The Trade

You, whose heart is a fist clenched tight around fear—come closer. I see you. You whose mind hums like a wire stretched to breaking, every thought split by numbers, debts, credits, by the ticking metronome of bills and booze — of balancing. The world has made even rest a luxury. The cost of stillness—guilt. The cost of dreams—delay. And so, you trade pieces of your soul for survival.

I want you to know: you are not failing. The system is loud and sharp and built to fray the edges of tenderness. And yet—here you are. Still waking. Still offering kindness to strangers even as your own hands tremble. I have seen others too—some with suits stitched in quiet desperation, some with holes in their shoes and eyes full of sky—and I tell you: the pain is not proof that you are broken. It is proof that you want to be whole: the calling of the human endeavor. Discovery, service, connection, love. Is that not the calling of the human being: to love?

We love minds—light flickering across water—those we name friends, whose thoughts rise to meet ours in morning conversation, in shared silence, in the curve of a question. We love bodies—warmth beneath the surface—those we call lovers, whose skin we know as we know the sea, not by the map but by the tide, the salt, the way it holds us. And we love the whole—soul, breath, form and word—when the mind and the body sing not in harmony but in one voice, and we name them spouse.

But always—the world speaks: You must have all. A mind and a body, a mirror and a flame. One is not enough. They say it in dining rooms. They say it in coffee shops. They say it in glances that hover too long. They say it in quiet, in the shape of a couple walking; and loudly in stories told again and again, on screens, in books, in songs.

Yet what if the ember burns steady in only one place? What if the mind alone is enough to echo through the corridors? What if the body alone is symphony, not prelude? What if you are full already—not lacking, not paused—but entire?

The house does not need all its doors thrown wide. A single room lit. A single voice answered. A single presence held in the hand or the mind. That, too, is a world. That, too, is a life

You long for peace—not just the absence of fear, but the soft, full presence of enough. A quiet morning. A day without calculation. A moment of breath not taxed by the future.

Rest is not a reward for having done enough. It is your birthright.

Let us make, together, a rebellion: a stillness that does not apologize. Let the frantic wind of survival howl outside for a moment. Let your shoulders drop. Let your jaw loosen. There is time yet. There is always time to become whole.

Even to your penultimate breath.

The Return

When the mind becomes a locked house, once warm, now shuttered from within—the windows fogged by silence, the doors swollen from disuse—outside, the world seems to rage on all the brighter, louder, quicker than the pulse beneath my skin can follow.

When each morning breaks like glass—shards of light across a floor—I find time pooling in corners, thick and unmoving. I trace cracks in the world instead of paths forward. I learn the language of stillness, of small breaths. I become fluent in the art of appearing.

When they tell you to rise, to hustle, to transform pain into fuel, doubt into drive—what if the self they demand I become is a stranger? What if I have already burned too long in the furnace of expectation—each smile a forged mask, each word a rope pulling me away from the truth of what I feel?

When depression does not shout, but murmurs, hums in the bones—when it is not absence, but presence in another key, a lower chord, constant, like distant machines in a factory long abandoned—it does not want to kill, but to erase; to soften the edges until you become less than a shadow.

When isolation—its twin—does not always come from solitude, but arrives in crowds, in conversations where I nod on cue, laugh on time, vanish behind practiced gestures—when the world demands I be better, without asking if I can simply be whole.

When the days of growth feels like betrayal, healing feels like pretending, even the thought of progress—of stepping into a world quick to slice, to measure, to mock—feels like walking naked into a hailstorm.

There is more than this—no more to achieve, no more to prove, but more to be—a life that does not require constant defense, a self not carved into palatable pieces, a world without performance. I do not know if I believe in that world, but some part of me aches toward it—quietly, like roots pressing through stone.

When maybe that is enough, for now: to ache, to press, to not vanish—not yet.

When I remember—though the memory is not solid, not whole—a time when breath came easy, when the day unfolded like paper boats down brooks in golden summer. When I remember bare feet in grass, and the world humming softly—not the harsh clatter of obligation, but the slow song of discovery. When each pebble was a galaxy, each puddle a portal. Then, I was light. Then, I laughed without earning it.

When I ask, “Where did it turn?”

When I search the seam, the fault line between then and now, and cannot find it. There was no ceremony, no closed door—only small trades, each day: a piece of wonder for a bit of sense, a dream for a number, a question for an answer. When slowly, the trades stopped feeling optional. Now joy arrives dressed in receipts, must be justified, scheduled, performed. When childhood joy had no witness, no need to be shared to be real—it simply was. When adulthood is built on proof—on minutes and milestones and metrics. I mourn that child in silence.

When still I ask, “When did I agree to this? When did the game become a task? When I began to edit myself before I even spoke?” It happened in passing—like sand slipping through fingers. When I clutch handfuls of silence and try to shape it back into joy.

When they say it is the way of things, that growing is shedding, that we must put away childish things—but I did not put them away—I lost them in the dark, one toy train at a time. When I lost the joy of simply dreaming, the voice that sang without needing to be good, the hours that stretched, not shrank.

When I see children now—how their feet run before thought can stop them, how their faces betray every feeling, bright and raw—I envy them, and I mourn the child that could play with them still.

When it simply comes heavy.

Still, some part of me turns—like a plant to pale light. I reach through glass, through years, for the child who still lives in echoes, in shadows, in the corners of songs I once knew.

If I could just remember him fully—what he saw, what he knew before they told him otherwise—maybe I could unlearn this weight. Maybe I could walk, not march. Maybe I could be, not prove.

When maybe, just maybe, joy will come—not as a reward, but as a return.

Coronation

America was an open wound—throbbing beneath the starched collars and stitched flags, pulsing beneath the skin of parades and proclamations. It bled in silence while brass bands marched on, oblivious, as if melody could cauterize. White gauze wrapped the body—New York to California—and still the fever never broke. Beneath the cologne and the paneling, under the weight of speeches when men leaned too far into power.

He spoke not of systems but of fate. Of invisible lines binding the nation—not veins grown within, but grafts imposed, cold and rigid, drawing lifeblood toward profit. Not a machine of progress, but a furnace of hunger. He conjured pyramids, dragged ancient stones into newspapers so that greed might masquerade as courage. He called upon old walls and new wonders, but what I heard—what I felt—was not wonder, but want. The ancient thirst in a new bottle.

And yet his eyes, those calculating instruments, saw not a country but a mechanism. Each man a cog, each nod a piston, each handclap another gear. No heartbeats here. Only motion.

They stirred—the high men of the nation—with the eagerness of those long trained to equate vision with value. They imagined deeds, stocks, maps carved with their names. Futures passed down like silver. But in truth, their hearts had calcified. Only their hunger remained, sharpened by inheritance.

And I—I drifted at the edge of it, neither inside nor far enough away. I watched and I wondered.

Is this how it begins again? Not with a cry, but with a claim? Not with chains, but with contracts? I have seen empires wrap themselves in reason and rot from the inside out. I have seen systems that do not lead home, only deeper into forgetting.

He proclaimed that money would bind the nation—an unbreakable thread, a silver seam through fractured flesh. But beneath those words, the truth revealed itself like bruises blooming beneath fragile skin—black, swollen, unyielding. Iron, cold and merciless, driven through bone not grown with it, a violence disguised as, and in, progress. Children, wide-eyed and silent, taught to whisper its name as promise, even as it fed ravenously—on their silence, their sweat, their fruitful soil turned dust.

Yet beyond this fevered delirium, beyond the towering walls of gold and glass that gleamed with hollow pride, another world stirred—a world where the lifeblood was no grafted vein but a pulsing heart; where this nation did not bleed out, but bloomed as the first wildflowers do after the long winter; where hands raised not cold towers of conquest but warm bridges of kinship; where joy was not the scattered residue of surplus, but the very air that stirred the soul.

Could there be a society less shackled to hunger’s cruel yoke? Less cleaved by shadows cast by insatiable profit? Could peace root itself in fields long ravaged by greed’s relentless plow? Could equality, long whispered as a fragile dream, rise anew—bold and blazing like the dawn?

Perhaps the lesson of this empire is not its ruin alone, but its warning—a solemn reminder that civilization must be more than a general ledger weighed by assets and liabilities. That hope, fragile yet fierce, is a thread as strong as iron, if only it is chosen, woven, and held fast—built into railways that simply, and beautifully, stay.

And so, in the stillness that followed the speech, the wound pulsed—raw and unhealed—the fever burned on, relentless. But beneath the noise: the faint, steady heartbeat of what might be.

Strand

There are encounters that unseat a man from the furniture of his own mind, that strip away the greatcoat of habit and expose the pinked, quivering machinery beneath. Not love, nor death, nor even the bombs that now ornament the sky. No — something far older. Older than language, older than the Thames herself, who still gurgles with Roman bones and the dreams of drowned queens.

It was early — that peculiar London grey before the hour turns decent. The river slouched low, its surface thick with yesterday’s soot and the floating tatters of today’s myth. And there, beneath Blackfriars Bridge, she rose — if one dares impose the grammar of gender on something so utterly beyond taxonomy.

She was magnificent. And dreadful. Like something dredged from a forgotten corner of Ovid, where the margins were too damp for proper translation. A creature made not for terror, exactly, but for awe. Her form shimmered not with light, but with memory — long ribbons of scaled shadow trailing into the Thames, eyes like smoked opal, and an expression that bore the unmistakable melancholy of having seen too much.

He could not name her — not with any word that wouldn’t crumble under its own inadequacy. Not woman, no. Not wholly beast. A cipher perhaps — as though some ancient intelligence had grown bored of form and simply arranged itself into myth. She stood there like a page torn from a forbidden codex — the sort of text whispered about in wet corners of old libraries, the kind said to have been written in fever and hidden by occult secretaries under floorboards thick with rot.

There was no indication of malice, and yet the very geometry of her presence unsettled the eye. One could not quite tell where her limbs began, or whether she had limbs at all. Her face flickered in and out of coherence, like a name nearly recalled.

Her eyes did not merely observe him. They dismantled him, kindly, as one might take apart a clock to better understand its error. He stood, bare to that gaze, and she seemed to read him in reverse, as though his entire life were being played backward for her amusement: childhood, war, this summer. She opened her mouth, wide and slow. No sound emerged, but a strange stillness fell over the scene — even the river seemed to lean closer. A quiet suggestion passed between them. It was not language. It was not thought. It was the echo of something prior to thought. And then, as though drawn backward by invisible threads, she receded beneath the water, leaving nothing but a ripple and a sudden absence of birdsong.

Now, he walks from the river, leaving behind the shadowed water and the lingering echo of that impossible presence, the city’s grey folding around him, that familiar cloak. The door to the bookstore swings open softly, a cool breath of paper and ink rising to meet him, stories waiting, eager, patient. Here — here is the threshold, the soft divide between this world and the countless others folded within these shelves. What worlds will open? What voices will rise and fall, carrying him beyond the walls of this room, beyond the dull ache of days? Oh, to be unbound, unmoored, to drift in currents spun from ink and imagination — the thrill of beginning, again and again, as if the very air were singing, and he, a child with a secret. The pages whisper promises, the stories pulse quietly, and joy — yes, pure joy — floods the hollow spaces inside him, swelling until he forgets the world and becomes nothing but light, a spark caught in the endless turning of time. This is where it begins again — he thinks — where I become everything and nothing all at once.

Rittenhouse Square

“My dear, have you ever truly looked at the way the light settles in Rittenhouse Square at this hour? Not merely shining—heavens, no, that would be far too straightforward—but resting, as though it too has grown weary of America’s prolonged nervous breakdown and decided to lie down quietly on the gravel path, like a governess who’s simply had enough.

Now, do look—just there. That bee, pitiful little thing, entombed in the bloom of a Tibouchina. Exotic, unnecessarily so. Quite ridiculous, really, given Philadelphia’s climate. One imagines it shipped in from California—or perhaps some forgotten botanical tantrum—to add a splash of drama to this otherwise beige collection of states they once dared to call "The New World." New, perhaps—but not necessarily improved. My dear, even Eden was new once. We know how that turned out. And America is rather like Eden, if the serpent had a hand in the planning committee.

And that woman—yes, the one in rose-coloured silk—drifting past like one of Botticelli's tarts. She doesn’t walk; she glides, as though auditioning for an allegory. Honestly, after all we’ve endured—the headlines, the hearings, the moral hemorrhaging—can a well-cut hemline still stir a soul? I rather doubt it. Though I'm sure someone at the New Yorker will try to argue otherwise in 6,000 words.

Listen to the brickwork beneath our shoes. Go on, listen. You can almost hear the ghosts muttering. Who laid them? Who’s laid on them? Ghosts, my dear. Ghosts and patriots with poor impulse control. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin himself, storming off in a huff, tripping over his principles. Or some lesser founding son skulking home after a scandal, pockets full of half-finished manifestos.

And look there—that girl with the seashell pressed to her ear like it’s whispering stock advice from Poseidon himself. Look there, a woman sways, not to any music we can hear, but to something primal, something private, as if joy were cellular and not quite sanctioned. She sways—not with decorum but with desire, as if her body recalled something her mind had yet to understand. The others look on, appalled. As if delight were indecent. As if she’d walked into one of those American yoga classes wearing makeup and good news. "Yoga,’ they call it — sounds less like a bit of exercise and more like something you catch from a mosquito in the colonies. Honestly, this country, my dear. Joy in this country is treated with the same enthusiasm as a bad case of the measles—best avoided, spoken of in whispers, and generally blamed on everyone else.

Is it the news cycle? The endless grief scroll? Or simply the long shadow of history sprawling across these streets like a houseguest who refuses to leave?

And the black clothing—why? The sun is out, but they are all dressed as though headed to the sort of funeral where no one cries, and everyone silently hopes the will was thorough. Even here, in Rittenhouse, in the sun, these people are suspicious of anything soft, or sincere.They are a nation that mistrusts its own laughter.

Look— bankers with the expressions of well-fed but emotionally stunted bulldogs, clerks who stare as though time itself has become impolite, and students clutching books they’ve never opened, but display like relics. And I—I sit beneath this tree. I’ve taken to calling Hamilton. He looks the part: noble, unbothered, clearly disappointed in everyone. He has witnessed riots, parades, renovations, and revolutions—and yet he endures. Judging, of course, but enduring.

I’ve read everything worth reading, I believe—Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, the Greeks . Their voices built the scaffolding of my better thoughts. But now—now I suspect I’ve had quite enough of other people’s conclusions. Perhaps it’s time I write some of my own. Not for fame, nor posterity, but simply to capture this peculiar moment, this city, and this version of myself.

So tell me, shall we write it all down? Before it changes again, and pretends it never happened?”