For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been traipsing through the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of photographs Grandad miscellaneously treasured over his lifetime. There’s the many from his childhood spent donkey riding and sand car racing in Blackpool with his sister, Win; even as a wee boy, and regardless of how ill-kept the photo may be, his mischievous grin is so easy to spot in a blurry crowd of many. There’s also bucket loads from his time in Changi and Sembawang, Singa

At some hopeless hour the mirrors gave up. The hallway filled with the mineral smell of rain beginning three streets over. A blue garment on the radiator spread like a bruise that you pushed on. Meanwhile language, poor animal, dragged itself in circles - wet paws over tile, slipping clumsily. I mentioned birds once, how they turn collectively without touching. This was taken incorrectly. Later, a sequence of small disappearances: the cup rinsed, the slam of a door thinning i

Human beings possess a remarkable ability to continue living lives that are slowly destroying them. This is evidenced by the frightening speed in which we adapt to emotional distortion, how we learn to perform enthusiasm we no longer feel, how we sustain ambitions that no longer move us, and how we organise entire identities around forms of labour that leave us internally diminished. Over time this adaptation becomes so normalised that the absence of meaning starts feeling le

There have been moments, recently, where I’ve found it difficult to afford the world even a basic generosity of spirit. Let's face it, the current state of geopolitics does not make this easy; it presses in on the edges of daily life, dulling any easy access to hope, peace, or uncomplicated joy. In conversation after conversation, I’ve found myself sitting opposite people whose view of the world feels so saturated with anger that it begins to reshape everything they see, unt

After a long, draining day in the office last week, I stood in the rain looking at the 90-minute journey home from my friend's house and despaired at the combination of tiredness, anxiety, a stupid little summer dress, wind, no jacket, rain and three tube changes on lines that were all broken in some way. Unsurprisingly, I got an Uber and it's safe to say that the tube journey would have been preferable... Now, it's important you understand that I generally enjoy talking to u

There is a garden now, that will, in time, be mine to tend - but these hands, soft and unsure, still reach for yours, without pause, as they have always done when I don't know how to begin. I stand lost and in awe of the asking, unsure of where to look, of what belongs where, unclear, in fact, of how anything takes root at all. And then there's you, turning up at my door, turning up, always, with herbs from home and pockets full of bluebell seeds. I watch as you tend the dirt

Some people are coy about therapy and speak about it with a kind of polite distance, as though it sits just outside the edges of their real life. I’ve never quite seen it that way. In fact, I'm very vocal about how grateful I am to have a therapist that has, in ways both subtle and profound, helped me change my life (and my brain) for the better. Over the years we've worked together, one idea in particular surfaced again and again in our conversations, until I began to reali

It begins lower than language, a warmth gathering where thought can’t quite follow, a slow ignition that doesn’t need permission to become itself. She feels it before she names it - that pull, that answering deep in the body’s interior, as if something long patient has turned towards the light at last. And when the word comes, it moves through her like rhythm already underway, carried in the hips, the mouth, the small involuntary arch that knows exactly where it’s going. Yes

Not the blaze of roses, not their cliche insistence, but this delicate blossom - a kind of arrival so gentle you could miss it if you were thinking of something or someone else. All winter the branches have held their breath, black script against a sky that wouldn’t answer. Oh how, we learned the grammar of endurance: how to wait, how to close down, how to be smaller than we are. But now - as if the air itself had loosened - they open. Not fully, not all at once, but in a sca

"The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master." - Elizabeth Bishop, One Art Loss has always had a strange aesthetic in literature. Why? Because it is rarely presented purely as absence and is instead framed as the condition through which the world becomes newly visible. So

I like opening the peach with my thumbs, the seam loosening until the fruit parts in my hands, oozing with an orange river that floods the blue roads of my wrist. Give me pears dense with rain, pomegranates split with their red constellations, and cherries so ripe they bruise when I breathe on them. Tell me what to do for I’m tired of arranging the world myself. Yes, hand me the bowl and watch as the fruit gathers here on the marble, each piece opened, each stone lifted out a

There is a room where laughter settles into the walls as if it had always belonged there, where glass refracts light into soft geometries that make brightness feel effortless, and where fabric skims the body lightly enough to suggest that joy can be worn without consequence. Here, in this domed cathedral, the air carries a subtle lift, a sense that gravity has agreed to loosen its hold for the evening, and everything within that architecture appears balanced, luminous, intact

After Chelsea DesAutels Start this one with the woman falling from the sky. Or the building - it doesn't matter. What matters is she's plummeting in vomitous swirls towards a fuse, and she knows, at this point, having lived two decades of blueness and four years of bliss, that there's nothing else she can do - No threshhold between love and letting go, or between letting go and longing - no demarcation she can draw around herself to stop the charcoaled edges of her bones from

It did not unravel - it split like crockery dropped on tiles - that sharp, unarguable sound of splintering then the silence that follows. One morning the air was ordinary, but by evening it had teeth that bit at the threads of the tapestry, until the pattern forgot itself. The flat - half-packed, half-lived-in - began to echo before I left it with drawers open like gossiping mouths, and ash on the sofa where friendships had burnt. Love did not fade, it vanished mid-sentence,