Entries
Floater
The first thing isn’t darkness.
It’s worse than that.
Something there—but not steady.
A stain that won’t stay put, like it knows you’re watching.
It drifts.
You try to look past it.
It follows
A small shadow cutting across everything, like a comma dropped in the wrong place.
In the right eye—something’s off.
Movement where there shouldn’t be.
Light breaking wrong.
When you close your eyes, it doesn’t go away.
It gets louder.
Rust-red shapes.
Thick, uneven.
Like something inside is… not right.
You open them again.
The room comes back, but thinner.
Edges soft, like they’re already starting to leave.
And then fear—no build, no warning.
Just there.
It sits heavy.
Right on your chest.
Starts asking questions you don’t want.
What if this doesn’t clear.
What if this is how it starts.
What if one day you open your eye-sand nothing answers back.
You stop sleeping.
Morning shows up too early, like you’ve done something wrong.
Your mind keeps count of things you never asked it to track: burden.dependent.
Too much.
You start imagining yourself differently—heavier.
Something people have to carry.
Your father’s voice slips in there.
Not really him, but close enough.
That instinct to expect the worst.
To prepare for it.
You learned that early.
How to brace.
How to find exits before you need them.
Now it won’t turn off.
“I’m a hypocrite,” you say, quiet, to no one.
Because you’ve always talked about strength.
About pushing through.
And now your hands shake.
As if fear means failure.
As if the body breaking rhythm's something you’re supposed to control.
Art used to steady you.
Boxing used to burn it out.
Now even that feels uncertain.
How do you paint when nothing holds still.
How do you read when words slip.
How do you trust your eyes when they’re the problem.
The doctor says it’s improving.
But the right eye lags behind.
Taking its time.
Like it’s deciding something.
Then another word shows up.
Surgery.
Vitrectomy.
You nod like you understand it.
Like it’s just another step.
But you hear the rest anyway—worse before better.
cataracts, eventually.
swelling that might come later.
You sit there, listening.
Doing the version of yourself that holds it together.
But later—
the thought sharpens.
If I go blind—
You don’t finish it.
You don’t need to.
It’s already there.
It’s not death you’re afraid of.
It's everything after.
Living without light.
Without words landing where they should.
Without that thin, invisible thing that lets you say this is still me.
Still—
there’s an appointment on the calendar.
A date.A time.Something ahead of you.
Follow up next step.
Someone watching.
Someone measuring it.
Not letting it just… happen.
For now—
you breathe.
You say what you can see.
Even if it’s imperfect.
You make it through the hour.
The floater drifts.
And you’re still here.
Afraid—yeah.
But here.
The first thing isn’t darkness.
It’s worse than that.
Something there—but not steady.
A stain that won’t stay put, like it knows you’re watching.
It drifts.
You try to look past it.
It follows
A small shadow cutting across everything, like a comma dropped in the wrong place.
In the right eye—something’s off.
Movement where there shouldn’t be.
Light breaking wrong.
When you close your eyes, it doesn’t go away.
It gets louder.
Rust-red shapes.
Thick, uneven.
Like something inside is…
not right.
You open them again.
The room comes back, but thinner.
Edges soft, like they’re already starting to leave.
And then fear—
no build,
no warning.
Just there.
It sits heavy.
Right on your chest.
Starts asking questions you don’t want.
What if this doesn’t clear.
What if this is how it starts.
What if one day you open your eye-sand nothing answers back.
You stop sleeping.
Morning shows up too early, like you’ve done something wrong.
Your mind keeps count of things you never asked it to track:
burden,
dependent.
Too much.
You start imagining yourself differently—heavier.
Something people have to carry.
Your father’s voice slips in there.
Not really him,
but close enough.
That instinct to expect the worst.
To prepare for it.
You learned that early.
How to brace.
How to find exits before you need them.
Now it won’t turn off.
“I’m a hypocrite,” you say,
quietly,
to no one.
Because you’ve always talked about strength.
About pushing through.
And now your hands shake.
As if fear means failure.
As if the body breaking rhythm something,
You’re supposed to control.
Art used to steady you.
Boxing used to burn it out.
Now even that feels uncertain.
How do you paint when nothing holds still?
How do you read when words slip?
How do you trust your eyes when they’re the problem?
The doctor says it’s improving.
But the right eye lags behind.
Taking its time.
Like it’s deciding something.
Then another word shows up.
Surgery.
Vitrectomy.
You nod as you understand it.
Like it’s just another step.
But you hear the rest anyway—worse before better.
cataracts, eventually.
Swelling that might come later.
You sit there,
listening.
Doing the version of yourself that holds it together.
But later—
The thought sharpens.
If I go blind—
You don’t finish it.
You don’t need to.
It’s already there.
It’s not death you’re afraid of.
It's everything after.
Living without light.
Without words landing where they should.
Without that thin, invisible thing,
That lets you say this is still me.
Still—
There’s an appointment on the calendar.
A date.
A time.
Something ahead of you.
Follow up next step.
Someone watching.
Someone measuring it.
Not letting it just… happen.
For now—
You breathe.
You say what you can see.
Even if it’s imperfect.
You make it through the hour.
The floater drifts.
And you’re still here.
Afraid—
yeah.
But here.
The Distance Love Walks
The night does not ask your name.
It only asks if you can keep walking.
Sand inside your shoes,
dust in the throat,
a sky so wide it feels like God forgot the ceiling.
You carry very little—
a backpack,
a photograph folded soft with fingerprints,
your mother’s voice stitched somewhere
between your ribs.
“Vete con cuidado,” she said.
Go carefully.
Carefully across a river that does not care
who drowns in it.
Carefully
across land that cracks open
like old bones under the sun.
The desert teaches you something quickly:
hope weighs more than water.
Every step forward
pulls a thread loose from home.
Your father fixing the broken fence.
Your sister laughing at the kitchen table.
The smell of tortillas warming on the comal
like small suns.
You leave them all behind—
not because you want to,
but because love sometimes looks like departure.
Because hunger is louder than pride.
Because dreams are stubborn creatures.
And so you walk.
The border is not a line.
It is a breath you hold
for miles.
It is the moment when fear
and courage
share the same heartbeat.
On the other side
there is no parade.
No welcome.
Only the quiet understanding
that now
you must survive.
You learn a new language
one broken word at a time.
Yes.
No.
Work.
Sorry.
Sorry for your accent.
Sorry for not understanding.
Sorry for existing
in spaces that look at you
like a stain.
You wake before the sun
to clean houses you will never live in.
Wash dishes you will never eat from.
Pick fruit you cannot afford.
Your hands crack open
like dry earth.
Your back bends
under the invisible weight
of someone else’s comfort.
Rooms packed with strangers
who smell like the same tired hope.
Mattresses on floors.
Walls thin as paper.
Dinner sometimes
is just beans
and the quiet calculation
of how much money can still be sent home.
Because that is the whole point.
Not you.
Them.
The little boy who will finish school.
The mother who will buy medicine.
The family that will sleep
with one less worry.
You wire money across a continent
like sending small pieces
of your own body back.
And still
some voices here say
You do not belong.
They say it with glances,
with laws,
with laughter that cuts like wire.
They do not see the miles in your bones.
They do not see the nights you nearly turned back.
The river that almost kept you.
The desert that tried to erase you.
But you are still here.
Still waking up.
Still working.
Still sending love home
in envelopes and phone calls.
Still believing
that somewhere inside this hard country
there is room
for your children to breathe.
Because you did not cross a border
just to survive.
You crossed it
so someone after you
would not have to.
The night does not ask your name.
It only asks if you can keep walking.
Sand inside your shoes,
dust in the throat,
a sky so wide it feels like God forgot the ceiling.
You carry very little—
a backpack,
a photograph folded soft with fingerprints,
Your mother’s voice stitched somewhere
between your ribs.
“Vete con cuidado,” she said.
Go carefully.
Carefully across a river that does not care
who drowns in it.
Carefully
across land that cracks open
like old bones under the sun.
The desert teaches you something quickly:
hope weighs more than water.
Every step forward
pulls a thread loose from home.
Your father fixing the broken fence.
Your sister laughing at the kitchen table.
The smell of tortillas warming on the comal
like small suns.
You leave them all behind—
not because you want to,
but because love sometimes looks like departure.
Because hunger is louder than pride.
Because dreams are stubborn creatures.
And so you walk.
The border is not a line.
It is a breath you hold
for miles.
It is the moment when fear
and courage
share the same heartbeat.
On the other side
there is no parade.
No welcome.
Only the quiet understanding
that now
you must survive.
You learn a new language
one broken word at a time.
Yes.
No.
Work.
Sorry.
Sorry for your accent.
Sorry for not understanding.
Sorry for existing
in spaces that look at you
like a stain.
You wake before the sun
to clean houses you will never live in.
Wash dishes you will never eat from.
Pick fruit you cannot afford.
Your hands crack open
like dry earth.
Your back bends
under the invisible weight
of someone else’s comfort.
Rooms packed with strangers
who smell like the same tired hope.
Mattresses on floors.
Walls thin as paper.
Dinner sometimes
is just beans
and the quiet calculation
of how much money can still be sent home.
Because that is the whole point.
Not you.
Them.
The little boy who will finish school.
The mother who will buy medicine.
The family that will sleep
with one less worry.
You wire money across a continent
like sending small pieces
of your own body back.
And still
some voices here say
You do not belong.
They say it with glances,
with laws,
with laughter that cuts like wire.
They do not see the miles in your bones.
They do not see the nights you nearly turned back.
The river that almost kept you.
The desert that tried to erase you.
But you are still here.
Still waking up.
Still working.
Still sending love home
in envelopes and phone calls.
Still believing
that somewhere inside this hard country
there is room
for your children to breathe.
Because you did not cross a border
just to survive.
You crossed it
so someone after you
would not have to.
In the Land That Calls Me Stranger
I walk softly here— not because I want to, but because the air hums with eyes that follow. The ground beneath me feels borrowed, as if one wrong step might make it vanish.
My tongue is careful now. I roll my r’s in silence, tuck my vowels behind my teeth. Even my laughter feels foreign— too loud, too brown, too much of home for a place that wants me quiet.
I carry my papers like a shield, my heartbeat quickening at sirens that aren’t for me but could be. Every headline feels like a warning, every promise like a trap.
Sometimes I dream in two languages, and wake up wondering which one I am allowed to speak. I scroll through news that turns my people into shadows, our stories into statistics, our names into questions.
There’s a weight to being watched— to always wondering when the shoe will drop, when the next word, the next law, the next face in power will remind me that I do not belong.
And yet— in the quiet of my kitchen, the smell of cumin and corn wraps around me like a prayer. I hum an old song my mother used to sing, and for a moment, I am safe.
In that small space, I remember: they cannot take the warmth from my hands, the stories from my blood, the language that built me.
I am still here— standing on soil that may not claim me, but still holds me. I am the daughter of survivors, the echo of a thousand women who refused to disappear.
Even when the world turns away, I remain— unseen, but unbroken, afraid, but alive, a heartbeat that refuses to be silenced.
I walk softly here— not because I want to, but because the air hums with eyes that follow. The ground beneath me feels borrowed, as if one wrong step might make it vanish.
My tongue is careful now. I roll my r’s in silence, tuck my vowels behind my teeth. Even my laughter feels foreign— too loud, too brown, too much of home for a place that wants me quiet.
I carry my papers like a shield, my heartbeat quickening at sirens that aren’t for me but could be. Every headline feels like a warning, every promise like a trap.
Sometimes I dream in two languages, and wake up wondering which one I am allowed to speak. I scroll through news that turns my people into shadows, our stories into statistics, our names into questions.
There’s a weight to being watched— to always wondering when the shoe will drop, when the next word, the next law, the next face in power will remind me that I do not belong.
And yet— in the quiet of my kitchen, the smell of cumin and corn wraps around me like a prayer. I hum an old song my mother used to sing, and for a moment, I am safe.
In that small space, I remember: they cannot take the warmth from my hands, the stories from my blood, the language that built me.
I am still here— standing on soil that may not claim me, but still holds me. I am the daughter of survivors, the echo of a thousand women who refused to disappear.
Even when the world turns away, I remain— unseen, but unbroken, afraid, but alive, a heartbeat that refuses to be silenced.
The Space Between Who I Was and Who I’m Becoming
There was a time when I lived by the ticking of progress—each task a measure, each success a breath of validation.I mistook motion for meaning, achievement for worth.
I built myself from outcomes, layer upon layer of doing, until the silence beneath it all became unbearable.
Now, the noise is gone.And what’s left is a strange kind of stillness—not peace, not yet, but a numb hum in the chest, a hollow where certainty used to live.
I grieve the version of me who knew exactly what to chase.I grieve the comfort of direction, the illusion of control. And in the quiet, I hear the echo of my own doubt—the voice that asks if I am anything without the gold stars and finished lines.
But somewhere in the rubble, a softer truth stirs. Maybe I was never meant to be built from milestones. Maybe I am meant to be found in the pauses—in the breath before the next step, in the trust that the path will unfold even when I cannot see it.
So I gather the pieces, not to rebuild what was, but to create something freer—a self unmeasured, a life unplanned.
I will learn to stand in the uncertainty, to let the unknown become a kind of faith.
Because life has never followed the blueprints I drew, and maybe that’s the point—to stop defining myself by what I’ve done, and start becoming who I already am.
There was a time when I lived by the ticking of progress—each task a measure, each success a breath of validation. I mistook motion for meaning, achievement for worth.
I built myself from outcomes, layer upon layer of doing, until the silence beneath it all became unbearable.
Now, the noise is gone. And what’s left is a strange kind of stillness—not peace, not yet, but a numb hum in the chest, a hollow where certainty used to live.
I grieve the version of me who knew exactly what to chase. I grieve the comfort of direction, the illusion of control. And in the quiet, I hear the echo of my own doubt—the voice that asks if I am anything without the gold stars and finished lines.
But somewhere in the rubble, a softer truth stirs. Maybe I was never meant to be built from milestones. Maybe I am meant to be found in the pauses—in the breath before the next step, in the trust that the path will unfold even when I cannot see it.
So I gather the pieces, not to rebuild what was, but to create something freer—a self unmeasured, a life unplanned.
I will learn to stand in the uncertainty, to let the unknown become a kind of faith.
Because life has never followed the blueprints I drew, and maybe that’s the point—to stop defining myself by what I’ve done, and start becoming who I already am.
The Echo Left Behind
In the quiet shadows where memories dwell,
Lies the echo of a story too tender to tell.
A heart once full, now hollow and bare,
Yearns for the touch that is no longer there.
The sun sets softly, yet the night is long,
Each star a reminder of where you belong.
In dreams, you visit, a whisper, a sigh,
But morning steals you, and leaves me to cry.
What ifs linger like ghosts in the night,
Questions unanswered, out of sight.
Does it get better? They say it might,
Yet the wound remains, despite the light.
Time, the healer, moves at its pace,
But the heartache lingers, a familiar face.
In laughter, in silence, in moments of grace,
Your absence is present, a haunting embrace.
What do I do with this pain I bear?
I carry it gently, with love and care.
For in this sorrow, a bond remains,
A testament to love that forever sustains.
So I walk this path with memories in tow,
Learning to live, learning to grow.
In the tapestry of life, your thread is spun,
A part of my heart, forever as one.
In the quiet shadows where memories dwell,
Lies the echo of a story too tender to tell.
A heart once full, now hollow and bare,
Yearns for the touch that is no longer there.
The sun sets softly, yet the night is long,
Each star a reminder of where you belong.
In dreams, you visit, a whisper, a sigh,
But morning steals you, and leaves me to cry.
What ifs linger like ghosts in the night,
Questions unanswered, out of sight.
Does it get better? They say it might,
Yet the wound remains, despite the light.
Time, the healer, moves at its pace,
But the heartache lingers, a familiar face.
In laughter, in silence, in moments of grace,
Your absence is present, a haunting embrace.
What do I do with this pain I bear?
I carry it gently, with love and care.
For in this sorrow, a bond remains,
A testament to love that forever sustains.
So I walk this path with memories in tow,
Learning to live, learning to grow.
In the tapestry of life, your thread is spun,
A part of my heart, forever as one.
Kintsugi of the Soul
In the quiet of a potter’s room,
Where broken shards lie in gloom,
A master works with hands so wise,
To mend what once met its demise.
Kintsugi, the art of golden seams,
Where broken pieces find new dreams,
Lacquer mixed with powdered gold,
Mends the cracks, makes stories told.
A vessel once shattered, now made whole,
The fractures filled with lines of gold.
The scars are not hidden, but shown with pride,
A testament to what has been survived.
So too the soul that’s been through pain,
Bears the marks of loss and strain.
Trauma breaks us, makes us fall,
Yet within us lies the strength to recall.
The cracks and breaks are part of us,
A history written in lines of trust.
To heal is not to make it disappear,
But to fill the gaps with what makes us dear.
Golden lines where once were wounds,
A symbol of the strength that looms.
The beauty lies not in what was whole,
But in the mending of a broken soul.
We are all like kintsugi, in a way,
With golden scars that never fade away.
The broken parts are part of our story,
A testament to our journey and glory.
Healing is a journey, a work of art,
Where broken hearts can make a new start.
With every crack is filled with love and light,
We become more beautiful in the night.
So let us embrace our golden seams,
The mended parts where once were dreams.
For in the art of kintsugi, we find,
The beauty of a soul that’s been refined.
In the quiet of a potter’s room,
Where broken shards lie in gloom,
A master works with hands so wise,
To mend what once met its demise.
Kintsugi, the art of golden seams,
Where broken pieces find new dreams,
Lacquer mixed with powdered gold,
Mends the cracks, makes stories told.
A vessel once shattered, now made whole,
The fractures filled with lines of gold.
The scars are not hidden, but shown with pride,
A testament to what has been survived.
So too the soul that’s been through pain,
Bears the marks of loss and strain.
Trauma breaks us, makes us fall,
Yet within us lies the strength to recall.
The cracks and breaks are part of us,
A history written in lines of trust.
To heal is not to make it disappear,
But to fill the gaps with what makes us dear.
Golden lines where once were wounds,
A symbol of the strength that looms.
The beauty lies not in what was whole,
But in the mending of a broken soul.
We are all like kintsugi, in a way,
With golden scars that never fade away.
The broken parts are part of our story,
A testament to our journey and glory.
Healing is a journey, a work of art,
Where broken hearts can make a new start.
With every crack is filled with love and light,
We become more beautiful in the night.
So let us embrace our golden seams,
The mended parts where once were dreams.
For in the art of kintsugi, we find,
The beauty of a soul that’s been refined.