“Please Don’t Expect Me To Always Be Good And Kind And Loving. There Are Times When I Will Be Cold

— roach-works

Tidal wave

I closed my eyes for a second Saw everything, all at once And the waves grew taller

The lighthouse was hanging on the lifeline The stars were falling into the ocean

And the water took over the city

Now everything I see is reminding me of where I want to be

Everything I see

can turn to dust in the blink of an eye

hey pookie 😘😏😩😩😣😖😩😩😤😤🥵😳😩

hiiiiiiiiiiiii

A childs imagination

I was always a daddy’s girl, even after he left.

I remember the day my mum sat me down and told me why he was gone. She didn’t go into detail-just said he couldn’t be around anymore, that it wasn’t safe for us if he stayed. My little brain couldn’t understand, but what I could understand is the fear in her eyes so I stopped asking. Instead I turned to writing. It felt like the only way I could still talk to him.

I wrote letters, simple at first. I sat on my bedroom floor, one hand under my chin and another holding a blue ink ball pen. I’d write about all the things I wish I could tell him if he was here… “dad, today I got 10/10 on my maths test at school” or “we had a Collin the Caterpillar cake for my birthday this year, it’s my favourite. I wish you were here”

I never did send them though, instead I folded them up into tiny little squares and placed them into a red box that had seashells glued on all the edges.

Every birthday he missed, every school play, every holiday where his absence felt like a cold shadow at the dinner table, I wrote. The letters stacked up like little pieces of me I hoped he’d find one day.

One night I sat there, staring at the paper, the pen trembling in my hand. This time, I didn’t write about school or my friends birthday parties or the sleepover I had with my best friend the week before. I wrote what I had been too afraid to say before. “Dad, please be nice to mum so you can come back.” I begged him in that letter like I never had before, hoping somehow that my words would reach wherever he was. I folded it up and placed it in the box that was now overflowing.

A week later he called my mum. He hadn’t done that in years, but there he was, asking about me. She didn’t tell me much, just that he asked how I was doing. It wasn’t much but in my child’s heart it felt like everything.

That’s when I became convinced I had some crazy magical powers. That I resembled the superheroes and magical witches in the shows I watched every weekend.

It just had to be true! How else could the letter I kept in my little red seashell box bring him back? I believed if I kept writing, kept wishing hard enough, praying before bed every night, that he would be able to stay this time. Maybe I was the one who could fix everything and bring my family back together! So I wrote more and more, until my favourite blue pen ran out of ink and my little box was too full of letters that I had to move them to my bedside table drawer.

But my magic wasn’t strong enough.

He left again, just like before. This time though, it hurt a little less. Maybe my magic hadn’t been enough to keep him here, but it had given me something else: strength. The kind that stopped my heart breaking completely.

The years passed, and the box was forgotten about. But I was still a daddy’s girl, even if he never came back in the way I wanted him to.

And in the quiet of my room, with the weight of that box heavy on my shelf, covered in dust, I realised something: my magic wasn’t about bringing him back. It was about learning to live without him.

Empress Yamatohime, transl. by Kenneth Rexroth, from Written on The Sky; Poems from the Japanese

“Part of Consequently being humans is that we all have sides we never want to reveal even to our own selves, deep dark, terrible, ugly sides. Solitary parts that only we know about”

—ayman abdinasir

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

— William Faulkner.