The Unshakeable Ache

“So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for.”

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

I learned yesterday that my first boyfriend passed away unexpectedly.

When someone close to your age leaves the world—especially someone who lived in the early, formative chapters of your life—it feels like a part of you goes with them. It’s not just their absence that hurts. It’s the closing of a door you didn’t realize had stayed open all this time—the one that led back to your teenage years, your first experiences of love, your gentleness before life asked you to be harder.

When someone from that time passes, it’s like those days shift out of reach. The memories don’t disappear, but they get quieter, more fragile. Like old film reels kept in a dusty box. You can watch them in your mind, but you can’t step back into them.

Grief has a way of arriving sideways.

I didn’t realize how much space he still held in my heart until it cracked open.
I didn’t realize that some part of me—maybe a very quiet part—was still holding on to the idea that we’d give it another try.
Or maybe we’d just watch another movie together.
Just one more… something.

There are people you assume you’ll have more time with.
People who feel timeless in your memory, like they exist just outside the edges of your present life, waiting to reappear when the moment is right.
They carry the soft weight of what-ifs and second chances.
And when they’re gone, they take all of that with them.

That’s what it feels like to lose someone who once held your heart:
like a light has gone out in a room you didn’t realize you were still visiting.
Like a part of your foundation—your tenderness—has quietly cracked.

If only we knew how little time we have with the people we love.
If only we picked up the phone the moment we thought about them.
If only we lived like nothing was guaranteed—because it isn’t.

I was fifteen when he asked me to be his girlfriend.
I hadn’t quite found “my people” yet, hadn’t grown into myself.
But he welcomed me into his world like I belonged there.
He made room for me at the lunch table, in his circle, in his heart.
He introduced me to music and movies that would stay with me forever.
He was thoughtful, darkly funny, and quietly brilliant.
He made it okay to be different—because he was, too.

There was a tether between us that I didn’t fully understand back then.
And even though we were young—and my stepdad’s rules made it impossible for us to be a “real” couple—what we shared was still real.

I remember having to ask him to wear khakis to my house, just to appease my stepdad.
I was so angry. I hated that I was being put in that position.
I loved the way he dressed.
Anyone else might have been offended, resisted, made it a thing.
But Andrew? He smiled and said okay.
He wore them.
Not because he had to, but because he wanted to see me.

That’s just who he was—kind, patient, quietly generous.

I think of us sitting in my dining room, eating Chinese food.
He was so tickled seeing me eat—like it was some sweet, ordinary milestone he didn’t want to forget.

Or the time I accidentally knocked over his orange soda in the courtyard at school, and I felt like I wanted to disappear from embarrassment.
He just hugged me and laughed.
Like it didn’t matter.
Like I still mattered.

We saw each other once more a few years later, after I moved to Texas.
He was already living there.
We made cookies and watched Downfall.
He met my cat, Bella.
We only had a few hours together.
And I wish I had hugged him longer that night.
I wish I had said more.

He was an artist. A real one.
He painted, sketched, sculpted.
He was sharp, brilliant, layered, and loyal.
He had this dark humor and quick wit.
And he didn’t like that he had a good heart—he didn’t want the world to see him as soft.
But with me, he never pretended.

He let the softness show.
And I never forgot it.

And now I’ve realized—this isn’t just the loss of a first love.
It’s the loss of the kind of love it was.

The kind that was pure.
That was safe.
That didn’t require you to perform or change or prove anything.
The kind that made you feel safe being exactly who you already were.

And even now, through the tears and the ache and the weight of everything unsaid,
he’s helping me find a way through.

Not down.
Not out.
But through.

This writing, this remembering—it’s him.
Still showing up.
Still encouraging me to shape the pain into something soft.
Still helping me find the light in the room that went dark.
Still loving me, in his own beautiful way.

And still—
I find myself feeling like that outsider again.
Like the girl with no one to invite her to the lunch table.

He didn’t believe in angels.
But I do.
Because I have to.

Because I need to believe I won’t have to walk through the rest of this life
without him with me
in some way.

The Architecture of a Daydream

There’s a cabin in my head, tucked into a pine forest where the light slants just so, and I’ve built it board by board since I was twelve. It’s not a vague dream—nothing blurry or half-formed—but a precise thing, with cedar walls I can smell, a window angled to catch the morning without blinding me, and a door that locks three times because once isn’t enough. I go there when the world buzzes too hard, when voices overlap and lights flicker like they’re yelling. People call it daydreaming, but it’s not idle—it’s work, the kind my brain does to carve out a corner where the rules make sense. I’m told minds like mine—spiky, spectrum-bound—see patterns where others see air, and this cabin is my pattern, my proof I can build something whole.

The main room is small, because too much space makes me dizzy. The floor is polished oak, smooth under my feet, and there’s a rug I wove myself—blue and gray, no loud reds to jar me. A single chair sits by the window, wooden with a high back, because cushions feel like lies sometimes, too soft when I need edges. I’ve spent hours—real hours—deciding the grain of that wood, the exact tilt of that chair, because details aren’t optional for me. They’re the scaffolding. When the grocery store hums with too many carts or a conversation splinters into noise, I’m here, tracing the lines I’ve made, breathing air that doesn’t fight me.

There’s a loft, too, reached by a ladder with seven rungs—no more, no less. It’s where I keep the quiet things: a quilt I’d sew if I could, a notebook for thoughts too big to say, a clock that ticks but doesn’t chime. Up there, the roof slopes low, pressing close like a hand on my shoulder, and I like it that way. Openness unravels me—too many choices, too much sky—but this is containment I chose. I’ve heard autism called a cage, but it’s not. It’s a lens, and this loft is where I focus it, where I sort the world into shapes I can hold.

The kitchen is practical, because even in dreams I need to eat. The counter is slate, cool to the touch, and there’s a kettle that whistles exactly five seconds before it boils—I timed it. No radio, no chatter, just the sound of water and my own breath. I cook the same meal every time: rice, butter, a pinch of salt. Repetition isn’t boring; it’s armor. When I was little, they’d say, “Why can’t you try something new?” and I’d shrink, not knowing how to explain that newness stings sometimes, that my brain maps safety in loops. Here, I don’t have to.

I didn’t build this cabin to escape forever—just long enough to remember who I am. The real world is a kaleidoscope, spinning too fast, and I’m the kid who’d rather watch one color at a time. People don’t get that. They see my silence, my scripts, my need for sameness, and think I’m broken. But in the cabin, I’m not fixing anything. I’m designing it. The locks, the rungs, the kettle—they’re me, unapologetic, built to fit a mind that doesn’t bend like theirs.

Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live there for real, to leave the buzzing behind and step into my own architecture. But then I think: maybe I already do. Maybe every time I retreat, I’m laying another plank, sanding another edge, making a home that no one else can see. It’s not finished—nothing ever is—but it’s mine. And in its walls, I find a truth I’m still learning to say: I’m not too much, or too little, or too strange. I’m a builder, and this is my proof—a daydream with a pulse, a place where I’m whole.

The Museum of Forgotten Sounds

The first exhibit is the hum of the old box fan in my childhood bedroom, a low, steady drone that swallowed summer nights whole. It wasn’t white noise—not the sterile kind they sell now on apps—but a living thing, rattling slightly when the heat pressed too hard against the window. I’d lie there, eight years old, tracing cracks in the ceiling while it sang me into sleep, a lullaby no one else could hear. Now, I walk past sleek, silent fans in stores and feel a pang, like passing a stranger who might’ve been a friend. These are the sounds I keep in my museum, the ones that slipped away when I wasn’t looking, and I visit them when the present gets too loud.

There’s a second wing, dim-lit and narrow, where the clack of my mother’s typewriter waits. It was an ancient thing, all black metal and sticking keys, and she’d hammer out letters at the kitchen table while I colored nearby. Each tap was a gunshot, each carriage return a thunderclap—sharp, deliberate, alive. I’d mimic the rhythm with my crayons, pressing harder when she did, as if we were composing something together. She sold it when I was ten, traded it for a computer that whirred instead of sang, and I cried without knowing why. That clack was her voice before life softened it, and I didn’t know how to tell her I’d miss it.

Further in, past a velvet rope I’ve imagined, is the jingle of my father’s keys. He’d come home from work, toss them onto the hall table, and the sound—bright, chaotic, a tiny cascade of brass—meant safety. It meant dinner soon, stories later, the world righting itself. I can still see him twirling the ring around his finger, a habit I copied with my own cheap keychains until I lost them all. He’s gone now, and the keys are somewhere in a box I haven’t opened, but I hear them anyway, faint as a memory I’m scared to touch. They’re the sound of a door I can’t walk through anymore.

The museum has no map, no guided tour—just rooms I stumble into when I need them. There’s the rustle of a paper map unfolding, the kind my sister and I fought over on road trips, its creases tearing under our impatient hands. There’s the fizz of a soda can opening, a hiss that promised picnics and laughter before I learned to count calories instead of moments. They’re small, these sounds, insignificant to anyone else, but they’re mine. They’re the echoes of a life I didn’t know I was living until it was past.

I used to think silence was the enemy, something to fill with music or chatter or anything to keep the emptiness at bay. But silence is where the museum lives. It’s the space between the exhibits, the pause that lets me hear what’s gone. I walk its halls alone, not because I’m lonely, but because no one else remembers the exact pitch of that fan, the exact weight of those keys. They don’t have to. This isn’t a place for crowds—it’s a archive of what shaped me, a proof that even the quietest things leave a mark.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only curator, if everyone else has their own museum tucked away. Maybe they do. Maybe we’re all collecting sounds we can’t explain, hoarding them like seashells from a shore we’ll never visit again. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I close my eyes, I can still hear the fan’s hum, the typewriter’s clack, the keys’ jingle—a chorus of the invisible. And in that stillness, I find permission to feel it all, to let the past breathe alongside me, as tender and real as the day it faded.

The Quiet Alchemy of a Softer Life

The overhead lights were always too much. Even as a child, I’d sneak into the living room and click off the ceiling bulbs, switching on the one lamp in the corner instead—the one with the frayed shade and amber glow. I didn’t have the language for it back then, but I knew what felt safe. What softened the world. Now, years later, my house is a network of low-lit corners—lamps with warm bulbs, candles lit before dusk, a life composed like a photograph in golden hour. It’s not just the light I’ve dimmed. It’s the volume of everything. I don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. I don’t go to places that require shouting over music. I don’t say yes unless I mean it. At some point, I realized I wasn’t fragile—I was tuned more finely. And I didn’t need to get better at handling noise. I just needed less of it.

I’ve always been this way, I think, though it took years to understand why. My mind—spiky, spectrum-bound—craves patterns, not chaos. There’s a kind of pride that comes with being constantly available, constantly “on,” but it’s a hollow kind of pride. It’s applause for enduring, not for enjoying. And I want more than survival. I want the quiet rustle of page turns, long walks that start without a destination, people who knock gently and wait. I used to think I had to match the world’s pace to be worthy of it. Now, I curate my own rhythm—a life with dimmer switches, not because I can’t handle the light, but because I know how beautiful it is when it’s softened.

In that softness, I uncovered a truth both beautiful and devastating: the reason I never found the one I was searching for is because I became that person myself. I spent so long chasing an idea—a ghost of someone I thought would make my life whole—only to see I’d been holding the pieces all along. All the magic I hold dear from past relationships was magic I brought to them. I was the alchemist, spinning ordinary days into something worth remembering. The moments I tried to make extraordinary were the ones I craved to live, the ones I shaped with my own hands. A drive down the Hana highway with salt in my hair, solo day trips to see my favorite musicians perform, words written in the middle of the night that felt like they could mend the world—these are the memories that don’t bear anyone else’s name. They’re the ones I’ve claimed alone, in spaces I’ve learned to guard fiercely, to keep sacred.

I’ve never known loneliness—not the kind people assume comes with being on your own. The closest I’ve come is the dull ache of mismatched company, the wrong voices crowding a space that should’ve stayed mine. I’ve known mostly takers—men too emotionally unavailable to offer warmth, too guarded to feel safe. There were a few good souls, rare and fleeting, like comets that lit up the sky for a moment before fading. But these days, it feels like a gamble with long odds: finding someone who isn’t still tangled in their own chaos, someone who won’t splinter you while they claw their way to solid ground. I’ve grown tired of being a lighthouse, beaming for the lost. I’d love to know what it’s like to have a harbor of my own—not to anchor me, but to share the view.

Someone said to me the other day, “You’re so good at being on your own. I don’t know that anyone could give you something you don’t already have.” I nodded, because it’s mostly true. I’ve built a life that’s full, a world that glows slowly—like twilight catching the edge of a windowsill, like a conversation that doesn’t require filler. It’s a life with fewer interruptions but deeper connections, fewer performances but more presence. Still, there’s a quiet corner of me that wonders what it would be like to meet someone who doesn’t arrive with empty hands or a map of wounds for me to navigate. Someone who chooses to be a cherry atop the moments I’ve already baked into my days, a bright note in a song I’ve already learned to sing.

Maybe this was the point all along: to give love freely, to feel its fragments scatter back to me, and ultimately to gather up what was lost to others and pour it back into myself—whole again, and then some. I’ve learned to dim the noise of the world not just to survive, but to thrive in the stillness. This life I’ve built doesn’t sparkle on command, but it shimmers in its own way—a soft alchemy of my own making, where the light is just right, the rhythm is mine, and the magic has always been my own.

The Child I Carried Into the Tide

"I am made of all the things I did not say."
— Nayyirah Waheed

My greatest fear has always been drowning. Not just the literal kind—though the thought of water closing over my head sends my heart racing—but the emotional surrender, the waves that pull you under when you least expect it. Today was one of those days. The tide came fast, heavy with memories I thought I’d buried, and I felt the familiar churn of chaos beneath my ribs. I’ve lived most of my life in extremes—complete peace or complete chaos, with little in between. For years, I thought I’d found a middle ground, a quiet gray, but I see now it was just internal chaos wearing a mask. Outwardly, everything was in order: a tidy life, a steady smile. No one knew I was breaking. But the lie you tell yourself eventually becomes too heavy to carry, and the waves don’t ask permission before they rise.

I used to avoid the water altogether. I’d stay on land, inside, where the world couldn’t touch me—where I didn’t have to feel the salt sting of too much. But avoidance is its own kind of drowning, a slow suffocation under the weight of all the things I didn’t say. I’ve learned, over time, that I trust no one to save me but myself. So I taught myself to swim, to face the tide when it comes. And lately, the tide has been carrying something new: pieces of my past, fragments of the child I used to be, washing up on the shore of my present.

I’ve been searching for her these past several months, trying to remember what it felt like to be wide-eyed and unafraid. My body is changing now—more fragile, etched with the ache of time. My eyes tell stories I didn’t choose to share, their creases humming an old song of years I can’t take back. But she’s still there, that child, tucked beneath the surface. She still gets giddy over cereal boxes with bright colors, still talks to squirrels in the park and imagines their reply, still believes in a world that’s softer, safer than the one I’ve come to know. I see her in the way I linger over glitter nail polish at the drugstore, in the way I smile at the first crisp day of autumn, in the stuffed animals I keep on my shelf, lined up like an audience waiting for a story.

She’s why the waves hit harder now. There’s more to protect. I’ve become her keeper—not to erase what’s happened, but to witness her, to let her know I haven’t forgotten. I let her speak when I’m brave enough. I let her pick the movie on a quiet Friday night, something animated and bright. I let her take the walk through the park, kicking leaves with abandon. I let her cry when the world feels too sharp, when the weight of it all—too many expectations, too many losses—threatens to swallow us both. I’ve always felt things deeply, my heart a pendulum swinging between joy and ache, leaving little room for stillness.

In those moments of surrender, I feel the waves settle. Not because the ocean changes—it never does—but because I’ve stopped fighting the tide. I used to think I needed a lifeboat, someone else to pull me to the surface. I spent years searching for a harbor in others, hoping they’d hold the magic I craved, only to realize I was the one carrying it all along. The glitter, the autumn, the stories—they were mine to keep, mine to give. I was the one who made the ordinary shimmer, who turned chaos into something worth remembering.

Now, I build my life with softer edges, choosing the light, the pace, the people who feel like home. I don’t say yes unless I mean it. I don’t reach for every open door just because it’s there. I’ve learned to swim not to escape the tide, but to carry her through it—the child I was, the child I still am. She doesn’t need me to save her. She just needs me to see her, to hold space for her laughter and her tears. And in that act, I find a quiet alchemy: the unsaid things I’ve carried become a song, a melody of waves that no longer scare me. I am made of them, yes, but I am also made of her—of the child I carried into the tide, and the woman who learned to let her breathe.

The Life She Built in Stowe

“I want to be where things are simple and quiet and soft.”

— Sylvia Plath

She didn’t arrive with a plan, just boxes packed neatly in the back of a car that had seen too many summers in Georgia, its paint chipped from years of humidity and regret. Two cats nestled in the backseat, their quiet purrs a small anchor as she drove north, away from a life that had grown too loud, too heavy. She’d left behind a city that never slept, a job that demanded her smile, and a string of relationships that always asked for more than she could give. Stowe was her exhale—a place where the air didn’t cling to her skin, where the leaves turned without permission, where the trees stood undisturbed and the birds hadn’t learned to fear every sound. It smelled like earth and old wood and distant chimney smoke, a scent that promised something softer.

She rented a small white cottage on the edge of a forest road, its porch creaking just enough to let her know it was listening. The kitchen windows caught the morning light—honey-colored and slow, spilling across the wooden table where she’d sip her coffee. For the first time in years, she didn’t wake up bracing for the day. She just woke up, the silence of Stowe wrapping around her like a wool blanket. She began to build a life in the small, deliberate acts: walking to the market on Tuesdays, wearing sweaters even when the air was still warm, bringing home pumpkins long before October. She made friends with the barista who always remembered to add cinnamon to her latte, a small ritual that felt like belonging.

In Georgia, she’d stopped writing, the words choked by the noise of a life she didn’t fit into. But here, in the quiet of her cottage, she began again—not to be read, just to breathe. She’d sit by the window with a notebook, the scratch of her pen a counterpoint to the soft wind outside, and let the words spill out like a creek finding its path. She kept a pair of muddy boots by the door, evidence of her solitary wanders through the woods. She knew where the deer liked to sleep, their hollows tucked beneath the pines, and sometimes, when the wind was gentle, she’d swear she heard the creek singing just for her—a melody of moss and water that felt like a secret.

Her neighbors, a quiet couple who waved but never pried, left bundles of rosemary and sage on her doorstep one morning, tied with twine, no note. She liked that kind of kindness—the kind that didn’t demand anything back. Her home became a reflection of her: twinkle lights strung along the ceiling, fairy lamps casting gentle shadows at night, books in every room, their spines worn from rereading. There was always something simmering on the stove—carrot-ginger soup, its warmth filling the air—or a candle flickering with the scent of cedar, or music playing just low enough to feel like memory, a violin piece she’d loved since she was a girl.

Some days, the past would creep in, uninvited. A memory of a shouting match in a cramped apartment, the ache of a phone that never rang, the weight of a life that had felt like a performance. On those days, her chest would tighten, the old anxiety whispering that softness couldn’t last. But then she’d step onto the porch, breathe in the crisp air, and feel the ground beneath her feet. She’d remind herself: this was hers now. And on the very good days, she didn’t feel anxious at all.

She still kept to herself, mostly. But every now and then, someone would find her—a postal worker who’d stop to pet her cat, a woman at the co-op who noticed the poetry collections she bought and struck up a conversation. She wasn’t waiting for someone to complete her, but she let herself imagine, sometimes, what it might be like to meet someone who wouldn’t need to be told how to love someone like her—someone who already understood the language of quiet, the beauty of a life built slowly.

Even if that someone never came, she was okay. She had built something rare: a life that didn’t just look soft, but felt it—in the glow of the fairy lamps, in the taste of cinnamon, in the sound of the creek’s song. It was a life that held her gently, a life that was finally hers. And as she stood on her porch one evening, watching the leaves fall like a promise, she knew she’d found what she’d been searching for all along: a place where things were simple and quiet and soft, a place where she could finally rest.