and also when you’re exhausted from the countless climaxes we’ve both reached.

I want you on every counter, bed, every surface that exists.

I want to take you in my mouth in every state and place my tongue in every orifice your body has.

I want to be choked by you, loved by you and touched by only you.

I want to be the reason your thoughts wander at inconvenient times,
the reason your pulse changes when my name is mentioned,
the reason longing feels less like suffering
and more like proof that something this consuming exists.

I want to be yours.
not in a possessive way,
but in a way that says losing the chance to love you
would feel like letting go of something sacred.

BUY ME A COFFEE 💌

I want my name to be the only words your mouth utters after each I love you.

I want your body aching with a desire only I can fill.

And when we’re not together I want you to ache with longing.

And then show me how much being apart from me wrecks you.

Worship me!

punish me!

reward me for each good deed I do to your body.

I want you to be mine

And sometimes I think how mad I’ll be

to let you be someone else’s.

SONG: SALTED WOUND BY SIA

I’ve been thinking deeply since realizing that my friendships have loved me better than most people I’ve been with.

Not more intensely.
Just… gentler and honest.

For a long time I’ve watched people around me recover from heartbreaks while still being held so carefully by their friends. Someone can leave them emotionally wrecked for months, yet the same person can sit with their closest friends for hours without fear, without performance, without needing to calculate every sentence before it leaves their mouth.

Friendships have taught me that choosing to stay regardless of the situation or circumstances is worth it but can’t be forced.

Buy me a coffee

Why do friendships so often feels safer than love?

Your real friends do not make affection feel conditional. You do not wake up wondering if they still care about you because they took too long to reply. You are not forced to decode silence like it is some kind of emotional scavenger hunt. You are allowed to exist imperfectly around them.

Exhausted. Broke. Lost. Messy.

And somehow the relationship survives all of it.

There is no constant audition happening.

Meanwhile, romance has somehow become this place where people tolerate emotional confusion in the name of “chemistry.” We mistake inconsistency for depth. We call emotional instability passion because we’ve been conditioned to believe love only matters when it hurts a little.

But love was never supposed to feel like standing barefoot in a war zone.

The older I get, the more I notice that healthy friendships already contain the blueprint for intimacy. The best ones are built on emotional safety. Honest communication. Forgiveness. Space. Choice. Mutual softness. You are not constantly trying to earn your place there.

Your friends do not weaponize vulnerability every time they are upset with you. They do not keep invisible ledgers of every mistake you’ve made. They do not punish you for being difficult to understand sometimes.

They simply learn you.

And maybe that is what romance is missing now.

Just genuine liking.

The happiest couples I know are not performing love like a tragic film. They are not exhausting each other emotionally every week just to feel desired again. They actually enjoy one another’s company. They speak kindly. They laugh often. They remain curious about each other long after familiarity settles in.

There is friendship inside their love.

Not in the cliché way people throw around online, but in the deeper sense. The kind where you are being considered and chosen and one where your partner still treats you like someone worthy of patience even during conflict.

Here silence feels peaceful instead of threatening and disagreement does not immediately feel like abandonment.

I think we underestimate how beautiful it is to feel emotionally safe with someone.

To not constantly monitor their tone.
To not fear emotional withdrawal.
To not feel responsible for stabilizing every mood swing in the room.

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A friend once told me he realized his relationship was unhealthy because he spent more time managing emotional tension than actually enjoying the person he loved. That sentence stayed with me because so many people confuse emotional labor with intimacy.

But love should not feel like emotional hostage negotiation.

The truth is, we already know what healthy love looks like because many of us experience pieces of it every day through friendship. We know what it feels like to be chosen consistently. To be listened to without punishment. To be accepted without constantly reshaping ourselves.

Yet the moment romance enters the picture, people suddenly tolerate emotional starvation simply because desire is involved.

We settle for fragments.
For uncertainty.
For almosts.

And maybe we need to stop calling relationships “passionate” when they are really just emotionally unstable.

Maybe the best kind of love is not the one that consumes you.
Maybe it is the one that lets you unclench.

The one that feels like coming home to yourself instead of abandoning yourself to keep somebody else.

The one that feels like “Friendships”

I wrote about intensity like I understood it from the outside.
Like I was only ever meant to witness people, not be witnessed back.

But recently, people wrote about me.

Not casually.
On Substack!

They wrote about the way my words touched them.
The way I made them feel seen.
The strange intimacy of experiencing me, even from a distance.

And I did not expect how healing it would feel.

To be written about is a different kind of closeness.

Something that brings you and other people you probably have never met together.
It means someone paid attention long enough to translate me this time.
It means I existed deeply enough in someone’s mind that they needed paragraphs to carry you.

I think a part of me always believed I was unforgettable only in silence.
That I would move through people as a feeling they could never fully explain.

But seeing myself reflected in someone else’s words made me realize something:

I have spent so much time romanticizing my ability to understand others that I never stopped to imagine what it would feel like to be understood too.

Cause for the first time in a long time, I did not feel like background narration in my own life.

I felt perceived.

And in only the right ways

And to the writers…🫠Thank you for seeing me and believing that I’m what I write..it means a lot in ways you might only imagine.

Thank you so much 💋

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I don’t think I fall in love anymore.

I think I linger inside people long after they have stopped choosing me.

I memorize the sound of delayed replies.

I turn their silence into evidence.

Evidence that I’m once again to be left behind.

I’m used to building meanings out of almost-nothings, because my mind is always on construction duty for feelings that were never commissioned.

Someone remembers the smallest thing about me and my heart immediately begins setting the table for forever.

They brush past me in passing and my brain doesn’t call it accidental, it calls it significant.

They speak softly and I don’t just hear words, I start assigning them intentions, future, weight.

And before anything real even has time to form, I’ve already made it sacred.

I know.

I know how that sounds.

But yearning has always made ordinary things feel holy to me.

And I don’t think that’s a problem.

Maybe that is the most beautiful thing about me.

Because despite everything, grief and disappointment and people leaving with pieces of me still caught in their teeth, I have never learned how to approach love casually still.

I still look at intimacy like it is something pure.

I still believe being understood is one of the closest things we have to being saved.

“Some people kiss like it’s a habit.

Others kiss like they are trying to apologize for every lonely thing that has ever happened to you.”

I have spent so much of my life pretending I am less tender than I actually am.

Pretending I don’t care too deeply.

Pretending I can separate desire from emotion.

Pretending I can survive connection without attaching meaning to it.

But I can’t.

I wish I could tell you I am detached now.

That I no longer reread conversations or replay certain laughs in my head while trying to sleep.

But the truth is, yearning lives inside me like a second heartbeat.

And honestly?

I have stopped trying to kill it.

Because every time I tried to become someone less emotional, less hopeful, less affected by love, I became unrecognizable to myself and to others.

There is a version of me that survives by feeling nothing.

But I do not think they are living.

And I want to live.

I think people like me experience love in echoes long before it ever arrives fully.

We fall in love with anticipation.

With possibility.

With the soft horror of almost.

We imagine entire futures from fragments because deep down we are not searching for perfection.

We are searching for permanence.

“I do not want intensity that burns fast.

I want the kind of love that lingers in a room after someone leaves it.”

And maybe yearning has ruined me because now I notice everything.

The way someone goes limp around me when they are tired.

The way affection hides itself inside small gestures.

The way loneliness can exist even while being touched.

Especially while being touched.

Being desired but not fully chosen.

From being wanted physically while your soul remains standing outside the door like an uninvited guest.

Maybe that is why I crave emotional intimacy so violently.

Not because I am needy.

But because I know what it feels like to be consumed without being understood.

And I no longer want love that only knows my body.

I want someone who notices when my voice changes slightly over the phone.

Someone who lets me in whilst others stand waiting.

Someone who studies my silence with the same attention people usually reserve for beauty.

“Romance is not dead.

People are just afraid of being witnessed.”

There are people who will never experience yearning because they never allow themselves to want anything sincerely.

Cause they feel there’s no one truly there to make them happy enough to feel worthy.

And maybe they suffer less.

But they will also never know the terrifying beauty of looking at another person and thinking:
there you are.

There you fucking are.

“My person”

The human being my soul has been reaching toward before I even knew how to speak.

I think love changes shape before it disappears.
Sometimes it becomes memory.
Sometimes it becomes art.”

I have made art out of almost every person who has ever hurt me.

Not because pain is romantic.
But because surviving tenderness requires somewhere for it to go.

So I write.

I write because my body does not know what to do with all this longing.

I write because some people leave fingerprints on your life without realizing it.

I write because there are nights where loneliness feels less like emptiness and more like overflow.

Too much feeling.
Too much memory.
Too much hope refusing to die.

And still…

Still I believe in love.

Not the performative kind.
Not the temporary kind people use to survive boredom.

I mean the terrifying kind.

The kind that rearranges you.
The kind that teaches your nervous system peace.
The kind that feels less like possession and more like recognition.

The kind that says:
I see every broken thing about you and I am still here.

Because despite everything yearning has taken from me, it has also given me something sacred:

The ability to remain soft without becoming weak.

And I think that is rare now.

I think choosing tenderness in a cruel world is its own form of rebellion.

So no, yearning has not destroyed me.

It has simply made me impossible to love halfway.

And maybe that means I will hurt more.
Maybe that means I will always feel things too deeply.

But if loving fully is the price of being alive, then let me remain unbearable in my hope.

Let me continue believing in hands that stay.
In conversations that last until morning.
In kisses that feel like honesty.
In being chosen deliberately.

Because at the end of everything, after all the leaving and returning and almosts and ache, I still want love with both hands open.

And I think that is the most human thing about me.

“I would rather spend my life ruined by yearning than untouched by love.”

Song: Love has no limits by Fleurie

There is something strangely intimate about writing for other people.

Not in the shallow way people assume.

Not the “I don’t mind, I just want quick money” kind of way. I mean it in the sense that someone hands you a thought they cannot fully explain and trusts you enough to turn it into something alive.

That, to me, is ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting is the act of writing content that is officially published under someone else’s name.”Essays, blogs, content, captions, newsletters, threads, speeches, stories, even entire books.

The writer remains invisible while the client becomes the face of the work.

And honestly? I used to think it sounded a little sad.

Why would anyone want to write beautiful things and not attach their own name to them?

But the older I get, the more I realize ghostwriting is less about disappearing and more about translation. Some people have emotions they cannot articulate. Some people know exactly what they feel but not how to shape it into language. Some people have stories sitting heavily in their chest with nowhere to go.

And I think I’m good at helping those stories breathe.

I’ve spent so much time online watching people desperately try to explain themselves. You can see it in half-finished tweets, overexplained captions, deleted paragraphs, reposted poetry, ai generated contents, private notes and all. Everyone wants to be understood. Everyone wants language that sounds like the inside of their head.

Most people just don’t know how to get there.

But hey!

I do..

I understand yearning. I understand tension. I understand silence so loud it becomes romantic. I understand wanting someone so badly they start appearing in your vocabulary. I understand queer intimacy, emotional chaos, internet humor, loneliness disguised as nonchalance, desire disguised as jokes.

And those things translate beautifully into writing.

If you know how to express using the right words.

That’s why ghostwriting makes sense for me.

Not because I want to hide behind other people’s names, but because I enjoy the process of making someone feel seen through an adaptive language that is just like them.

There’s something fascinating about taking fragmented thoughts and turning them into words that feel cinematic, vulnerable, and painfully human.

Also, if I’m being realistic, ghostwriting is efficient.

Writing has always been treated like this tragic starving artist profession where people assume passion and financial stability cannot coexist. I don’t believe that anymore. We are living in a time where personality is currency. People want newsletters. They want think pieces. They want emotionally intelligent captions. They want threads that sound honest instead of corporate. They want branding that feels human.

And they would pay a killing just to be seen.

Most creators do not have the time or ability to write those things themselves.

That creates space for writers like me.

And maybe this sounds dramatic, but I genuinely think the internet is starving for sincerity. Not polished perfection or robotic marketing.

People remember writing that makes them feel exposed.

The posts that go viral are usually the ones that accidentally tell the truth too loudly.

That’s the kind of writing I do and I want to create that safe space for people.

Emotionally intimate content. Sensual writing. Diary-style prose. Queer storytelling. Soft romance. Brand copy with actual personality. Things that sound lived in instead of manufactured.

I think a lot of people assume ghostwriting is dishonest because the audience never sees the real writer. But I actually think it’s collaborative. The emotions still belong to the person speaking. I’m just helping them say it better.

Like emotional tailoring.

And honestly, I like the irony of it too. The idea that some of the most vulnerable things online are written quietly by someone sitting in bed at 2 a.m. with low brightness and too many tabs open.

Maybe that someone is me now.

I’ve decided to start ghostwriting because I know words matter. I know what it feels like to read something and suddenly feel less alone. I know the physical ache of being understood too well by a sentence.

And if I can create that feeling for people — while building something sustainable for myself too — then why wouldn’t I?

And maybe this is me announcing myself properly for the first time.

I’ve decided to go into ghostwriting.

For the overthinkers.
For the romantics.
Hire me now!

please???🥺

You touched me
like grief touches old houses
slowly, then all at once.

In rooms that smelled like sweat, bad decisions,
lay my loneliness
bare, with no clothes.

Somewhere between your mouth and my pulse,
I realized desire is just self-destruction
wearing an expensive perfume.

There’s something about meeting a girl who feels like a bad decision you find yourself already rehearsing excuses for.
Yes!

You know that type.
Dangerous.

Fierce.
One look from her and you forget your rules.

And God! she tastes sweet.
Smells heavenly.
Like temptation dipped in honey and wrapped in skin you’d gladly sin for.

Skin so pretty, body so tea in a way that feels unfair to the rest.
The kind of fine that makes you forgive her before she’s done anything wrong while consistently matching your freak in the best way possible.

She’s the type to sit across from you, calm, composed, and say something mildly unhinged in perfect grammar.

She would kiss you in a room full of people but be shy when alone with you.

Our conversations don’t run.
They simmer.

Layered like something that’s been slow-cooked.
You peel one sentence and there’s another underneath.

Flowing perfectly like it’s been pre-ordained.
One perfect topic after another.
Then suddenly you’re somewhere intimate and you don’t remember how you got there.

We talk about normal things.
Music.
Life.
Food.
She knows the exact weight of words and enjoys placing them carefully on my chest.

I have laughed with many women.
I have flirted with many women.
I have survived many women.

But this one?

This one makes silence feel like foreplay.

The kind that stretches between two people like an invisible thread.
Pulling.
Testing.
Refusing to snap.

support my writing💌

She doesn’t beg for attention.
Doesn’t perform desire like a street vendor shouting prices.

She just… looks at me sometimes.

And it feels like a secret handshake I forgot learning.

I pretend I’m normal about it.
I am not normal about it.

I will be mid-task, brushing my teeth, replying emails, pretending to care about productivity, and suddenly remember something she said three days ago.

And my brain goes:

Oh.

And then my heart goes “Fuck we’re in danger, you’re cooked”

This doesn’t necessarily feel like butterflies.
It feels like standing too close to the edge of something high and realizing you’re not stepping back.

That’s what this is.

The truth is:

I would let her ravage me.

Not in the dramatic way.

But emotionally and very much so; physically.
Being with her is an intentional way of agreeing to chaos with both eyes open.

I would let her ruin my composure.

Let her take that carefully curated version of me…the one that knows when to stop talking, when to leave, when to act uninterested and dismantle it piece by piece.

I would let her split me open in that terrifyingly tender way only some women know how to do.
And trust me, this kind has nothing to do with force but everything to do with permission.

And that’s the part that scares me.

Because desire, when it’s honest, is rarely about dominance but trust.
It’s standing still while someone learns the geography of you.

And I know, deep down, if she ever asked me to stay.. really stay…I would.

And the wildest part?

I know I would give it back to her just as recklessly.

Because for all my dramatics, I am not soft in love.
I am deliberate.
Hungry in a way I disguise with jokes.

I would meet her intensity stride for stride.
Match every dangerous softness with one of my own.

I would hold her like time was expiring.

That’s the thing about women like her.
They don’t just make you want.
They make you respond.

They wake up the part of you that doesn’t do half-measures.

The part that says:
If we’re doing this, we are doing this fully.
No seatbelts.
No disclaimers.

Just impact.

And maybe that’s why I’m writing this like a confession instead of a love letter.

Because nothing has happened.
And yet everything has shifted.

I am still going about my life.
Doing the random things I do.
While still pretending I am emotionally well-adjusted.

But somewhere in between ordinary days, I have these thoughts that if she ever reached for me with those steady hands,
If she ever decided to stop being patient…

I wouldn’t run.

I would laugh first.
Probably make an anxious joke.
Deflect like my life depends on it.

And then I would step closer anyway.

Because I want to exist in your orbit long enough for gravity to do its job.

And suddenly I’m writing diary entries at 2AM,
Smiling at my phone like an idiot,
Realizing with mild horror and a little excitement…

That I’m not the one in control here.

The most honest sentence I can write tonight is this:

If she ever decided to ruin me gently,
I wouldn’t stop her.

I would open the door,
Step aside,
And say with full awareness and very poor judgment;

“Go ahead.”

AUTHORS NOTE

song: Lunch Billie Eillish

Pictures (from the movies; Fear Street, Wheel of Time & Imagine Me and You)