Find yourself walking back to where nostalgia sits.

I once looked at this meadow and sat under a guava tree nearly 20 years ago, the canopy of swaying leaves and fractures of sunlight my only companions.

Now, two decades later, I’m looking at the same prairie from a window in a house I now call my very own. I stand taller than the canopy of leaves that once offered me shade. I can see the world better, long realized the vastness I once couldn’t fathom.

What a marvel it is to be alive, to be able to look back.

idk about you but I only surface when the moon is out and then return to the sea before the sun rises.

Things I love really do eventually find me again no matter what, even if I once forgot about them along the way.

It’s the universe’s law.

Contrary to what I used to believe, I actually am the source of romance in my life.

Should have, could have, would have — did.

Nostalgia is a knife.

The weight of patience… of trust.

My back feels the throb, how the burden swells under my skin that I can no longer lie still. The lump has grown, tough — like a calcified stone, purple, aching… It makes me wince whenever I shift in my sleep. It follows me even in my dreams. I feel it. Demanding. To be torn open. To be cut and allowed to spill down my spine. I sometimes feel like this is the price for trying to grow wings.

// I always end up finding meaning in everything. Should probably book my surgery appointment.

Oh my tender heart beyond the wall of ice.

For a moment, I couldn’t remember the point of why I’m still writing. Why I’ve been writing. How many times this act has saved my life. Not just my own, but someone else’s who—somehow by pure fate—stumbled across my words on a screen.

Slipping away, lost at sea, drowning. I’m terrified of forgetting how to hold a pen, just like that day nine years ago, when I walked away from the paintbrush I’ve always held in my hand since I was four. Letting myself breathe feels like taking steps towards forgetting the things that keep me alive.

The sea wafts the stench of rust, iron in the sharp air akin to the stiffened blood of an ancient wound clinging to a knife. The scent is familiar. It paints the corroded pillars of a lost gilded city I once traced in a distant dream, clings to the frozen hands of a forgotten watch face — stilted and suspended in the depths of a past life I can no longer recall, where time itself has stopped altogether. The waves hiss beneath me, white-lipped and spiteful as it licks the bruised sky, the ocean pulling the darkness into its chest to obscure what’s underneath, as if it knows something I don’t. The slit where the sky meets the sea feels like it’s breaking, and I can’t help but wonder about all the things the water has swallowed and never spat back out. Left to decay in its belly, despite their will to abandon destiny. To defy tragedy. I also can’t help but wonder if my memory is one of those things the ocean refuses to let go.

The moon is just a sliver now, cutting the sky in half, its light bleeding into the sea. It looks as if it’s fighting back and ripping through the cloak, determined to break through the water’s turbulent surface. I watch the night unfold with my legs dangling over the jagged seam that cradles the shore, my body barely holding itself together on the rocks, as if the wind could pull me apart if it blew hard enough—if it wanted. Or if I dare to remember.

Remember. Who?

Just as the tides rage in, like clockwork, the lonely moon and the abyssal ocean—tied and destined to shift when the other rises—devour each other.

I can feel it coming, the pull, the way the water shifts before it rises. It always happens like this. There’s an ache in it, a softness I’m too terrified to touch, feeling like it would fall apart if I do. I know that ache too well. It mimics the faint, burning nostalgia I can’t pinpoint that blossomed inside of me from something that was cut off so precisely I would’ve thought nothing was ever there if it weren’t for the way I’ve been drawn to the sea. A cavity in my chest that has left me feeling like a hollowed out shell for most of my life. A blank canvas stained with time. Cursed to bear the weight of the questions I can never have the answers to.

— EXCERPT FROM A BOOK I WROTE BACK IN 2024 THAT I MAY OR MAY NOT PUBLISH

I do not recognize myself. Is this distortion? Or is this growth?

But still, you persist.

within the deepest recesses of my mind, a continuously burning tree has been left buried underground — its brittle branches breaching the soil like hands, waiting for someone to meet its open palms. the flames that have been burning for a quarter of a century sway in the damp breeze, cloning my own desperate, twitching fingers, broken from trying to dig itself up from its unforgiving grave.

in this place, the land is barren. only the trapped embers and scorching rain remain. a fading warmth seasons the air despite how many times the muddy tides have come in to demand its prize. a nameless girl visits sometimes. razor thin with paper skin. an entity that would instantly bleed under the brief graze of a stranger’s gaze, clinging to a tangled ball of thought, melted and stale from being left unspoken.

here, everything is stained. dried. hidden under old carpet. an unknown thing inside a box. an open ended question that holds everything as long as it is left undiscovered.

curious. 

when one finally finds the courage to dig up the tree, do you believe the tree will still remain a tree?

curiouser and curiouser.