bedside table.

on recovering, a month and a half spent in therapy, and the postpartum depression of rebirthing yourself.

cremello foal via @dreamstars on tumblr, "shoppers in the sky" by jessie boy via flickr, @sentimentalbeing2001 tumblr.

❝ in front of my mother and my sisters, i pretend love is cheap and vulgar. i act like it’s a sin–i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. but at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb. i dream up a lover who makes love like [she] is separating salt from water. ❞ — salma deera, “salt.”

jan 11th, 2026.

It is Sunday and raining and quiet. Luteal phase again. I am in slight pain/discomfort due to the presence of gas in my belly. I have never wanted to be in the ocean more than now. And truly in. I want to be submerged underneath the waves up to my shoulders, smelling of salt and that thin space between water and sky that goes pink then purple before reaching night. I’m still lightheaded since leaving home, but the allergy pill has helped. I wish I were a mermaid, bottom body gone smooth and reptile, breathing nothing but salt and song and sun. I can only hope my iron is going up.

I’m doing okay here, taking care of myself, and not giving up. I am tired but proud, which I think is sign of a life lived. The longing for home does not escape me, but I feel less drowned in it. I think I am transitioning—to what I do not know—but it is getting easier to bear. It is easier to cry and be sad without assigning meaning and tumbling into a spiral.

My Hollanov fic went viral thanks to a kind mutual’s tweet of my fic (five thousand, eight hundred likes. Over six thousand saves.) and I’ve been flooded with comments since, which filled me with incredible joy. I’ve responded to seventy-eight this morning, but now there are twenty-five more. For tomorrow or sometime when. Someone commented that they can tell everything I write, even if not about romance, is romantic. I could’ve cried at that, nearly did. Yes, everything is romantic for me, and I am highly sensitive and intense, and writing makes it all bearable.

Another comment from the South of France was my favorite—stilted English and dips back into our romance tongue. Told me that my fic felt too intimate to stay in. A lovely compliment.

Therapy is introducing new things to me, and I am finding it easier to be kind to myself. I must get back to submitting to agents and conceptualizing something new to keep writing through the wait. My agent will find me. I will live. Halfway through January already, and the days end later. Spring is approaching.

Valoa, valoa, valoa.

Light light light.

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jan 31st, 2026.

February begins tomorrow. It is odd to think of January as coming to a close. My sinuses are flaring again, and I feel slightly lightheaded. Last night I had a mini anxiety attack because the pressure felt odd when I moved and—

Sorry. New pen.

But the pressure felt odd and disorienting as I tried to sleep. It made me think again of that quote that was like, the healing process truly comes back to revisiting the same instances with new perspectives and feelings. I was still scared, but able to cut through the spiral and be kind to myself, which is a big win. The fear is okay when I remember that I now know what to do.

I think as well with my period being so heavy that my iron fell low again. But I’ve been taking my supplements, which have made me feel more grounded than before. However, I’m slipping on eating properly, so I need to make a real effort this week.

Therapy has been helpful though grueling. I find myself bracing during the calls because she cuts through and doesn’t hold back. And I make this big show of journaling for homework, but have only done it once, if then. I think there is fear there, too.

I worry a lot about stumbling and falling, turning back into that dark space that consumed most of November and all of December. I worry about it all the time.

I don’t know what to do with that. I miss Paris.

I want to write, I feel the urge, but I don’t know what. It’s like I have my hands around the idea of something, and then it just slips away. Like a seal’s coat.

I miss home. I miss Paris. I miss being happy in London. But only four more periods ‘til I go home. Three, really.

I think today is a harder day. I think I just want to be on my own, something not to worry about.

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Aquaphor by the tube, Neutrogena Norwegian formula hand cream, two-year-old AirPod Pros sheltered via a tortoise-print Kate Spade case, two gold ear cuffs braided with cubic zirconia, Privé Revaux eyeglasses—slightly oversized, an off-brand Stanley Cup dupe in pointe shoe pink.

All of this spills dramatically along the rather thick limb of my pine headboard. Something nearly always falls when I get up in the morning; I’m the most frantic when it’s one of my cuffs threatening to perform a disappearance behind my pillows. I’m so desperate to find it, to reach it before it flows deeply into the black space behind the mattress and underneath the bed, never to be found again.

I miss having a bedside table. It’s also very difficult to admit that something is wrong with you.

Well, it is less admitting that something is wrong with you, and more that it is difficult to have everyone who matters to you finally realize it as well. In some ways, I’m relieved. It has loosened something inside of me, this realization that I have never once been making things up.

“I remember you had moments like this when you were little, that you were like this when you were younger.” My mother said this to me weeks ago, over a month ago, in the height of the most recent anxious episode I’d been in. I was teetering over something, nearly bursting at the seams with a shriek of something: tears, disbelief, delight. An odd smattering of emotion that only felt volatile, destabilizing.

Yes, I have always been like this. I have always been strange for no reason at all, sad and cow-eyed and trembling, fear ricocheting through the chamber of my chest for reasons that could be shelved mostly under needless.

Yes, I have always been like this. Aching for touch, and pretending that it was for something for other people. Aching for love, because this was something that seemed reserved for other people, seemed just out of reach, off to the side because I didn’t yet have the word for what I was.

Nearly all of last year, I used to fall asleep watching medical ASMRs. An odd choice with someone for healthy anxiety, but it wasn’t about the threat to health; it was about the touching. My favorite were back exams, because my back ached badly back then, my spine always cracking and burning along the lining, the flame coming to set fire to everything along the blades of my shoulders.

I’d have it very low and very close, the phone propped against the wall on top of my beloved weighted, stuffed fox gifted by a best friend, and I’d only spare a moment to think about the implications of absorbing the radiation before beginning to drift off.

Sometimes, I’d have to tuck in an earbud or turn the volume all the way up, so that I could better hear the quiet grasp of fingers against skin or the shuffle of a hand skating down a limb. Most times, I would tingle, and when I did, it was usually because of the back exams rather than the other “appointment-style” formats.

I would fall under the spell of sleep, listening to the course of someone else’s touch, the quiet whispering, or sometimes no talk at all. Just two people pressed together for the sake of comfort. I began to look for longer videos, needed it to continue for hours, eventually stumbled into hair-play videos (brushing, oiling, braiding, etc.), and massaging when things got dire, and I’d played my favorites all out.

I haven’t listened to anything of the sort since getting sick last winter.

But touch hasn’t become any less important. I don’t know why it’s such a challenge to admit that I want to be touched. I don’t know why my brain thinks it’s normal for other people, and not for me.

I am very intense, very severe, and there’s not much I can do to change that. But I worry that it keeps others away from me, that I’m just never going to luck out like everyone I seem to know, destined to maintain and love myself forever, not meant for having someone to love me.

I want to come home to someone, I want to lie on the tile and have their hand along my back.

And then sometimes, I think: this is just 22.

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