Poet After Dark Æ⃝ 🩸

Nights with you, mornings with you, everything with you. I want the hours when the moon is high and neither of us is ready to sleep, when the whole world has gone quiet and somehow we are still finding things to tell each other. I want the mornings, too— sleep still tangled in our bodies, your hair a mess, coffee going cold somewhere because I would rather stay close a little longer. But more than that, I want the unremarkable hours. The grocery store. The long drives. The bad moods and laundry piles. Your hand reaching for mine without either of us thinking about it. I don’t only want the parts of you that feel like poetry. I want the punctuation. The pauses. The unfinished sentences. The days when nothing extraordinary happens except that I get to exist beside you. Nights with you. Mornings with you. A whole ordinary life with you. That is the kind of forever I could believe in. — Everything With You ©️

There are conversations that never happen, yet somehow change the course of our lives. Entire futures buried beneath a sentence we swallowed. Apologies that grew old inside us. Confessions that learned to live without daylight. I wonder how many versions of ourselves exist in the lives we almost chose. And whether, somewhere, in a room we never entered, someone is still waiting for us to finish a sentence we never started. —— The Things We Almost Say ©️

A locked door is only frightening when you don’t know what’s behind it. But I’ve met people who spend their entire lives guarding doors they’ve never tried to open. Sometimes the prison isn’t the fear of what’s inside. It’s the comfort of never finding out. ©️

There are entire lifetimes buried inside the person I am today. People I used to be. Dreams I stopped dreaming. Places that no longer exist. And somehow, every morning, I wake up and pretend I’m only one person. ©️

All Hallows’ Eve There is something beautifully strange about a night when the entire world agrees to pretend. We dress as monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. We paint unfamiliar faces over our own, as though the rest of the year hasn’t already taught us how to wear a mask. And perhaps that’s the most haunting part. For some, Halloween is an invitation to become someone else. For others, it’s permission to finally look like something they’ve been hiding. A mask over a mask. And then there are those of us who find our magic in quieter rituals. An old horror film we’ve watched a hundred times. A candle burning beside the television. The familiar sound of a soundtrack that takes us back to a house we no longer live in, a childhood we cannot revisit, or someone who once sat beside us and never will again. Funny, isn’t it? How we spend one night celebrating ghosts, when so many of us have been living with them all year. But Halloween is older than our costumes, our candy, and the flickering television screens. Long before plastic skeletons decorated porches, there was Samhain. An ancient Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. A turning of the seasons, when darkness stretched its fingers across the earth and the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to grow thin. Perhaps that’s why this night has always felt different. Not because the dead necessarily return, but because we remember them. Because nostalgia is its own kind of haunting. Because somewhere tonight, someone will light a candle without knowing exactly who they’re lighting it for. Someone will watch a childhood favorite and feel, for just a moment, that time has folded in on itself. And someone will put on a mask, step into the darkness, and feel more like themselves than they have in years. So however you spend this All Hallows’ Eve, remember that beneath the costumes and celebrations lives something much older than fear. The passing of seasons. The honoring of what came before us. The strange, beautiful relationship between memory and mortality. And perhaps the greatest trick of Halloween is convincing us that ghosts only come out once a year. Some of us have been carrying entire haunted houses inside ourselves for a lifetime. ©️

I wonder how many people have mistaken peace for happiness simply because nothing terrible was happening. How many have spent years calling themselves content when all they really meant was that the world had finally stopped hurting them.

I think the loneliest thing about being human is how often we are loved without ever feeling known. How someone can memorize the sound of your laughter and still never recognize the silence that comes before it. How they can hold you close enough to hear your heartbeat, yet never wonder what taught it to race at the slightest change in someone’s voice. There are parts of me that have never been touched, despite all the hands that have found their way to my skin. And I don’t mean the obvious places. I mean the small, unlit rooms inside me. The ones where I keep the words I swallowed to make someone stay. The apologies I offered when I was the one bleeding. The tenderness I learned to disguise as indifference because wanting to be loved had begun to feel like standing barefoot in a room full of broken glass. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to be understood without having to become an open wound first. To have someone notice the way I grow quiet when something matters too much. To recognize that my hesitation is not an absence of desire, but the trembling of something that has survived being mishandled. I don’t need someone to tear down my walls. I need someone who understands why there are fingerprints on the inside. And perhaps that is the most intimate thing I could ever ask of another human being. Not to save me. Not to promise they will never leave. But to sit beside the parts of me that are still waiting for an ending, and remind them, without saying a word, that not every beautiful thing arrives to become a memory. ©️

Somewhere in my past, an ordinary afternoon is still happening. The sunlight is coming through a familiar window. Someone is laughing in the next room. Nobody knows it’s a memory yet. I think that’s the part that hurts. ©️

I wonder how many times I’ve experienced something beautiful for the last time without knowing. How many ordinary moments have quietly become sacred simply because I can never return to them. ©️