The Ether

I pressed my hands into the earth—
the dead grass, brittle, snapping under the weight of my palms.
Soot blackened the crescents of my nails,
the air thick as something just burned.
But soot is only another form of paint.
Bareness twists itself open,
revealing possibilities stitched into its ribs.
Periphery becomes perspective.

I’m learning the alchemy of language:
how a single word can undo a wound
or plant one.

This fall, I danced with passivity and action—
two lovers pulling me in opposite directions.
Sometimes, I chose the oatmeal raisin cookie,
the crunch of sugar under tooth
a small rebellion against practicality.
Other times, I chose the vanilla yogurt,
its sourness settling something
deeper than hunger.

Action always leaves behind casualties.
To move is to bruise.
To bruise is to learn what your body can hold.

But passivity has its own violence:
it drapes itself over you,
a velvet weight that grows heavier
the longer you stay still.

It came to me one morning:
passivity is not the absence of motion.
It is the moment before—
a breath held before the leap.
The light arrives in tandem with the leap.

This fall, I wrote about God.
My pen moved without my consent.
This surprised me because faith
can be a fickle thing.

By October, when someone asked what I believed,
I offered this:
“I was raised in it,
so it lingers, but I’ve faded.”
It sounded smooth enough to leave unquestioned.

But in truth, God wove through my life
in quiet, deliberate movements,
while I danced around Him,
avoiding His gaze.

Until one night, it all came crashing—
the weight of avoidance
too heavy to carry another step.
I fell into myself,
and there was God, waiting.

What could I do but strip myself down,
lay the brittle bones of my stubbornness at His feet?
What could I do but admit:
I don’t know.
I will never know.
But You—
You will hold what I cannot.

It came to me one sunlit afternoon—
light, golden and sharp,
cutting through the lattice of tree limbs.

I failed my fifth headstand,
the blood rushing to my skull,
my balance unraveling.
I fell, laughing, into the grass.

And I knew:
I will never be this alive again.
Never as possible
as in this single breath of the world’s long exhale.
This is it, isn’t it?
The reason for gratitude—
to hold the infinite in a moment,
a universe folded small enough
to fit in the palm of my hand.

The next night, darkness wrapped us whole,
a sky like ink spilled across the edges of everything.

We sat, backs pressed against the cool of the earth,
watching bats circle the tower,
their wings cutting arcs in the void.
Our laughter broke open the silence,
volcanic, spilling out from our cores.

And I thought:
this is it.
Laughter—the warmth that burns in the absence of sun.
The heat that hardens your stomach,
softens your soul.
It tastes like mac and cheese, buttery and too hot,
like something that will follow me forever.

Even when the wells dry up,
there will be nights like this
to draw from.

My mother remains my brightest light.
She is no longer just mother—
but a friend who hums with the wisdom
of a life already lived once through my eyes.

Now, I see my youth for what it was:
a story told in first-person limited.
My eyes, slowly gaining strength,
learning to cut through the haze.
It is a kind of miracle—
to live long enough to see your own story as myth,
and to survive its gods.

I enter winter brimming—
not with answers,
but with a buzz, an itch,
a sense that something is about to begin.

I’ve always tried to know—
to measure the shape of the world against my own two hands.
But now, I feel the string that pulls me
beyond what I can see.
A thread leading into the great unseen,
where possibility folds and unfolds itself,
like light playing on the surface of water.

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happy holidays to my loyal readers ❤ wherever u are, i hope life feels like this rn: