I am currently at a peculiar peak in my life where the view behind is just as long as the horizon ahead. My poetry has always been the skeletal frame of my emotions, but prose allows me to put flesh on the bones. So here is the mixture of both expressing how it feels to carry a life that is both a sanctuary and a battlefield.

My childhood memories often feel like faded Polaroids and there is a specific despair in realizing that the made-up standard version of me no longer exists. The sudden ache of a Sunday afternoon when a scent or a sound drags me back to a moment twenty years ago manifests as an itchy knot in the throat carrying a sense of both longing and apathy.

In the present moment, I find myself navigating a strange duality. I can be laughing over tea with a friend while simultaneously feeling the pull of an old trauma. We are taught that happiness and sadness are chronological; one comes after the other ends. But my thirty year old heart now knows better. They are layers, not segments, existing in chorus. The burden that I carry is also what gives me the depth; to understand........

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