[ripplesinthesea]

They say energy is neither created nor destroyed.

They say it translates but never truly ends.

The fight we had, the one where you said that thing you can't take back.

That information shall linger for an eternity. The sound wave dissipated, sure but the shape they made in the air? The specific quantum vibration of my heart breaking? It's still out there.

My love for you? Same law.

I can't destroy it, I've tried, I've tried to scatter it, burn it, drown it but it just trasmutes.

We can never truly be done, we can only be scattered.

The information is eternal, you in my heart is eternal, it's tragically safe and I am the star that died to keep it.

[ripplesinthesea]

Sometimes I'm terrified the goodness in me is just a performance I perfected too well, that every kind thing I've done was only a trick I learned to survive.

I fear the people who love me love a version I rehearsed,

and if they saw my thoughts unedited, they'd call it manipulation, not humanity.

Even my guilt feels suspicious—

as if remorse itself is a lie, as if caring is just another way to convince myself I'm not cruel.

So I stand trial in my own mind every night, both the accused and the judge, wondering if the worst thing about me is how badly I want to be good.

[ripplesinthesea]

God, I am so weak.

I keep dreaming of saving people when I can barely hold myself together.

But still, if you're ever drowning in the dark please know this:

I will come for you with light in my mouth, with stars in my pockets, with every soft part of me burning like a promise.

And even if I fail, even if the world takes you away from me anyway

Know that I tried, know that I loved you enough to try.

But again, I am so small, so soft and the world is so, so loud.

[ripplesinthesea]

Do you know what scares me?

That I'm not writing for you, not for God, not even for some imagined reader.

I'm writing because I'm afraid if I stop, I'll vanish like I was never here.

I'm scared my words are fake.

Scared they're just pertormance.

That I'm dressing up a hollow chest with big, tragic language.

Then I try to stop and I can't.

My head starts screaming.

The silence gets teeth. It chews my fingers. I start pacing. I start thinking about knives, or bridges, or disappearing.

Writing is the only thing between me and the bottom.

Blue. Blue. Blue.

My pen leaks like a vein.

My hands look like a murderer's.

A murderer of my own life, stabbing it with sentences until something spills out that looks like meaning.

I'm terrified of God.

Terrified that He's reading this.

That He sees me writing instead of praying, that He knows I'm making poems instead of repenting.

Terrified He'll turn His face away and say, "All this ink and you still don't know Me."

Sometimes to be honest I imagine Him leaning over my shoulder as I write.

Watching me scribble.

I imagine Him whispering " Stop dressing your wounds with words. Just give them to Me." and I can't because I don't know how.

I keep thinking the next page will be the page where I confess everything.

Where I'll stop hiding, stop building a self out of fragments.

I want to stop.

I want to stop writing.

I want to stop existing.

I want to keep writing.

I want to keep existing.

I want to be forgiven.

I want to be punished.

[ripplesinthesea]

God, I do know that You are there.

I cannot name You without my voice breaking but I also doubt myself. I doubt the hands that rise in supplication. I doubt the sincerity of my tongue. I doubt the worth of my soul.

Where did I go wrong?

Was it arrogance to think that I could find You on my own?

My heart is clean or at least I scrub it until it bleeds.

I am afraid

I am afraid of myself.

I am afraid of my own emptiness.

And here l am yet again writing to You, asking You, begging You

to speak back.

to tell me if l am still Yours

[ripplesinthesea]

The headline said "girl dead at 29 from a fireworks accident at the county fair".

You pictured her in cutoffs and red boots, leaning against the hood of a car, holding a sparkler like a love letter that caught fire in her hands.

Somewhere between the Ferris wheel and funnel cake stand, she forgot the part about making it home.

You've always known that sweetness can be a trap.

That every "stay a little longer"

comes with a debt you can't pay in cash.

And you've learned that love, like the fair, always packs up overnight, but you still keep a twenty folded in your pocket

for when the ticket booth opens again.

[ripplesinthesea]

At recess you weren't talking to yourself, you were updating your closest confidant, who just happened to live entirely in your head.

You gave them a name, a backstory, a seat next to you at lunch, where you both agreed

that applesauce was suspicious.

People say you can't live in two realities, but you've always known one was never enough.

You carry parallel universes in your pockets, switching between them

the way other people change songs.

Your life's a deck of cards shuffled mid-game, half the suits missing, but somehow you're still winning.

The missing suits don't matter.

You've always been the wildcard they didn't see coming

[ripplesinthesea]

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade that was the last one with Grandma.

You didn't know it yet, but she was in her pale blue Muumuu, telling you the Rockettes kicked higher when she was your age.

You've been trying to keep

every table set the same way since as if repetition could hold time still, as if loyalty meant never changing a single thing.

But loyalty isn't keeping the plates in place it's carrying the laughter to the places where the ones we loved never got to go.

You can't preserve someone by freezing life where they left it.

You can only honor them by letting life keep moving.

[ripplesinthesea]

You tried to build a stairway to heaven using nothing but sarcasm, sleepless nights, and the belief that maybe you could still be good.

Love wasn't mushy in your house.

It sounded like vacuuming at 6am and being told you were "so mature for your age."

You learned early that gold stars came with conditions.

You were the designated driver of your childhood,

hauling everyone's grief in the trunk and still getting straight A's.

No one saw the tollbooth in your throat, charging you every time you swallowed what you needed.

But I hope one day,

you let someone else take the wheel, and let your hands learn the shape of peace.

[ripplesinthesea]

I am finding that I still have a lot of work to do on myself. Every new person I develop a friendship with brings out a new side of me and I realize that I don't like very many sides of myself. I have so many judgements and harsh opinions about things. Where did I get so opinionated? I keep asking people "WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST VISION" and I think I'm scaring people away with my eagerness to go to the depths too fast. I have no time for small talk. What is MY biggest vision? What am I trying to create? This is what I must find out.

I do not know. The truth is, I had a vision. I knew exactly what I wanted to become and do and have but then I did some shapeshifting and now I don't know. I have everything I want, but I feel so unimpressed. I feel successful, but I don't like myself very much. Everything seems possible and quite logical so it sort of loses its magic. You want to travel the world? You can! You just have to plan it properly and be smart and take action. You no longer want it? Okay. You want to buy a house by the ocean? Get the right job and put in the hours and you can have it. Still want it? No, okay. You want to move to Greect and be a writer? Even if you'll be lonely for eight months straight? Okay, so do it.

One day I'll make it big and never mention it to anyone and that will be my greatest achievement.

[ripplesinthesea]

I think about all the people I have pressed my heart against, pulling them closer, hoping they'll somehow connect with me better if they feel my pulse; I'm fully human.

Just like you!

But the eyes I stare into are always closed, or empty, or just... weird looking, like they're viewing a different world than mine and so the connection is lost.

Yes, I do in fact remember, even if we don't talk anymore. It feels better when it's warm outside, the sun in my face, forgetting about the game. Sometimes i feel like this might be the last night for all of us. no one wants to keep doing this. not badly enough. the God up there must be bored out of his mind. we're all idiots. sometimes l imagine someone up there just turning it off, like a TV. "what a shit show".

A good storyline should involve the main character's transformation. We start by presenting him in a good light so we're on his side. Then he makes a mistakes that ultimately leads him to the point of no return: this is when he needs to make a change, or learn something new, or transform into a better human. Then we follow his hero's journey all the way home again.

But sometimes I imagine someone up there watching what we're doing down here and just shaking his head because there is no hero's journey going on anywhere. No transformations. We're privileged mother t's who create drama to fill up our meaningless lives. we cry a little because we think that means we're hurting. we complain about not earning enough money, or earning a lot of money and complaining because it didn't make us happy. we travel the world believing we'll be happy if we learn how to surf, or party with stars in LA.

anyway, those people i press my heart against, they never feel it. my pulse. maybe it's not there. i press and press and pull them closer but their eyes are empty, or closed, or staring into an abyss somewhere else. whatever. i know one day i'll press my heart against someone who will put his hand over my heart and say he feels my heart beat and i will know in that very moment that i have found my person. one person in this entire galaxy that connects with my rhythm. maybe that moment will change everything?

[ripplesinthesea]

Digging through your storage unit

you found your childhood copy of A Wrinkle in Time,

the spine cracked on the exact page you stopped believing adults had the answers.

Dust burgeoned like a ghost, and suddenly you were nine again, asking stars for instructions.

You were the kind of kid

who apologized to stuffed animals before giving them away,

and cried when strangers looked lonely.

You felt everything twice. once for you,

and once for everyone else.

You were made to feel oceans and name them.

The world doesn't need you to toughen up.

It needs you to stay vulnerable enough to see it.

-aife

[ripplesinthesea]

Life sits in the director's chair and hands Time a script, where it will play the villain who takes what the hero cannot keep.

It's 2007.

The scene is a science fair gymnasium, your project collapsing under the weight of its own glue,

and the janitor telling you no one really wins at anything,

they just learn how to tape things back together.

You thought the movie was about the kiss, the fireworks, the swelling chorus.

Instead it was scrolling through headlines about a pandemic that locked the whole planet inside,

your plans dissolving on a couch you barely left.

But you take the ending back, you're the hero after all,

laughing on a rooftop with the wrong people, and realizing they were the right ones all along

[ripplesinthesea]

The day I cast the love spell, time got drunk and kept looping your laugh.

It curled like smoke around my spine until I forgot which bones were mine, and which ones bent just to mold myself around you.

I said yes so so many times that my no forgot the shape of its own mouth.

Called it compromise. Called it love.

Called it anything but the extinction of the look you used to give me, now aimed at someone else.

I kept waiting for the mirror to recognize me again,

but all it did was ask who I was trying to impress.

I thought breaking the spell would feel like dying,

but it felt like breath.

Turns out, love doesn't live in the shape I shrink into.

It lives in the voice that finally says, "That's enough”

[ripplesinthesea]

I and my freedom, which I don't know how to use.

Huge responsibility of solitude. Those who are not lost do not know freedom and do not love it. As for me, I take up my solitude. Which sometimes becomes rapturous, like looking at fireworks. I'm alone and I have to live a certain intimate glory which, in solitude, can turn into pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets to live.

[ripplesinthesea]

feel like things are possible again. Like the week before school lets out in June - when the air tastes like escape and the sky feels like it's flirting. I could start a band, fall in love, drink wine from the bottle on a cliff no one else knows about.

The sun wakes us early.

Your skin in that light.

We ride our bikes until we forget the way home.

New tattoos still tender. Everything feels like a beginning.

Like the world just unzipped a little, saying go ahead — touch what you thought you weren't allowed to want.

[ripplesinthesea]

If I could leave behind just one thing, instill in you only one notion, it'd be this - love yourself enough. Love yourself, first and foremost, thoroughly, from the inside out.

Love yourself so deeply your belief isn't shaken by the sound of someone's doubt. Love yourself loudly, through every single storm. Love yourself enough to know you are worth respecting, admire your lightning.

You're always significant, even if and when someone else can't see it. Understand something - anyone who attempts to dissuade you of your dreams was never meant to be a part of them. They will surely drag you down well before you ever get them to believe. Love yourself when it isn't easy, especially while breaking, and watch the way it heals you whole again. Love yourself enough to outgrow people and places comfortable, yet are no longer meant for you. Love yourself with the type of tenacity and temerity others find inspiring. Love yourself wildly, through every season. Love yourself unconditionally, with enough audacity to believe in the miracle you are.

Should you ever lose your way, or find yourself questioning your worth, come home. I'll show you.

Your love is enough that it changed my life, rearranged the stars in my sky and lit my way through.

Just imagine what your love could do for you