I write the held breath before coffee spills, right before I sleep. Words caught mid-gesture, mid-collapse, mid-becoming — mine, my mother's, strangers I invent and then mourn. Acrylic to watercolour to oil pastel because it smudges and betrays me, while remembering every touch of my hand. When I was small, every light stayed on. Not waste, just certainty. Illumination was infinite, darkness a choice I could refuse. Then eventually: the hallway I stopped walking, the kitchen at 3am where I learned to be alone, the porch light that guided my cat Blink home. Each taught me visibility is conditional, that seeing depends on what I can still afford to power. So I draw faces in partial eclipse. Half-lit, surreal, synaesthetic, reaching toward sources that may not be there. Not sadness. My adaptation. My pupils dilating. Learning to navigate by feel and colour because I had to. I don't trust writing that makes itself naive, I want the viewer to lean in the way I leaned into doorways as a child, catch themselves inventing stories that might be wrong, feel a validation they have been craving for years. I write because it's a form of therapy for me, it makes me feel whole.
