Stars, Hide Your Fires

  • Lessons from the Land

    In the latter half of 2025, I took on a role that required me to leave home. At the time, it felt more like an adventure than a plan—my first real step beyond what I knew of myself, taken with openness rather than certainty. I didn’t know where it would lead. I only knew I wanted to go.

    But life has a way of deepening the things we begin lightly. The change didn’t arrive dramatically. Instead, it unfolded gradually, through new routines and unfamiliar streets. And somewhere along the way, the move stopped being about where I lived and became about how I lived.

    Working on a project rooted in farming taught me to see growth differently. Progress no longer felt like something to rush toward. Rather, it became something to tend. And as the work took shape, a few principles—borrowed from the land itself—kept surfacing as steady reference points: suitability, resilience, and sustained cultivation.

    The first had to do with environment. In farming, effort alone cannot compensate for misalignment. If the conditions are wrong, nothing thrives for long. That truth extended beyond the fields. I became aware of how much energy I had previously spent adjusting myself to fit. Here, that friction eased. I could focus more fully and think more clearly. The challenges didn’t disappear, but they made sense. They had edges and limits.

    That awareness naturally extended to how I dealt with difficulty. Resilience, I learned, is rarely about force. Crops survive disease through attention, timing, and prevention—not panic. Applying this way of thinking meant noticing patterns sooner, responding with intention, and conserving energy. Problems became signals instead of threats. Not something to conquer, but something to understand.

    And finally, there was sustained cultivation—the quiet work that happens daily, often invisibly. Showing up. Refining small things. Repeating what works. Trusting that growth accumulates even when nothing dramatic seems to be happening. Over time, consistency became less of a choice and more of a state.

    When progress was no longer something I felt the need to chase or defend, it began to resemble growth in a field rather than movement toward a finish line. My days took on a rhythm. Decisions followed the season they were in. What once felt unfamiliar and effortful settled into something workable. The same openness that first led me away from home—taken without certainty, without a map—slowly became attentiveness, and attentiveness, over time, became commitment.

    That commitment was never driven by urgency. It grew from staying, from tending what I had stepped into, and from allowing time to do its quiet work. What began as an adventure became cultivation. And I came to understand that this is how anything enduring is built—not through intensity, but through persistence, learned over time. Because as seasons turn, what stands strong is what was cared for when growth was slow.

  • Definitions

    Definition is a coffin, polished and precise, built to contain something that was never meant to be still. We press ourselves into its corners, into the words others have given us—daughter, lover, failure, dreamer—until the shape of us is lost beneath the weight of their meaning. But meanings rot, don’t they? They decay like fruit left too long in the sun, sweet at first, then sour, then gone. And what is left? A body unclaimed by language, shifting, slipping through the cracks of expectation.

    There is a cruelty in being known, in being named. A name is a brand, seared into the skin, a promise you never agreed to make. They say you are this, so you must be this. They say you are that, so you cannot be anything else. But there is a rebellion in silence, in refusing to give yourself away, in holding your shape loosely enough that no one can grasp it. To be nothing is to be untouchable. To be nothing is to be free.

    Yet, we ache to be seen. To have someone look at us and say, there you are, without turning us into something small enough to hold. But if they name you, they claim you. If they define you, they own you. So you swallow your longing, tuck it into the hollow of your ribs, and let yourself become wind, become water, become whatever the world cannot catch.

  • Saturn

    I am a planet wrapped in my own debris, a celestial body spinning in the void, my rings forged from the shards of what I could not keep. Time, that indifferent sculptor, has carved me into something I barely recognize—a mosaic of fractures, a tapestry of scars. And yet, I am told this is beauty. This is growth.

    The stars whisper their cold truths: You are not what you were. And they are right. I am not the girl who once believed in the simplicity of light, who thought the universe would cradle her in its arms and sing her to sleep. I am the woman who has learned to cradle herself, to sing her own lullabies in the dark.

    Saturn does not apologize for its rings. It wears them like a crown. And I? I wear my pain like a second skin, a map of all the places I have been and all the battles I have fought. The cracks in my heart are not flaws; they are the fault lines of a soul that has trembled but not shattered.

    Time is a thief, they say. But I have learned to steal it back. Every wrinkle, every gray hair, every scar is a trophy, a reminder that I have outlived my sorrows. I have outlived the nights when the weight of the world pressed down on my chest and I could not breathe. I have outlived the days when I thought I would never smile again.

    Still, I orbit. I move through the darkness, not because I am brave, but because I have no other choice. The sun calls to me, its warmth a distant promise, and I answer. I always answer. For even in the coldest reaches of space, there is light. Even in the deepest corners of my mind, there is hope.

    I am not what I was. I am more. I am less. I am everything and nothing, a paradox wrapped in flesh and bone. Like Saturn, I am a mystery to myself. Like Saturn, I am a work in progress. Like Saturn, I know I only get better with time.

  • Twin Souls

    In the vast, unending expanse of the multiverse, where time folds in on itself and reality splits into infinite refrains, two souls search endlessly for one another. They are bound not by the laws of space or gravity, but by a force so profound it defies the very fabric of existence. In one universe, they might share a fleeting glance across a crowded room; in another, their hands might graze, only to be pulled apart by the cruel tide of fate. In every iteration, the stars seem to conspire against them—galaxies collapsing, dimensions folding—yet they persist, eternally attuned to the ache of something that can never fully take root, but will never fully fade.

    It is said that somewhere in the multiverse, there exists a thread, a perfect alignment of moments where they are free to find each other without barriers. But in all other worlds, they are tragic echoes, missing each other by a fraction of a breath or a beat of time. She dreams of him in fragments—his voice a low hum in the static of her thoughts, his touch like a memory she cannot place. He searches for her in shadows, in the patterns of falling leaves, in the spaces between stars. Though they may never exist in the same frame, their connection reverberates across dimensions, an indelible imprint on the cosmos, reminding every universe that even the cruelest distances cannot sever the tether between two destined souls.

  • Belonging

    There’s a strange dissonance in being surrounded by everything you think you should need, yet still feeling untethered, like a wandering star forever orbiting but never landing. I’ve sat at countless tables, felt the warmth of laughter ripple through me, seen faces turned toward mine with care and recognition—and yet, there is always that distance, invisible but insurmountable. It’s as if my soul exists a step removed from the world, suspended in a space that no one else can enter. I’ve tried to explain it, even to myself. But how do you describe the feeling of being a stranger in your own life?

    I’ve learned how to move through it, of course. I’ve become an architect of my own belonging, building bridges of conversation, laying foundations of shared moments. People see me as adaptable, present, connected. And maybe I am, in fragments. But beneath the surface, there is a quiet yearning that I can never ignore. It whispers to me when the laughter fades and the rooms grow still: You are not where you are meant to be. I don’t know if it’s a call to somewhere else or simply the echo of my own longing, ricocheting endlessly within me.

    For so long, I believed this ache was a flaw to be fixed, a wound to be healed. I searched for answers outside of myself, thinking that a place, a person, a purpose might finally anchor me. But as the years pass, I am beginning to realize: the ache is not a void to fill, but a map to follow. It is the part of me that refuses to settle, the part that knows I was not made to fit neatly into the spaces the world offers. I am not untethered because I am lost—I am untethered because I am still becoming.

    Maybe this is what it means to belong: not to a place or to others, but to the endless, unfolding journey of yourself. To hold your own contradictions with tenderness, to make peace with the fact that you are both whole and unfinished. I am learning that the distance I feel is not a flaw; it is space, vast and full of possibility. Maybe the greatest act of belonging is not finding where I fit, but creating the world where I am enough, just as I am. In that, the ache does not vanish but softens, transforming into something almost beautiful, something like hope.