a person curled up tight inside a microwave of their own making.

the hum isn’t deadly.

just relentless, that low insect-static that seeps into bone and thought until everything inside them softens, blisters, mutates.

the glass door becomes a warped mirror for regret, stretching old mistakes into towering shapes and shrinking anything good into background noise.

dear you,

i imagine i’m holding a dated photo of you. some old version, frozen mid-blink, with no clue what your body and brain are about to drag you through. the ruptures. the rebuilds. the quiet surgeries of the spirit. the lessons carved straight into bone. there you are. practical, maybe a bit androgynous, half-tethered to outdated versions of yourself, still soft enough to bruise but stubborn enough to keep moving. i’m already proud of you for surviving things you haven’t even met yet. you’re going to learn that bold, honest beauty decisions can save your life in small, stubborn ways. cutting your hair short enough that people don’t know what box to put you in. getting a tattoo of a nun with her tits out on your shoulder because you’re tired of apologising for having a body at all. buying your first fridge that isn’t secondhand, just to quietly prove to yourself that you deserve new things, solid things, things that are yours alone.

the non-profit coughs like a half-rusted generator, shuddering through another mercy cycle. it runs on leftover passion and the jittering electricity of overcommitment. frayed extension cords salted stiff, fairy lights sagging like constellations someone gave up naming. the artist’s spent more hours plunging toilets and coaxing printers back from the dead than writing grants. somehow it’s sacred.

i’d be shattered if someone took this from me…

this permission to stand at the edge of the world where the ocean hisses through its cracked teeth and spits the sky back in shards. the wind here doesn’t caress, it interrogates. it drags its nails down my cheeks like it’s trying to scrape off the polite version of me. salt seeps into everything, even the half-healed bits i pretend aren’t still bleeding.

you can’t own this place. can’t trademark the way chaos hums through the air like an exposed wire. the ocean laughs at anyone who tries. it’s laughter that smells like iron and rot and memory. try to bottle it, you’ll end up drinking ghosts.

a mother-daughter bond can tangle like a bird’s nest
knotted in instinct, spit, broken plastic,
scraps of care, and generations of unspoken grit.
mumma-bird builds it the only way she knows how:
delicate, fierce, desperate.
she weaves love with fear,
lines the base with silence mistaken for strength,
and packs the walls with survival disguised as tradition.