🌸 About Me 🌸

When I was seven, I caught a firefly in my hands.

I remember the glow leaking through the gaps between my fingers. I remember laughing and running to show my mother.

"Look!"

She crouched beside me.

"Open your hands," she said.

I shook my head.

"What if it flies away?"

"It will."

I held tighter.

Not enough to hurt it, I thought. Just enough to keep it.

My mother smiled sadly.

"It was always going to."

When I finally opened my hands, the firefly lay still in my palm.

For years, I told myself that wasn't where it began.

But perhaps it was.

Perhaps that was the first lesson I refused to learn.

Because I grew into the kind of person who kept things.

Not objects.

Moments.

People.

The feeling of sitting in the back seat of my father's car while rain tapped against the windows.

The way my brother would grab my wrist and drag me outside when the first snow fell.

A friend's laughter from a summer that ended too quickly.

I collected them all.

Not in photographs. Not in journals.

Inside myself.

I revisited them constantly, polishing them until they gleamed.

And whenever I felt one beginning to fade, panic would seize me.

I would repeat conversations until I knew them by heart.

I would trace old scars and remember where they came from.

I would hold people close, sometimes too close, because I could already feel the future stealing them from me.

I loved fiercely.

That was what everyone said.

What they meant was that I loved fearfully.

Every goodbye felt like a threat.

Every ending felt like an injustice.

Every passing season felt like a theft.

I watched leaves fall and thought of death.

I watched children grow and thought of distance.

I watched sunsets and mourned them before they were even gone.

The world seemed determined to move on from every beautiful thing it created.

I could not understand why.

Why make spring if it must become summer?

Why make stars if dawn would erase them?

Why let people love each other if one day they would have to part?

I spent years fighting a battle against impermanence.

Years trying to hold water in my hands.

And, like water, everything slipped through eventually.

Friends moved away.

My parents grew older.

Faces changed.

Voices changed.

Lives changed.

Mine changed.

No matter how tightly I held on, time always proved stronger.

The cruelest part was that the harder I tried to preserve things, the less I seemed able to enjoy them.

A perfect afternoon became a future memory before it was even over.

A conversation became something I needed to remember instead of something I could simply experience.

I was so busy trying to keep life that I forgot to live it.

The revelation came quietly.

Not through tragedy.

Not through wisdom.

Not through grief.

I was sitting in a park one evening, watching sunlight move through the branches overhead.

Children were playing nearby.

A dog chased a ball.

The sky was turning gold.

Nothing remarkable.

The kind of moment I would once have tried desperately to preserve.

And suddenly I realised that this moment was already disappearing.

The light was changing.

The children were growing.

The season was turning.

Even as I watched, it was leaving me.

And yet it was beautiful.

Not despite that fact.

Because of it.

The sunset mattered because it would end.

The blossom mattered because it would fall.

A song mattered because eventually it would fade into silence.

The people I loved mattered because our time together was finite.

For so long I had treated impermanence as the enemy of beauty.

What if it was the source of it?

I thought of the firefly.

Of my small hands closing around something luminous.

Of my desperate certainty that keeping it was the same thing as loving it.

How many times had I repeated that mistake?

How many people had I burdened with my fear?

How many moments had I squeezed so tightly that they lost the freedom that made them precious?

The evening breeze stirred the trees.

For the first time in years, I let it pass over me without wishing I could trap it.

I let the sunlight fade.

I let the voices drift away.

And I loved it no less.

Perhaps even more.

Because love was never the art of holding on.

It is the courage to let things pass through your hands and cherish them anyway.

The matter, when spoken of plainly, was nothing at all.

And yet, for a time, it appeared to occupy the whole of his mind.

It began- as these things often do- not with an event, but with an absence. A silence where, by all reasonable expectation, there ought to have been a reply. He had written in the morning a short note, neither urgent nor careless in its tone, and had thought no more of it once it was sent. There were errands to be attended to, a day that required his presence, and no cause, at that hour, to imagine any disturbance.

But by the afternoon, the silence had lengthened.

It is a curious failing of the human mind that it does not endure such spaces with ease. What is not said begins, by degrees, to take on a shape of its own. At first, he supposed it a simple oversight. Then, a delay. Then- though he could not have said why- something more deliberate.

He found himself returning to the matter without intention. In the midst of conversation, his thoughts would wander. In the quiet between tasks, they would settle upon it again, as though it possessed some claim upon his attention. He reviewed his own words, searching for some fault in their arrangement, some unintended sharpness or ambiguity that might account for the silence. Finding none did little to settle him.

By evening, the thing had grown considerably.

It was no longer merely the absence of a reply, but the suggestion of meaning within that absence. A hesitation. A withdrawal. Perhaps even a quiet reproof. It seemed to him that something must have altered- some balance shifted, though he could not say when or how. The mind, once set upon such a course, is not easily persuaded to abandon it. Each moment that passed without answer appeared to confirm what had never been established.

And yet, there was nothing to support it.

When, at last, a reply did arrive, it was of the most ordinary kind. Brief, apologetic, and entirely without weight. The delay was explained in a manner so simple that it scarcely warranted mention. There was no hidden meaning, no trace of the significance he had so carefully constructed. It resolved itself at once into what it had always been; a trivial circumstance, unworthy of the attention it had received.

He read it once, and then again, as though repetition might reveal something overlooked. It did not.

For a time, he sat with the curious sense of something having been misplaced. Not the message itself- that was now plain- but the hours that had gathered around it.

The consideration, the quiet unease, the subtle rearrangement of thought and feeling that had seemed, in the moment, entirely justified. All of it had arisen without foundation, and yet it had not been without consequence.

It would be easy, perhaps, to dismiss the matter. To laugh at it, even. But there was something in it that resisted such easy resolution.

For if so little could give rise to so much, then what confidence could one have in the weight of things as they first appear?

He rose at last and went about his evening as he had intended before any of it began.

The air beyond the window was unchanged; the light had faded in its usual manner, indifferent to his brief disturbance. Nothing, it seemed, had been altered by it.

And yet, he could not entirely persuade himself that nothing had occurred.

For though the cause had been slight- indeed, almost nothing- the effect had been, for a time, quite real.

And that, he thought, was perhaps the greater concern.

February 12, 1554

I should not be here.

Yet the crowd presses in, thick with the stink of damp wool and sweat, their voices a murmur of gossip, of prayer, of something near revelry. The Tower looms before us, its stones blackened by years and soot, its walls indifferent to the tragedies they have swallowed whole. Today, they will drink the blood of another innocent.

Jane Grey. Queen for nine days.

A child, really. Seventeen. Younger than my own sister, who still clings to her girlhood, who still believes in the mercy of God and men. How, then, is Jane to die a traitor’s death? How is her name to be spat upon when it was never hers to write, when others thrust a crown upon her head and called it fate?

The sky above us swirls grey, thick with mist and the taste of burning. Smoke from a nearby pyre curls through the streets, its scent clinging to my tongue like regret. The world feels as though it, too, mourns.

And yet- yet- the people around me do not.

"God save the Queen," someone mutters, but they do not mean Jane. They mean Mary, Mary the rightful, Mary the vengeful, Mary with her father’s Tudor fire and her mother’s Castilian steel. The Queen who will burn men in the streets, who will see this kingdom scoured clean in the name of her faith.

Jane is an obstacle removed. A footnote. A lesson.

But I see her.

She emerges from the Tower, clad not in royal finery but in the plain, modest black of a woman resigned to death. No jewels, no crown, no sign she ever held a throne, save for the way she carries herself- as though she is still a queen, despite what they have stolen from her.

Her face is pale, but there is no terror in it. No weeping, no trembling. It is this, more than anything, that silences the crowd. The executioner waits, hooded and faceless, an axe resting in his calloused hands. He has done this before. He will do it again.

She kneels.

I clutch the crucifix at my neck, but it feels heavier than it ever has, the weight of it pressing into my chest. What good is faith, when the pious die and the wicked wield power?

Jane lifts her face to the sky, as if to memorize it one last time. Then, in a voice both fragile and unyielding, she speaks:

"I die a true Christian woman, and I look to be saved by no other means but the mercy of God."

A hush, then. Even the wind stills.

She reaches for the block, but she fumbles- her fingers grasping at empty air, her breath hitching as she searches for what she cannot see. My stomach twist. She is blindfolded. She cannot find her own death.

For the first time, her composure cracks. Her hands tremble. A murmur ripples through the crowd- not of mockery, but of something else. Something that tastes like shame.

Then there is another round of whispers, whispers that make my stomach turn. A cacophony of voices muttering about the hilarity of how pathetic she looks, a traitorous Queen brought to her knees. They rejoice, and I just bow my head in disgust.

A hand guides her. The executioner’s assistant, perhaps, or some other soul who cannot bear to watch her suffer. She lays her head upon the block.

A prayer, soft as a whisper.

Then the axe falls.

A gasp, sharp as a blade, cuts through the silence. Not from me- from the woman beside me, her breath hitching, her hands clasped to her chest. There is something raw in her expression, something horrified. She had called Jane a traitor, only moments before. But now she stares at the severed body, the spill of blood against the stones, and she looks as though she might be sick.

She did not think it would be real.

It must be her first execution. She seems young, and wealthy. Maybe she was sheltered by protective parents. I do not know, and quite frankly, I could not care less.

The moment stretches, heavy, unbearable. Then, as if the air has been let from a balloon, the crowd shifts, exhales, moves. The moment collapses. The spectacle is over. Jane was their entertainment for the day, and she has exhausted her purpose.

People drift away, muttering about supper, about the cold, about how swift the blade was.

I stay.

The colour of blood against stone is not red but black. The same as ash, the same as soot.

The same as the sky before a storm.

The witch lived at the edge of the world.

That was what the villagers said, in hushed voices and behind drawn shutters. She lived where the fields ended, where the earth turned black and the trees leaned inward, their branches tangled like old fingers in prayer.

Her house was a place of bones. They hung from the rafters, bleached white by the sun, rattling softly in the wind. The path to her door was lined with them, half-buried in the earth- ribs like curved knives, skulls grinning up at the sky. No one knew if they were human or animal. No one dared ask.

Children whispered of the things she could do. That she could turn into a crow, her voice swallowed by the wind. That she could summon storms with a breath, with a sigh. That she could pull the dead from their graves and make them dance.

They did not know her name.

But Mari knew her own name, and that was enough.

She had once been something else. A girl, perhaps, though she could barely remember the shape of it. The softness of a mother's hand on her cheek, the sound of a lullaby hummed in the dark. But that was long ago, before the fever, before the fire.

She had died once.

She had burned.

The men of the village had tied her wrists and thrown her onto the pyre, their faces hard as stone, their voices raised in the name of God, prayers curling in the air like incense. The flames had licked at her skin, kissed her hair into smoke, filled her lungs with embers.

And then-

She woke.

Not in heaven, nor in hell, but in the black earth, in the roots and the rot and the cold, wet dark. No pearly gates, no open arms, no great reckoning of sins and virtues. She woke with her body remade, her breath drawn from the wind, her bones stitched together with night.

The earth had claimed her, and in return, she had learned its secrets.

Now, she walked through her garden of bones, her bare feet pressing against damp soil. The dead whispered to her, their voices curling like mist around her ankles. Some had come to her willingly- lovers lost to war, mothers who had buried too many children. Others had been given to her by the land, their bodies found in shallow graves, in forests where the trees grew too thick, too silent.

They did not speak in words, but in memory. A locket clutched in skeletal fingers. A wedding ring buried beneath a tree. The sound of a child's laughter, long faded.

Mari gathered them all.

Tonight, the air smelled of rain. The sky had turned the color of a bruise, deep and swollen with the weight of the coming storm.

She moved through the garden, her hands brushing against hanging bones, their touch light as breath. She had work to do.

At the edge of the trees, the girl stood.

She was small, thin as a reed, her hands curled into fists at her sides. Her dress was torn, her feet bare. She smelled of fear.

Mari tilted her head.

"You are lost," she said, matter of factly.

The girl swallowed. "They’ll come for me."

Mari did not need to ask who. She could see it in the girl's eyes, in the bruises on her skin. A father, perhaps. A husband. A village that feared what it did not understand.

She had seen it before.

Mari reached into the folds of her dress, fingers brushing against the small pouch at her hip. Inside were the things that had power- dried herbs, slivers of blessed bones, a vial of something dark and thick as sorrow.

"You have two choices," she said softly. "Run, and they will hunt you. Stay, and they will burn you."

The girl's breath hitched. "Then what am I to do?"

Mari opened her palm. The wind stirred. The bones in the trees shuddered.

"Die," she said. "And be remade."

The girl stared at her, wide-eyed, lips parting to protest- but then, the wind howled. The sky split open.

The storm came.

Mari did not move as the rain poured down, as lightning struck the ground in a violent burst of light. The girl gasped, stumbling back, but Mari held firm. She stepped forward, pressing the small pouch into the girl's hands.

"You must choose," she whispered, her voice barely louder than the storm.

The girl trembled. Then, slowly, she nodded.

Mari took her by the hand, led her into the dark, into the garden of bones.

That night, the village burned.

By morning, the girl was gone.

And in the garden, where the bones hung and the wind whispered, a new voice joined the song.

Mari closed her eyes.

The dead would always find their way home.