Familiar Strangers

Between What We Show and What We Can’t Contain

I’ve been told more than once recently that I move through a wide range of emotions. At first, I laughed— doesn’t everyone? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings are the raw, primitive signals that evolution has handed us: hunger, disgust, satisfaction, irritation. They help us survive. Emotions, though, are different. They are layered and human, shaped by memory, imagination, and meaning. They connect us to history, to each other, and to ourselves. To experience emotion is to see not just the surface of things, but their depth— the way billions of years of change have somehow led to this moment, and to the fact that we get to feel it at all.

Toaster Girl

Ode to Toes

Silly little poem

I Love

I love what I do for a living. Throwing myself into a codebase feels like throwing myself into the chest of somebody I love; messy, unknown, and sometimes scary. But still somewhat predictable… When you look at the pieces with a clear mind, they all fit in together.

The Shape of Me (But Make It Complicated)

Because why settle for simplicity when you can be a cosmic riddle?

I’m learning that being human means living with contradiction. There’s this ache, this relentless hunger to be seen, but also a fierce need to protect the most fragile parts of myself. I want to be wholly here, yet untethered, free. And somehow, I keep finding pieces of myself in the spaces I thought I’d left behind—in the people I’ve almost forgotten, in the smoke of long-ago nights, and in the words I try to wrap around it all. I’m a shape in motion, a story that refuses to end, endlessly shifting, season by season.