Hello, there!

Maybe the mind is just a lantern, swinging on some invisible thread, casting light on shapes it half-remembers and half-invents so the heart won’t go dark. Maybe this man, with his crooked smile and watch set a few seconds faster, is far less a person and more an idea the universe borrowed from a dozen tiny places: a character in a book, a stranger in a café, a line from a song you once hummed without knowing why. And maybe that’s alright. “Get out, get out of my head,” she almost whispered into the pillow, the words breaking somewhere between plea and command.  “Why do you want him to get out?” the therapist asked gently, voice a careful weight that didn’t disturb the stillness. She leaned forward just a fraction, the faintest smile softening her eyes. “There isn’t anything to be scared of, just a flicker of your imagination shining brighter on a Wednesday, as long as we can talk about it.” The room exhaled calm. White walls softened by amber lamplight. A low bookshelf with a scat...

It’s a love language built from quiet conspiracies, keeping someone’s bookmark but returning their books, fingers intertwined while glaring at a painting of Mount Etna in some forgotten gallery in the south of Wales, slipping folded notes into the spine of a John le Carré novel.  It’s leaving a pressed wildflower between borrowed pages and saying nothing, standing shoulder to shoulder on a night railway platform until the last train pulls away and your hands finally find each other, softly debating which café chair has the better view and trading places halfway through. It’s sharing music on a tiny USB drive instead of a link, tracing secret shapes on each other’s palms while pretending to study a museum map, leaving cryptic sticky notes on coffee cups, walking an unfamiliar city under one half-soaked umbrella. It’s mapping constellations with your fingertip on their wrist beneath a quiet sky, tucking a single printed photograph into the lining of their coat. A romance stitched tog...

There’s a story I’ve been carrying inside me for a while. Not a plot line or a pitch, but something else, something that feels like memory but also like myth. And it’s not about love, not the kind we usually talk about. It’s about Time . Yes, Time . That ever-present, slightly dramatic character that haunts everyone’s calendars, under-eyes, and birthday cake candles. Except in this story, Time isn’t a villain. It’s.. well. It’s something closer to God. And this girl I’m going to be telling you about, let’s just say she wasn’t born for chasing trends or hurrying through moments. She was more of a dusty piano in a world obsessed with bluetooth speakers. A little out of place, a little out of sync, but stubbornly intact. This story isn’t a love story in the classic sense. There are no stolen glances or sweeping gestures. But it’s still about love - the strange, slow kind. The sort that grows without asking. The sort that isn’t always easy to see, until one day, you realise it’s be...

It was the kind of afternoon that made time hesitate. The garden lay suspended in a hush, as if the world had exhaled and decided to stay that way for a while. Trees, tall and gnarled with age, stood cloaked in saffron light, their leaves turning shades of burnt amber and rust.  Somewhere in the center of it all, under a wooden pergola wrapped in ivy and old, sleeping roses, a swing creaked ever so gently. A boy sat there, legs curled, back slightly hunched, lost in the pages of a book so worn it looked like it had belonged to generations before him. Sunlight filtered through the latticed branches overhead, dappling his face with moving gold. His fingers occasionally paused on a line, not to turn the page, but to feel the weight of a word. A woolen shawl hung loosely around his shoulders, and next to him lay a steaming cup of something that smelled faintly of cardamom and crushed cloves. Beyond the garden, faint outlines of mountains watched in silence, draped in a gentle haze that...

I’ve lived in the mountains. Not visited or passed through or stayed for the season, but truly lived where the trees remember more than people do. Woken up to the sound of silence so complete it felt like the earth was pausing to listen. There is something there, something you don’t quite see but always feel. It creeps into your bones no matter the weather, snow or sun, and settles behind your ribs like a secret. The place doesn’t try to impress you. It doesn’t perform. It just exists with such quiet magnitude that you can’t help but feel watched. Not in a fearful way, but in a way that makes you soften, makes you smaller in the most honest sense. You don’t live on a mountain. You live inside it. And some nights, if you’re still enough, you can almost hear it breathing.

The sky had been threatening melodrama all day. By 4:30 PM, it delivered. In Nat’s office, somewhere deep in a city that didn’t believe in subtlety, the rain slammed against the glass like it had unresolved issues. The kind of downpour that made traffic lights look like crying eyes and turned everyone’s socks into existential metaphors. Inside, it smelled faintly of printer ink, rain-damped concrete, and too much ambition. The AC was confused. The room was trying to be both winter and wet monsoon. Nat, hunched slightly over a scaled site plan for a new exhibition center, was chewing the end of her pen like it owed her answers. Her heels were kicked off under the table. A cold oat latte stood untouched to her left, and a very sassy notification on Slack had just made her rethink the company’s entire hiring policy. Across some unknown-but-not-so-distant part of town, or was it a different city altogether? Who knew anymore,  Miles was in a meeting room that looked like a design m...