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While going through work photos for a presentation, I found myself looking at familiar faces, colleagues, teams, friends, how easily everyone smiled for the camera, how willingly they were remembered. And I noticed something. I am rarely in them. Even though I was there for almost all of it, I exist somewhere behind the lens or just outside the frame. Even in my personal life, I have very few photos of myself. Sometimes I tell myself I will regret it one day, for not having memories to hold onto, but does remembering truly need proof? So, I keep choosing not to be in them. I do not even keep my childhood photos. I do not remember seeing many, though I know my parents took them. Even then, it always felt easier to exist behind moments rather than inside them. But I do take photos, just not of myself. I capture life as it passes, places, fleeting moments, the feeling of a day before it disappears. Maybe I am just a private person, and perhaps I have always been this way. I do not think I want to leave a memory behind. When I am gone, there will be nothing to look back on, nothing to hold, and maybe that is the point. And as time passes, who will remember we were here at all? And yet, I do not know if that thought comforts me or quietly breaks something in me. M. | unframed April 2026

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My dreams are often sad because they are too beautiful. They bloom in places no morning has ever touched, calling me by a name I do not remember ever having, yet somehow recognize. And still, I go. I slip out of myself easily, like a shadow loosening from the body, leaving something behind that I do not bother to retrieve. I wander through corridors that bend, through doors that open into oceans, into skies that fold into rooms. Midnight spills like ink, and the carriage of dreams arrives without horses, without sound, only a silent summons, something that knows me better than I know myself. It takes me, and I do not fight it. I don’t think I ever wanted to. How could I, when even the stars seem to have lost their place, drifting as I do, suspended somewhere between sleep and return, between something I almost understand and something I am afraid to name. And he is always there, almost. A warmth I cannot reach, a hand that disappears when I try to hold it, a voice blurred beneath water. He exists in that fragile space where longing is allowed to live without consequences, where I can have him without ever truly having him at all. I wake with him slipping through me, and the morning feels less solid than the dream. M. | reverie April 2026

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Isn’t it strange how easily something can return to what it once was? You built your defenses carefully, stone by stone. Then one day, someone came, someone who felt soft enough to be let in. You began to take the walls down, slowly at first. One stone, two stones, then more and more, until the opening felt wide enough to let them in. And then something slips through that changes everything. You stood there, helpless, as everything rebuilt itself around you, thicker now, taller than before, as if it has learned from its own collapse. But this time, it does not only keep the world out; it keeps you in, too. It has learned to guard itself from you as well. It no longer trusts your hands. Every time you try to reach for the light again, it resists. It turns against you, presses you back, and keeps you still. And so, you remain inside, watching life continue without you. While the walls whisper that you are safe, even as they replay every hurt, over and over, across the surface that was once meant to protect you. M. | of walls & masks April 2026

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It has been eleven years, and I still do not know how to speak about you without feeling something in me shift. In the moments when your name crosses my mind without warning, I find myself talking to you as if you had only stepped into another room. You were gone long ago, but the love and the hurt have never learned how to follow time. I try to imagine what you would think of me now, after all this time. Eleven years of growing, of changing, of learning how to live in a world that continued without you. There are things I wish I could show you, things I wish I could say, moments I wish you had been there for. There are so many things I have become, and so many things I am still trying to understand. I think about the way you used to look at me, like I was never something you doubted. I wonder if you would still recognize me in the same way. You once told me, “You are everything that I am, what is there for you to be afraid about?” I did not understand it then, not in the way I do now. Back then, it felt like comfort. Now, it feels like something you left behind for me to hold onto. I hear you in those words when fear finds me, when I hesitate, when I forget myself. I miss you in ways that arrive quietly. In ordinary days, in passing thoughts, in the smallest moments that no one else would notice. And somehow, even after all this time, loving you still feels the same. Steady, present, unchanged. Even with all this distance between then and now, missing you feels like something that has never learned how to end. M. | April 2026

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He lets me choose where and when I soften. There is no asking, no silent expectation pressing against my ribs, only the gentle understanding that I am allowed to lay things down, piece by piece, in my own time, as if he knows I have spent too long being everything all at once. He does not take my strength away. It stays with me, familiar and guarded, but around him it loosens, as if I no longer need to hold it so tightly. And I fear what I might become without it, how easily I could be hurt, but still, I let it happen. The pressure I have learned to live with begins to dissolve in his presence. I do not know whether to be grateful or afraid, for in its absence I am left with a stillness I am not used to, an unfamiliar softness against my own skin, like something I was never meant to keep for long. There is no force in the way he loves, only an intimate, sweet yearning. That is what terrifies me most. Not the breaking, not the falling, but the gentleness of it. The way he reaches parts of me I have kept hidden, doing so with care, as if he understands that even light can overwhelm when you have lived too long in the dark. He is light filtering through leaves, finding me where I did not know warmth could reach, reminding me I am allowed to feel the sun, even if only for a moment. He is my komorebi, and I do not know how to stand beneath it without trembling, as if some part of me is already learning how to miss it. M. | komorebi April 2026

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I hope you chew your food slowly because you are learning how to savour the taste again, not because your eyes and your chest are still heavy with tears. I hope you grow your hair again because you once loved it long, or keep it short simply because it feels like you, not because some distant part of you is still hurting in ways you do not speak of. I hope you enjoy your midnight drives because you love the silence of the road, not because you need somewhere to scream, where no one could hear you, without worried faces finding you. I hope you stay a little longer in the shower, soft with yourself, not sitting on the floor and letting the water fall just to drown your tears, as if they could take the pains off you. And I hope, in the quiet way healing comes, with no one noticing and nothing certain, you begin again, slowly, tenderly, even if your hands are still trembling, even if your heart does not quite believe it yet, even if you have to learn to live with yourself all over again. M. | I hope you stay April 2026

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