Feya

more at elsielovelace.wixsite.com/prose-palette

[loveandquillfeathers]

What the ocean taught me about being a woman

The ocean has always felt like a woman to me. Not because she is gentle. That was never true. Because everyone loves her from a distance. They photograph her in the morning light. They bottle her colors, write songs about her tides, drape paintings of her across living room walls. They call her beautiful while forgetting she has swallowed ships whole. They admire her until she reminds them that…

[loveandquillfeathers]

The Weight of Tomorrow

I’m nineteen, which feels like standing in the doorway of a house that’s still being built. Everyone keeps telling me these are the years I’ll remember forever. They say life opens up now. Roads split into highways. Dreams stop being daydreams and start asking for rent money. The future stretches in front of me like a city skyline at sunrise. Every window catches the light differently, every…

[loveandquillfeathers]

Shoreline Between Ages

There is a season so brief you almost miss it. Not childhood. Not adulthood. The shoreline between them. You do not recognize it while you are standing there. That is the trick. You imagine growing up will arrive like weather, announced by dark clouds gathering at the horizon. You expect trumpets. Milestones. A door swinging open. Instead, it happens quietly. One afternoon, you are laughing…

[loveandquillfeathers]

Where the Daylight Goes

Being a lamb means carrying exhaustion like a second skeleton. It follows you into classrooms, through grocery store aisles, down gravel roads cut between cornfields and telephone poles. It sits quietly in your ribs while everyone else seems capable of existing beneath the weight of daylight. The lamb has always envied them for that. Sleep loves her. It curls around her ankles like barn cats…

[loveandquillfeathers]

The House Of Wilted Things

I fell in love in a house that had forgotten how to bloom. Not metaphorically. The place seemed genuinely hostile to growth. The curtains were always drawn, preserving arguments like pressed flowers between the walls. Every room held the stale perfume of old resentments. Doors slammed often enough to become a kind of weather. Even the plants on the windowsill developed a habit of yellowing at…

[loveandquillfeathers]

The Family Lamb

Every family has a machine hidden somewhere inside it. Not a visible one. Not gears hanging from the ceiling or belts spinning in the walls. I mean the invisible mechanism that decides who gets polished and who gets worn down. Who becomes the favorite song and who becomes the static beneath it. In my family, the machine was old. It hummed softly through birthdays and holidays. Through dinner…

[loveandquillfeathers]

The Gears Of The Garden

There is a moment—so small it barely registers—when the gear slips. You don’t hear it at first. Life is loud in its own gentle way: the hum of bees threading golden stitches between blossoms, the soft percussion of wind brushing petals into applause, the warm ticking of sunlight stretching across your skin like a promise that time, for now, is kind. You stand in the middle of a field that seems…

[loveandquillfeathers]

Angel Wings and Carnations

I did not notice when it began—only that one day, the air around me felt perfumed with something I could not name. Later, I would learn to call it floriography, the secret language of flowers, but at the time it felt more like scripture whispered through petals. Every glance became a bouquet. Every silence, a pressed bloom between unseen pages. I was reading something sacred without knowing the…

[loveandquillfeathers]

I do not yet know how to shed it completely. Perhaps it will never leave entirely. But I am learning that the shadow does not define me, that the weight, however suffocating, can be met with breath, with acknowledgment, with defiance. That mercy— tiny, stubborn, human— can exist even where divine condemnation looms.

[loveandquillfeathers]

some kinds of loneliness don’t come from being alone.

they come from being surrounded by love—

just not from the people you needed it from most.

parents. siblings.

the ones who were supposed to see you first.

but somehow never really looked.

now the world cares.

friends show up. lovers hold you.

but part of you is still searching the crowd

for someone who never learned how to stay.

and that doesn’t make you ungrateful.

it makes you human.

still learning how to hold the child inside you

the way they couldn’t.

[loveandquillfeathers]

Quiet Hope

You’re my laughter,

my late-night talks,

the one who sees

behind my locks.

I hold a secret,

soft and true,

a silent wish —

to be with you.

But I know your heart

belongs elsewhere,

and still I’m here,

always aware.

Of all the dreams

I can’t pursue,

I’ll cherish this —

just knowing you.

Best friends, they say,

that’s all we’ll be,

and I’ll keep loving

quietly.

[loveandquillfeathers]

18 feels like knowing how to be desired but not how to be loved.

people want the highlight reel—the lips, the laugh, the late-night texts.

but not the full version.

not the crying-over-nothing version.

not the burned-toast-at-2am version.

not the soft, overthinking soul underneath.

i don’t want situationships.

i want someone who holds my hand like a promise.

who says “call me when you get home” and means it.

maybe i’m too much.

or maybe i’m just not for people who only want fragments.

either way—i’ll keep loving hard and hoping harder.

because i know i deserve the kind of love that stays.

[loveandquillfeathers]

soft rebellions

i grew up learning silence.

how to fold myself small

so no one would call me “too much.”

(they did anyway.)

but in the margins of notebooks,

i wrote what i couldn’t say.

worlds where softness wasn’t weakness.

girls like me were chosen,

again and again.

adhd makes my mind a sky of lightning —

brilliant, chaotic, impossible to hold.

but the page never needed me to be still.

it just needed me to be honest.

writing became survival.

a love letter to the self i wasn’t allowed to be.

and maybe that’s the softest kind of rebellion:

to believe you are worthy

of your own words.

your own voice.

your own gentleness.

you are not too much.

you are becoming.

you are a poem still unfolding.

[loveandquillfeathers]

It started with a look.

One accidental glance that somehow felt like fireworks, soft, messy, and impossible to ignore.

But this one person? My best friend? They’re the one who makes my thoughts twist and turn like I’m caught in some emotional maze.

I didn’t plan this. No dramatic confessions or late-night “what if” texts. Just feelings creeping in, the kind that make your stomach do weird flips when they laugh at a dumb joke or lean in just a little closer than usual.

The worst part? She likes a guy. Unrequited pining.

[loveandquillfeathers]

It’s 2:14 AM. I’m wearing my softest, fuzziest socks and sipping lukewarm tea I forgot about an hour ago.

Lo-fi is playing in the background. The candle I lit for “ambience” is now just flickering judgmentally.

And yet, I have decided now is the perfect time to rearrange my entire room.

I just dragged my dresser three feet to the left. My bookshelf is in the middle of the floor. There are books and throw pillows everywhere. My bed looks like it exploded. I may or may not be sweating in this knit cardigan.

Why am I like this? No idea. But the energy hit and I simply must follow it.

I’ll cry about the chaos tomorrow. Right now, I’m thriving in it.

[loveandquillfeathers]

me: I crave peace. also me: puts on a playlist called ‘witch screaming in the woods’ and knits aggressively.

There’s a very specific kind of peace I crave. Not the soft, classical-music-in-a-sunlit-room kind. No. I mean the kind where I’m in a dim room surrounded by candles that smell like “forest fire and regret,” knitting a scarf with chaotic urgency while a playlist that sounds like it was recorded in a haunted moss cave blasts in the background. One minute it’s eerie violins, the next it’s thunder and something vaguely screaming in Icelandic. It’s not calm exactly, but it’s… centered. Focused. My soul feels like it’s being gently exorcised through cozy domestic rituals and minor chaos.

And there’s something about the clicking of knitting needles against the soundtrack of eldritch wailing that feels right. Like yes, this is who I am now. A little creature in their nest, warding off the world one handmade sock at a time, half feral but fully cozy. People talk about mindfulness, have they tried hyper-fixating on a single loose stitch while pretending they’re the protagonist in a folklore horror movie? That’s transcendence. That’s peace.