Firewords

The art of spilling ink on paper

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The Prayers I Never Said

No one ever really talks about the prayers that are never spoken. We grow up being taught how to ask—how to raise our hands, how to shape our كلمات carefully, how to call upon Allah with certainty. We are told that Dua is powerful, that nothing is too small to ask for, that even the تفاصيل of our lives matter to Him. And still… there are things we don’t say. Not because we don’t believe He can…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The Lemon Tree That Wouldn’t Grow

I bought a lemon tree because I believed in a future that needed one. In another life—the one I was certain we were building—it would have stood on our balcony, leaves glossy and full, catching the morning light like it had something to prove. The lemons would start out small and bitter, stubborn little things, before ripening into something softer, heavier in the hand. I would press one between…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The Days That Feel Empty

The randomness of existence There will be days when life feels unbearably random. When things happen without reason, without warning, without meaning. No lesson announces itself. No closure arrives neatly wrapped. Events just occur, careless and indifferent, and you are left standing inside their aftermath, expected to continue. On those days, remember this: not everything happens for a reason.…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

All this

Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’…

All this

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

Optional

The Violence of Hope For quite awhile, I keep wanting to go back in time. Not for clarity. Not for certainty—just for that dull, aching pull that lives in the chest when everything feels wrong, and you don’t yet know why. I imagined returning to an earlier moment, thinking I could fix this: say the right words, wait the right amount of time, love in a way that would finally make you stay. I…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

A Map Drawn in Ruin

I want to remember this day, this moment, this wreckage of myself stripped to bone and nerve. I want to carve it into the inside of my skull like a warning that refuses to fade. I want to remember the violence of feeling this much. I will rise above it—not gently, but with the feral force of someone ripped out of their own skin. The fear, the anxiety, the loneliness, the hunger to be chosen—they…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The Women Who Carried Me

Oh, HOW I LOVE BEING A WOMAN! For so long, we were taught to reserve a certain softness for the man we imagined would arrive. The one we believed would make the world feel less heavy, less sharp, less lonely. We held that hope like something delicate—passing it from one version of ourselves to the next, convinced that real love would eventually take the shape of a man’s certainty. But when life…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

A Quieter Kind of Ruin

RUINED You’re tested with what you want the most. The one thing your heart kneels before. The one you love, the one you’d hold onto for life — that’s your test. And when you lose it, it’s not just loss; it’s revelation. It’s the moment you realize that love was never meant to be kept, only survived. At the end of that ache comes a kind of helplessness that humbles even the proud. A surrender so…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

It’s high time that his majesty appear finally and save my sorry ass — I desperately need my Prince Charming to spawn in life.

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

Why is nobody talking about or writing about -

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

Half-Breath

BREATHE The rational part of me—the voice I try, again and again, to trust—knows the facts of us with an almost sterile clarity. It catalogues the timeline: what we were, what I thought we might become, and the precise way those possibilities collapsed. It can say, without flinching, that you left. It can name the mechanics of the leaving: the quiet untethering, the small hesitations that…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

Every Universe

I love you. I love you in every universe. Yet I had to lose you in every universe—even the ones where you loved me back too. That truth doesn’t loosen its grip on me, no matter how I turn it over in my mind. Love is supposed to be the force that bends fate, the one thread that binds what should stay whole. Yet in every version of us—whether it began in tenderness, or chaos, or quiet…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

A Monument of Ink

A Collage of Life The diary was never meant to be seen. It was my hiding place—ink-bound and secret—where I left pieces of myself I couldn’t carry in daylight. Each page held the tremor of words I was too afraid to say aloud, pressed down until they felt safe enough to leave behind. I wrote like someone smuggling feelings across a border, as if survival depended on their concealment. But one…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

We’re a family of lemoneaters. 🍋

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

As a young girl, I liked screaming on highways — raw, and full of heartbreak only I could hear. Yesterday, I rolled down the window, took a deep breath, and tried again. The scream came out brighter, almost laughing halfway through. I think the sad kid missed the bus.

[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The Life That Arrived Anyway

MULTIVERSE OF EXISTENCE There are multitudes of lives you spend years building inside your head. Life you bargain for in prayer, dream of in silence, mourn before it’s even lost. And then one day, without ceremony, a different life shows up in their place. You don’t remember the exact moment it arrived. Maybe it was a delayed answer. Maybe it was punishment. Maybe it was mercy. But it didn’t…

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[butterfliesoverfeelings]

The World Doesn’t Mourn What It Uses

THE BLOOMING ROSES I keep saying this is it. That this will be the moment I finally go cold. That I’ll stop caring, shut the door, and never look back. I tell myself I’ll cut the last thread, become unbothered, unbreakable, unreadable. But I never really do. No matter how many times I rehearse the exit, there’s always a part of me that lingers. Soft. Relentless. Alive. I’ve tried—honestly, I…

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