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...