[candlelitscribes]

154

Burnt by moonlight

a pale fire leaving no warmth only the silver outline of what was once there.

I stayed awake beneath an indifferent sky, letting every reflection find another piece of me.

The night never touched me with hands.

It only showed me what daylight had hidden.

A tenderness too bright to survive being seen,

a heart exposed to borrowed light,

smoldering quietly beneath the stars.

By morning there was nothing left to burn

except the memory of having glowed.

[candlelitscribes]

153 (gloss)

A glistening gloss over the fractures underneath,

making broken things look beautiful from a distance.

A thin layer of light over everything I couldn't bring myself to say,

polished until even the scars began reflecting something worth looking at.

But light doesn't heal what it touches.

It only makes the damage easier to see.

[candlelitscribes]

152 (Reflection)

The moon to your sun it's your light i want to reflect.

Not to eclipse you, not to borrow your warmth, only to catch what you give and carry it through the dark.

Let me be the quiet glow that follows your setting, a pale reminder that even after the day is gone your light still reaches me.

I have no dawn of my own.

I only know how to shine with what you've left behind.

And if you ever wonder why I keep looking toward you,

it's because some lights are meant to be witnessed,

and some of us were made to remember where they came from.

[candlelitscribes]

151 (Soul Stagnation)

When every thought has run its course when every emotion has been felt when every idea has been made when every interaction a soul could make has been made when the last fruit is plucked

when every branch has surrendered its color and the roots have nothing left to pull from the earth

what remains?

A hollow orchard waiting for a season that has already passed.

No new songs from the same old throat. No undiscovered roads beneath familiar feet.

Only the slow accumulation of yesterday settling over everything like dust.

stagnation isn't the absence of movement.

it is moving through the same life until every path becomes a circle.

And still

somewhere beneath the soil,

something refuses to call itself finished.

A seed too small to notice,

holding its silence like a secret,

waiting for the impossible to become another spring.

[candlelitscribes]

150

In heaven every little fool falls in love.

They tumble from the clouds with their hands full of wishes, believing every light was meant to guide them home.

Angels laugh softly at the ones who reach too far, who mistake a falling star for a promise.

Still, they keep falling.

Hearts first, grace somewhere behind them, learning too late that even paradise has gravity.

Maybe that's what heaven is

not a place without pain,

but somewhere we are foolish enough to love again

after we've already learned what falling does.

[candlelitscribes]

149

I am the falling star you made a wish on while you were young.

A memory of a memory.

Something you never truly knew, only the warmth of having wanted, the brief illumination before the sky swallowed me.

You remember the wish more clearly than the star.

The feeling remained after the light was gone, a small mythology you carried forward without knowing why.

Perhaps I was never what you wished for.

Perhaps I was only the evidence that once,

long ago,

you still believed something beautiful might fall from the heavens just for you.

And now, when you look up,

you don't see me.

You see the child who did.

A distant silhouette wearing your old face,

making wishes on things already disappearing.

[candlelitscribes]

148

Everyone is talking down to me Putting me in my place. Just another to be made an example of.

A name pinned beneath a lesson I never volunteered to teach.

They point toward me like a warning sign, something to be studied before they return to their comfortable lives.

I know the ritual.

Lower the voice. Narrow the room. Speak slowly enough to make me feel small for not understanding what was decided before I arrived.

Every correction another brick in the little kingdom they've built around my silence.

And I keep wondering who appointed them architects of my worth.

How many times can I be put in my place before I forget that I was never born there?

Maybe I am tired of standing where they left me.

Maybe the example they keep trying to make of me is not a warning.

Maybe it is evidence

that I was never meant to fit inside the lesson.

[candlelitscribes]

147

To write again would have to be done wearing another mask while I cleave through my old world of dead sentiments to be the sediments to new life.

Buried beneath everything I thought I was, old roots curl around the bones of unfinished thoughts, holding what I once believed was worth remembering.

I cannot resurrect what has already died.

I can only turn the soil.

Let the fallen words decompose beneath me, let every forgotten feeling break down into something my hands can finally use.

The mask will not be a lie if I know it is only temporary.

A shell to cross the distance between who I was and whatever waits beneath the surface.

Maybe writing again doesn't mean finding the voice I lost.

Maybe it means giving the silence enough time to rot,

until something stubborn pushes through it.

A small green thing I don't recognize.

No prophecy.

No resurrection.

Just life making use of what I left behind.

[candlelitscribes]

146

How can i delve into dreams without delusional daemons

peeling back the layers of a sleeping mind without waking what waits beneath

I want the strange places the impossible colors the doors that lead to places without permanence

I want to wander without every shadow learning my shape

to let imagination be escape without every whisper demanding to become real

Perhaps the trick isn't closing every door

but learning which ones are meant to open

and which voices should remain on the other side

I can still dream without believing every dream

still wander without mistaking the map for the world

There are things worth bringing back

a fragment of light a forgotten landscape a thought with no language

something beautiful that doesn't need to be believed

only remembered.

[candlelitscribes]

145

i wish my mind could be as forgiving as my heart hemorrhages apologies

each memory a reopened wound each situation another reason to press down

until the bleeding looks enough like penance to quiet the questions

I forgive them for what they never meant for what they couldn't give for every silence I mistook for an answer

but my mind keeps records in places my heart can't reach

filing away every failed conversation every hesitation every hand I should've held and every one I pulled away from

my heart keeps saying it wasn't their fault

my mind keeps asking then whose was it?

So I carry both

the surgeon and the scar

one stitching shut what the other keeps reopening

until forgiveness is no longer mercy

just another way of learning to live with what refuses to heal.

[candlelitscribes]

144 (Blank Spaces)

The desire to write has curled my fingers into hooks at the ends long barbed wire reaching for something just beyond the page dragging scraps of thought through the skin until every word comes away bleeding. I keep trying to catch what refuses to be held, the shape of a memory before it remembers itself, the ghost of a sentence that dies somewhere between the mind and the hand. Blank spaces staring back like open mouths. I fill them with whatever remains. A little silence. A little blood. A few names I promised myself I would forget. And still the wire keeps growing, threading through my fingers, pulling me toward the page as though somewhere inside all this emptiness there is still something worth dragging into the light.

[candlelitscribes]

143

You’re going to have to carry that weight with you.

Not because it belongs to you, but because leaving it behind would mean admitting it happened.

So you learn its shape, where it catches against your ribs, how it changes the way you walk.

Maybe that's the cruelty of memory

you can outgrow the moment without ever becoming free of what it taught your body to carry.

[candlelitscribes]

142

Looks like I need to begin again,

flowers wilt, bloom, and die

the seeds of memories left behind like mementos planted in whatever ground I haven't abandoned yet.

Maybe beginning again isn't starting over.

Maybe it's returning to the soil with enough of the past intact to know what is worth growing.

[candlelitscribes]

141

Purveyor of half truths, convenient excuses, where you're never at fault and any story is enough to soothe.

You only need the version that lets you sleep at night,

a careful rearrangement of what happened until consequence belongs to someone else.

And that's the easiest lie

not pretending it never happened,

but telling it often enough that you no longer remember which parts were yours.

[candlelitscribes]

140

I am the third wheel between your phantoms and friends.

Always close enough to feel the warmth of belonging, never close enough to become part of it.

Your ghosts already know you. Your friends already understand which parts of you belong to them.

I arrive somewhere in the middle, trying to find a place in a conversation that had already begun.

[candlelitscribes]

139

I know I’m the replaceable component,

the piece designed to be removed when something better fits.

I learned to measure my worth by how easily I could be substituted,

how quietly I could disappear without disturbing the machinery.

But there is something cruel about being replaceable

not that someone else can take your place,

but that eventually you begin doing it yourself.

[candlelitscribes]

138

My emotions are admissible, and my viewpoint no longer valid.

You read the stories where you crave information, taking what confirms the version you came looking for.

To me, this is obvious.

The evidence changes depending on who is hungry for it, and suddenly my experience becomes unreliable because it doesn't satisfy the story you prefer.

I can tell you what happened.

You can decide what you're willing to believe.