February 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 1

The pamphlet of my past reappears & I know there is no time like the present to ponder if my own family is no longer composed of flesh & bone. We have this urge to turn away from comfort. I swear, the imagery of how hardship holds us with its metal hands is so vivid; I can't bear to tell it all. All I can tell is a sound coming out of the flute, speaking of both love & life. I swear, I am not willing to dance to the sound coming out of the gun, played by the trigger. I swear, I still love music, but I am still quavering on which will be played during my own absence. I still want to choose life without despising love, too. Someone tell me how to conquer the sad memory without envying the shape of doldrums breaking through my windpipe. Look, everyone here is welcoming their own seclusion. Just believe me. I'll pretend to know better: the older we get, the more we approximate our bodies to cadavers. Even death is holy enough to say: God, look at the shining stars, how they outlast like they are nothing. I mean, you know the end is never defined by the beginning. I am learning that silence, too, has its own bloodstream. Some time, the  night folds itself into my chest like a congregation of moths calling the names I buried in silence. I have carried sorrow the way rivers carry drowned cities, quietly, with devotion. I keep collecting metaphors for light—broken mirrors, shattered canticles, & the halo of a moth dying against glass  to remind myself that ruin can glow. Even the wind now speaks in elegies; it knows my heart is a cathedral where grief comes to worship in secret. I don't know if faith still remembers my name, or if love has turned into the smoke rising from its own altar. It’s true that a place like this will give you what you seek if you know how to ask & where to look. I am still clueless in my thought: burying godly things, I do not  want to carry in my hands, in my faith. But I swear, If I can’t spend a lot of time with my consciousness, I set it free. I will re-enter the crude in the daylight like a wine entombed in the Osmanthus tree. Often, my mouth is rehearsing forgiveness in another dialect. Maybe memory is just a god returning to itself, naming what I have lost. But what if grief is just a country where names go to unlearn their tongues? I have seen where love wears a burial cloth, & calls it forgiveness. I am still learning how to cradle the invisible, & sip from the cup  without tasting the end. If this is what living means to dissolve gently into meaning, then let the wind take my confession & return it as a song.