On the Reluctant Death of Your Most Luminous Self

If you don’t see me as special, I might as well kill you. Might as well kill that part of me, too. It’s just like me to stomp around with all the petulance of a child who’s never been told no. But more often than not, I release that white-knuckled grip and quietly let my deepest desires die—watching them float down the river and fade into oblivion.

If I catch my reflection in the water, I might see more than I want to. After all, a mirror is meant to show you things, even things you hate about yourself.

It’s true that you might eventually get what you wanted, but you might never get what you felt. That’s why you’re here too, if you’re being honest. It’s easy to hold those two unspoken truths now, like a passing nod between two world-weary strangers—fulfilled contracts and silent agreements that honour the space between what is and what never could be.

Although a part of me died in an overlit fire long ago, something new and magical emerged from the ashes: a quiet hope, a flicker of something incandescent in the dark. Something to pass along and burn brightly for.

In any case, it’s enough to know that ghosts still linger around my gravesite, running their fingers along the cracked headstone, even when they never leave any trace that they were here.