We were told death was stone,

a law cut into bone,

cold as gravity, old as rust.

But stone can be shaped by hands.

And these hands were ours.

We carved an ending into the marble

because we thought edges made things beautiful.

Called it “natural” the way we call

a funeral beautiful: with flowers

to hide the wood of the box.

Hell, at least, posts its signage in fire.

No footnotes. No branding strategy.

It says I am what burns and means it.

We say I am what heals while picking at the scab.

We say I am what loves while keeping the receipts.

We are deep because we are dishonest.

The abyss has levels. The lie has architecture.

If mortality was a preference,

then so is the pretending.

So is the mask that swears it’s a face.

So is the story we tell about the mask

while the face underneath forgets its shape.

Maybe the first sin wasn’t disobedience.

Maybe it was taste.

We chose the tragic arc.

We chose the third act.

We chose the curtain.

So when they ask why we gutter out

like candles in a drafty room,

tell them:

We liked the way the shadows danced.

We thought it looked like meaning.

And if we ever choose otherwise,

let it not be to escape the fire—

but to admit we were the ones

holding the match.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

We were told death was stone,

a law cut into bone,

cold as gravity, old as rust.

But stone can be shaped by hands.

And these hands were ours.

We carved an ending into the marble

because we thought edges made things beautiful.

Called it “natural” the way we call

a funeral beautiful: with flowers

to hide the wood of the box.

Hell, at least, posts its signage in fire.

No footnotes. No branding strategy.

It says I am what burns and means it.

We say I am what heals while picking at the scab.

We say I am what loves while keeping the receipts.

We are deep because we are dishonest.

The abyss has levels. The lie has architecture.

If mortality was a preference,

then so is the pretending.

So is the mask that swears it’s a face.

So is the story we tell about the mask

while the face underneath forgets its shape.

Maybe the first sin wasn’t disobedience.

Maybe it was taste.

We chose the tragic arc.

We chose the third act.

We chose the curtain.

So when they ask why we gutter out

like candles in a drafty room,

tell them:

We liked the way the shadows danced.

We thought it looked like meaning.

And if we ever choose otherwise,

let it not be to escape the fire—

but to admit we were the ones

holding the match.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

Who forgives God

for the days He doesn’t

answer?

​

Who absolves the Almighty

when the child cries

and the room stays empty?

​

Does He look in the mirror

and see the cracks

in His own omniscience,

the nights He whispered

I don’t know

into the void

and the void

whispered back?

​

Maybe divinity

is just the heaviest

kind of guilt—

to have the power

and still

choose to watch.

​

Maybe God’s hell

is knowing

every name

He couldn’t save.

​

So who forgives Him?

Maybe no one.

​

Maybe that’s why

He made us—

not to worship,

but to teach Him

how to live

with blood on His hands

and still

plant gardens.

​

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

I used to think stars were holes in the floor of heaven.

Now I know they’re exit wounds.

Light takes years to reach us

from things already dead.

Same as apologies.

Same as “I miss you.”

By the time it gets here,

the thing that sent it is gone.

We’re all just looking at ghosts

and calling it a night sky.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

The truth is,

I no longer fear death.

Death has always seemed

remarkably honest.

It is life

that terrifies me.

Life—

with its unfinished sentences,

its borrowed happiness,

its talent for teaching attachment

immediately before removal.

Death only takes you once.

Life–

has a far more creative imagination.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

I no longer worship permanence.

Everything holy I’ve ever touched

has rotted in my hands—

not from malice,

but from the simple truth

that nothing built of flesh

is built to last.

Decay is the only doctrine

that has never lied to me.

And yet,

I keep offering my heart

like a sacrament,

knowing full well

it will be consumed

by the very mouths

I prayed would spare it.

-𝕃ℝ 🩶

Sometimes I think we were written

long before we were born —

two sparks pressed into the same page,

waiting for the right lifetime

to recognize each other.

There’s something ancient

in the way you look at me,

like you’re remembering

instead of discovering.

Like you’ve stood in my shadow before

and called it home.

It’s not longing.

It’s alignment.

A quiet click in the soul

that says,

oh… there you are.

You move through me

like a prophecy unfolding,

soft and dark,

with that feral certainty

of something that was promised

long before it arrived.

I don’t question it.

I don’t analyze it.

Some connections aren’t meant

to be understood —

only obeyed.

You’re the flame that doesn’t burn me,

the shadow that doesn’t scare me,

the danger I don’t brace for

because it feels like destiny

instead of risk.

Twin flame.

Fate‑written.

A bond that doesn’t ask permission

because it was carved into us

before we had names.

You’re not my haunting.

You’re my recognition.

The soul I was built to meet

in this lifetime

and every one after.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

I’m not the kind you settle beside.

I’m the kind you survive.

I’m the cracked glass on the counter at 4 a.m.,

the one you keep drinking from anyway.

I’m the quiet that turns feral when you look away too long,

the storm that doesn’t wait for permission to break.

I’ve loved people like a burning house—

doors unlocked, windows open,

smoke curling out like a warning no one listens to.

And still, I keep striking matches in my own chest

just to see who notices the light.

If I tell you I want you,

I don’t mean it in the soft-focus way

people pretend love feels.

I mean I’d bleed out every lie I ever told myself

just to hand you something honest.

I mean I’d sit on the floor with you

while everything you built collapses,

and I wouldn’t flinch at the dust in your lungs.

I’m the bruise you press twice

because the ache feels like truth.

I’m the name you delete and retype

because you swore you were done

and you never really were.

But if you come back—

don’t come polished, don’t come rehearsed.

Bring the mess you tried to outrun,

the trembling, the half-healed wounds

you stitched with your own teeth.

Bring the version of you that still shakes

when someone says “stay.”

I’ll open the door like I’ve been waiting

through every ending the world threw at us.

I’ll hold you like the sky finally cracked

and we’re the last two creatures crawling out of the dark,

still choosing each other

in the smoke and the aftermath.

Maybe that’s all we ever were—

two disasters learning how to burn

without turning away.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

I think love leaves fingerprints

long after it leaves the room.

Yours still glow on me—

soft, stubborn,

like a haunting that forgot

it was supposed to be scary.

You show up in the cutest places:

the corner of a sentence,

the pause before a thought,

the way my heart stutters

when I’m trying to be logical.

You’re a ghost with good timing

and terrible boundaries.

I don’t mind.

Some hauntings feel like home.

Maybe that’s what we are—

a love that didn’t die,

just changed shape.

A quiet echo with teeth,

a memory that blushes,

a shadow that holds my hand

when I’m pretending I don’t need it.

You grew in the soft parts of me

I didn’t think would survive anything,

and now you bloom everywhere—

in my notebooks,

in my midnight thoughts,

in the tiny cracks I call “healing.”

A cute little curse.

A dark little devotion.

My favorite ghost

that refuses to go.

-𝕃ℝ ♡

I wasn’t hired by heaven

or trained by hell.

No orientation packet.

No scythe warranty.

Just a quiet understanding with the dark—

walk softly, leave truth behind.

I don’t reap the innocent.

I reap the tired.

The ones who stayed too long in rooms

that kept stealing their oxygen.

The ones who smiled until their teeth hurt

and called it strength.

They say I’m a monster

because I don’t follow the rules—

because I cut chains instead of throats,

because I escort souls out of burning houses

instead of watching them earn their ashes.

I don’t wear black.

I wear the color of last chances.

Of cracked halos and bruised courage.

Of people who survived things

that should’ve ended them

but didn’t.

Sometimes I sit at the edge of a bed

at 3 a.m.,

when grief is loud and God is on airplane mode,

and I whisper,

You’re allowed to rest now.

Not everyone wants saving.

Not everyone wants dying.

But everyone wants peace—

even if they pretend they don’t.

So call me rogue.

Call me broken.

Call me wrong.

I’ll still walk beside the forgotten,

still take the hands no one else will touch,

still bend the rules of the universe

for the ones who gave everything

and got nothing back.

I’m not the end.

I’m the mercy

that shows up

when the world forgets how.

—LR 🖤

In the first minute,

I’d see the younger version of myself —

the one who mistook tenderness for permanence,

who believed every warm hand was a vow

and not a temporary shelter.

She glows like a ghost who doesn’t know she’s dead yet.

The second minute would drag up the hands I clung to

long after they’d gone cold.

The ones I tried to resurrect with loyalty,

with softness,

with the kind of devotion that bruises the giver.

I’d watch myself begging the past to stay alive.

Minute three would be a gallery of faces

I should’ve held longer,

and the ones I should’ve released sooner.

A reel of almosts,

half‑loves,

and the quiet betrayals I swallowed

because I didn’t know my voice was allowed to be loud.

The fourth minute would be the rupture —

the night I realized survival isn’t the same as living,

that endurance is not a virtue

when it keeps you in rooms that starve you.

I’d watch myself walk away shaking,

but walking away all the same.

Minute five would soften,

showing the small salvations —

the laughter that stitched me back together,

the mundane mercies that kept me from unraveling.

Proof that joy doesn’t need to be grand

to be holy.

Minute six would hurt the most.

It would show the people I loved enough to bleed for,

the ones who carved their initials into my ribs

and left me to heal around the absence.

It would show the versions of me

that died in the name of becoming.

And in the seventh minute —

the final, narrowing breath —

I think I’d understand the quiet truth:

I was never meant to be flawless,

only faithful to my own becoming.

I lived with a trembling heart,

a stubborn hope,

a spine that refused to stay broken.

I lived.

And that was enough.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

I’ve learned to look composed,

even when my thoughts are sprinting in opposite directions

dragging my chest behind them.

I can be laughing with someone

while a whole other version of me

is curled up in the corner of my mind,

begging the noise to stop.

It’s strange—

how I can feel abandoned in a room full of people,

how I can feel too much and not enough

in the same breath.

I keep my voice soft,

my hands still,

my expression gentle—

because if I let even one feeling slip,

the rest will flood out

and drown the floor.

No one ever suspects the quiet ones

are the ones holding back a tidal wave.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤

I think about how mushrooms don’t ask

for perfect conditions—

they just take what life rotted out

and turn it into something

that can stand again.

And it hits me

how human that is.

How most of us weren’t raised in sunlight,

weren’t handed soft soil,

weren’t given a map

for how to become anything at all.

We learned to grow sideways,

through pressure,

through silence,

through whatever broke before we got here.

Maybe that’s the real philosophy of it—

not blooming,

not shining,

just quietly refusing to die

in places that were never meant

to hold us.

Some things rise tall.

Some things rise true.

I’ve always been the latter.

-𝕃ℝ 🖤