The Woman Who Followed the Sound: An April Folk Story of the Green World

Photography by Cottonbro Studio

There once was a woman who walked beyond the edge of her village. It was the first true arrival of spring, the kind that does not ask permission but announces itself through softened ground and air that feels newly inhabited. Some would later say it was April first, though in those places time was not measured by calendars so much as by the behavior of the earth itself. In her departure there was nothing remarkable. No urgency. No witness who could say, with certainty, when the moment shifted from ordinary to something else. She simply followed the sound.

Whether it was music, wind, or something less tangible was never agreed upon. But it was a sound. Or rather, something that resembled one. A frequency that moved beneath hearing, something felt more than received. There were those in the village who understood this distinction. The old ones, they were called. Those who had lived long enough to recognize that the land does not always speak in ways the ear can translate. They said the earth spoke to everyone. Not in language, not in sound, but in vibration. And that every so often, someone would answer.

She was gone for days.

Or at least that is what the others believed. Because when she returned, nothing in her appearance suggested absence. Her clothes carried no sign of travel. Her body bore no evidence of hardship or distance. Nothing, except the quiet arithmetic of time, could have insisted that she had been gone at all. It might have been minutes. It might have been something else entirely. And yet those closest to her felt it immediately. Not in what they saw, but in what they sensed.

As she moved through space, it was as if the air adjusted around her. Not dramatically, but subtly, as though density itself had shifted. Her presence did not arrive in the same way it once had. Her speech changed, though not in volume. It became measured, inward, as if each word had to pass through another place before reaching her mouth. She seemed to be listening while speaking, attending to something just beyond the visible. There was a quality to her attention that unsettled those who knew her best. It was not distraction. It was orientation. As though she were encountering this world for the first time, or perhaps remembering it as it had once been.

When pressed, she offered only a single explanation.

“I went where everything was alive.”

In early Celtic regions, particularly in parts of Ireland and Scotland, there existed a long held understanding of seasonal thresholds. The turning between spring and summer, what would later be called Beltane, was not simply agricultural. It was considered a point of permeability. Fires were lit not only for protection, but for passage. Livestock were driven between them. Bodies were marked by smoke. It was believed that during this time, the boundary between the human world and what lay beyond it thinned. Not vanished, but softened. The land itself was understood to be animate, responsive, aware.

Within that framework, stories like hers were not dismissed. They were recognized.

The place she described, though she did not name it, aligned with what was often referred to as the Green World. Not heaven. Not death. But a realm of intensified life, where growth was not seasonal but constant, where time did not behave in the ways humans expected it to. In older accounts, particularly those recorded in early folklore collections of the nineteenth century, there are repeated references to individuals who crossed into such spaces. Most often women. Most often during periods of seasonal change. They did not return with spectacle. They returned with alteration.

Something in them had shifted.

It was not always visible, but it was always felt.

In the weeks that followed her return, small things began to reorganize around her. Plants seemed to respond to her presence. Not dramatically, not in ways that could be proven, but enough to be noticed. Animals approached her without hesitation. Women, especially, found themselves drawn to her, though they could not always articulate why. They came with questions they had not known they were carrying. Questions about the body, about longing, about the quiet unrest that seemed to rise with the warming of the earth.

She did not call herself anything. Not a healer. Not a seer. She did not name what had happened to her.

But she listened.

And those who paid attention began to understand that what had changed was not her form, but her orientation to life itself. She no longer moved as someone contained by the world she inhabited. She moved as someone in conversation with it. As if the boundary between her and the living field around her had thinned, just as the old ones had always said it would.

There are reasons these stories persist. Not because they can be proven, but because they remain recognizable. Even now, April carries that same undercurrent. A subtle stirring that cannot be fully explained by weather or light alone. It arrives in the body first. In restlessness. In memory. In a kind of quiet alertness that does not always make sense.

In older traditions, this was never dismissed as imagination. It was understood as response. The earth shifting, and the body answering.

The woman who walked beyond the edge of her village was not the first. She would not be the last. What happened to her was not an exception, but an expression of something cyclical. Something that returns each year, whether it is acknowledged or not.

Because spring does not simply bloom.

It calls.

And sometimes, someone follows.

Zora Neale Hurston and the Magic of Folklore: The Woman Who Preserved Hoodoo Traditions

Long before spiritual traditions like rootwork, hoodoo, and ancestral folk practices were discussed openly in books or academic spaces, one woman was quietly documenting them with care and respect. While much of the world dismissed these traditions as superstition, she recognized them as something else entirely: cultural knowledge.

Zora Neale Hurston did not simply study folklore. She preserved the living spiritual traditions of the African diaspora at a time when they were rarely taken seriously.

Today she is widely known as the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, but her work extended far beyond literature. Hurston was also one of the first Black women anthropologists in the United States, and her research took her deep into the spiritual practices of the American South and the Caribbean.

What she discovered there would change how future generations understood magic, folklore, and cultural memory.

A Childhood Surrounded by Stories

Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first self governed Black towns in the United States. Storytelling was woven into daily life there. Front porches became stages where people shared folktales, jokes, spiritual beliefs, and oral histories passed down through generations.

From an early age Hurston learned that stories carried power. They preserved memory, identity, and knowledge that did not always appear in official histories.

This early exposure shaped the work she would later pursue as both a writer and anthropologist.

Documenting Hoodoo in the American South

In the 1930s Hurston began traveling through Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana collecting folklore and spiritual traditions. She immersed herself in communities where hoodoo, a system of African American folk magic, remained part of everyday life.

Unlike many researchers of her time, Hurston did not approach these traditions as an outsider looking down on them. She lived among the people she studied and allowed practitioners to teach her their methods and beliefs.

Her book Mules and Men became one of the most important records of hoodoo ever written.

Within its pages she documented:

spiritual baths used for cleansing and protection
herbal mixtures and root work
candle rituals and charms
beliefs about luck, fate, and spiritual influence

What made Hurston’s work remarkable was not just the information she recorded, but the respect she showed toward the people who shared it.

She treated their knowledge as wisdom rather than superstition.

Journeys Into Caribbean Spiritual Traditions

Hurston’s research eventually took her beyond the American South. In the late 1930s she traveled to Haiti and Jamaica to study spiritual traditions connected to the African diaspora.

Her experiences there became the basis for another important book, Tell My Horse.

In Haiti she attended Vodou ceremonies and observed rituals that honored ancestral spirits. She documented how spiritual practices shaped everyday life and community structure.

These journeys allowed Hurston to show readers something rarely acknowledged at the time: that African derived spiritual traditions were complex systems of belief with their own philosophies, ethics, and cultural significance.

Magic as Cultural Memory

Hurston understood that folklore was more than entertainment. It carried the memory of a people.

Stories, rituals, and spiritual practices preserved knowledge that could survive even when formal history ignored or erased it. Through her writing she ensured that these traditions would not disappear.

Her work helped future generations recognize that hoodoo, Vodou, and other folk spiritual systems were not relics of the past. They were living traditions shaped by resilience and adaptation.

The Legacy She Left Behind

For many years after her death in 1960, Hurston’s work was largely forgotten. It was not until the late twentieth century that scholars and readers began rediscovering the depth of her contributions.

Today she is celebrated not only as a brilliant novelist but also as a cultural preservationist who safeguarded spiritual knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.

Zora Neale Hurston did not claim to be a mystic or a practitioner of magic. Yet in many ways she performed a different kind of magic altogether.

She listened.
She recorded.
She ensured that the voices and traditions of her community would continue to be heard.

And through that work, she left behind a legacy that still speaks today.

The Woman Who Figured Out the Secret to Immortality

Image Courtesy Library of Congress by Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer Article by Bruja’s Circle

For centuries, humans have searched for immortality. Ancient myths tell of elixirs, sacred waters, and hidden knowledge that could allow a person to live forever. Alchemists experimented with strange substances. Kings and emperors sent explorers across oceans looking for fountains of youth. Entire philosophies were built around the desire to escape time. But immortality rarely looks like the legends imagine it. Sometimes it looks like a woman sitting quietly at a desk, writing. Joyce Carol Oates has spent more than half a century doing exactly that. While many writers produce a handful of books in their lifetime, Oates has written dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories, essays, and poems. Her body of work stretches across generations, touching subjects as varied as violence, identity, family, history, and the strange emotional terrain of ordinary life.

Looking at the scale of her work, one begins to suspect that Oates may have discovered something others have missed.

Not a potion. Not a secret ritual. But a different form of immortality.

Writing as a Way of Remaining

Every story preserves a moment of consciousness. When a writer records an observation, an emotion, or a piece of the human experience, it does not disappear with time. It becomes part of a larger conversation that continues long after the writer is gone. Readers open a book decades or centuries later and suddenly find themselves face to face with another mind. The distance between past and present collapses. In this way, literature becomes a kind of time travel. Oates has spoken often about discipline rather than inspiration. Writing, in her view, is not something that waits for perfect conditions. It is something that happens every day, through persistence and attention. That consistency may be the real secret.

The Legacy of Attention

Many people assume immortality belongs to extraordinary moments. Great discoveries. Historic achievements. Dramatic events. But writers understand something different. Immortality can grow out of careful observation. The small details of life that might otherwise be forgotten. The texture of a conversation. The tension in a room. The quiet thoughts that pass through someone’s mind at night. When these moments are captured in language, they remain accessible to future readers. A person does not need to live forever for their perspective to endure. Their voice simply needs to be recorded.

Women and the Question of Legacy

For much of history, the literary world did not easily grant women this kind of permanence. Many women wrote, but their work was overlooked, unpublished, or dismissed as insignificant. The idea that a woman could leave a lasting intellectual or artistic legacy was often treated as secondary to other roles society expected her to fulfill. Writers like Joyce Carol Oates changed that narrative. Through sheer persistence and dedication to the craft, she created a body of work so extensive that it cannot be ignored. Her stories continue to circulate through classrooms, libraries, and private collections around the world. Her voice travels farther each year.

A Different Kind of Immortality

The secret to immortality, it turns out, may not involve escaping death at all. It may simply require creating something that continues to speak. A story that moves someone decades from now. A sentence that lingers in the mind. A book that becomes part of another person’s life. Joyce Carol Oates did not set out to defeat time. She simply kept writing. Yet through that practice, she achieved something remarkable. Her work has become part of the cultural memory that shapes how people understand the world.

That is its own form of permanence. And perhaps that is the real secret.

Behind My Eye: A Spell for the Half-Light

By Selahmon Risingsun Photography by Matias Mango

Image by Matias Mango

I have never truly spoken about what it’s like to be legally blind. Maybe because language feels too small to carry it. It’s not just about sight; it’s about initiation. One day, you wake up inside a dimming world, and it feels like being sealed in a dark room where the walls breathe and the light switch refuses to exist. You wait for the return of what was lost, until you realize—
the darkness isn’t punishment.
It’s a portal.

Behind my eye, there is a hidden universe. A place where light folds in on itself like silk. It’s a kind of velvet void, ancient and sentient. It hums with the songs of all things unseen. I used to think half of me had gone missing—but no, half of me simply went elsewhere. That part of me began listening instead of looking. Feeling instead of chasing. Knowing instead of seeing.

They call it blindness. I call it witchcraft.

Because now I can sense storms before they gather. I can feel people’s truths crawling beneath their skin before they speak. My intuition sharpened into blade and balm. My one good eye stares into this world, while the other gazes into the one beneath it. Together, they make me whole.

I don’t talk about my vision much, not out of shame but devotion. This eye is my familiar, my oracle. It sees without needing to see. It reads the room, the wind, the pulse of the air. I’ve stopped wishing for symmetry. Perfection is dull; perception is divine.

People tell me my eyes look like the sky arguing with itself—one dusk, one dawn. Sometimes they say it feels like falling into a galaxy. Maybe that’s what I am now: a galaxy rearranged.

There’s a strange sensuality in half-light, a soft ache that glows where sight ends and spirit begins. I’ve made a home there. I’ve learned that beauty isn’t in what we see, but in how we sense.

So when they ask, “How does it feel to lose vision?”
I tell them:
I didn’t lose.
I transmuted.

Behind my eye lies the night, the whisper, the knowing.
And when I close the other, I see everything.

Lesson: The Power of Partial Light

Disability is not a deficit—it’s a different kind of doorway.
We live in a world that worships symmetry, speed, and sameness, but those who move differently—who see differently—carry sacred sight. They remind us that wholeness has never meant perfection.

When you lose one sense, the others rise like ancient guardians.
When one path closes, another—often quieter, wiser, more luminous—opens.
The lesson is this: we must stop romanticizing “normal” and start revering variation.

The body is not broken just because it bends a different way.
The mind is not lesser because it perceives through shadow.
And blindness—whether of the eye or the heart—can become its own teacher if you let it.

Those of us who live with visible or invisible differences are not asking for pity.
We are asking for presence.
To be seen not as lacking, but as luminous in a different frequency.
Because every so-called limitation can become an instrument of intuition, creativity, and divine perspective.

Behind every altered sense is a portal to deeper knowing.
Behind every scar, a star waiting to be recognized.

When Love Demands Too Much: The Grief I Buried Beneath His

By Selahmon Risingsun Photography by RDNE Stock project

What happens when you’re left to grieve not only the person,
but the weight of carrying everything they could not?

Today began in light, but it ended in shadow.
Facebook — that tireless archivist of memory — unearthed ghosts I had tried to lay to rest.
A photograph of him appeared, then a reminder of his late mother.
Her words to me surfaced, like spirits rising through water.

She was not just his mother.
She became my confidante,
my witness,
my sacred ally when the nights grew long.
I leaned on her when addiction was the third body in our bed.
I poured my questions into her inbox like prayers:
How do I hold him together?
How do I keep us from breaking?

But clarity comes with distance.
Now I see:
I was the one holding us up.
I was the one arranging therapy,
chasing AA meetings,
dragging us both toward a healing he never tried to hold.
I was the altar,
the offering,
the sacrifice.

And when she died,
I carried his grief too.
Mine was silenced.
My tears belonged to him.
My strength was spent outward,
never inward.
I dissolved.
I disappeared.
I drowned in silence.

Years later, the storm came.
Tears, long overdue,
wept not just for her,
but for myself.
Because back then, I was too busy bracing his body
to let my own shake.
Too busy smothering my sorrow
so his could breathe.

It is a bitter revelation:
while I was fighting to be strong for him,
he never once tried to be strong for me.

This is not condemnation.
It is testimony.
Addiction is a merciless captor.
Grief is an unforgiving guest.
But love — true love — cannot survive when it rests on only one back.
Grief, buried, will always seep back through the cracks.
And healing cannot be outsourced.

I write this for the ones drowning quietly in someone else’s ocean.
For those mistaking endurance for intimacy.
For those confusing sacrifice for love.

Here is what I’ve learned:
When you do all the work,
you do not save the relationship.
You only lose yourself.
And sometimes the most sacred act of love
is not in holding on,
but in finally letting go.

---

Lesson

Love is not martyrdom.
It is not meant to consume you,
to drain you,
to hollow you out.
If you find yourself carrying both your grief and theirs,
know this: you are not failing.
You are awakening.
True love requires two hands, two hearts, two souls rising.
And when only one is willing,
the holiest act is release.

When the Walls Come Down

Written By Selah Risingsun Photography by Julia Malushko

There is a strange magic in the moment before collapse.
Everyone else runs when the old towers begin to sway.
But some of us — the ones with ash on our hands and fire in our veins — stay.
We do not run from the dust; we inhale it. We let it mark us.
We hold up our hands like lanterns, we press record, we take pictures. We witness.

For years, I built my life as if it were a fortress, stone upon stone, secret upon secret.
Family, lovers, silence, ritual — stacked too high to see the ground.
And then, without warning, the beams gave way.
No earthquake. No fire.
Just the inevitable undoing of something that had forgotten how to breathe.

I thought I would be afraid.
I thought I would scatter like birds at the crack of thunder.
But something older, something sparse and guiding, whispered: Stay.
Stay in the ruins. Stay in the smoke. Stay and see.

So I stripped myself bare,
casting off layer after layer like serpent-skin.
A demolition I did not cause but could no longer resist.
I walked into the wreckage with my own two hands,
taking pictures — not for nostalgia, but for proof.
Proof that death and rebirth can be twin flames.
Proof that the ground beneath the ashes still belonged to me.

By the time the dust settled,
I had seen what most are too fearful to see:
the skeleton of the old and the quick pulse of the new,
rising out of the same soil,
rebuilt faster than grief,
taller than sorrow,
a temple where a tomb once stood.

---

Lesson in the Dust

To every woman who feels her own walls trembling:
your body will always whisper first.
A knot in the stomach, a tightening of breath, a dream you cannot shake.
Listen. That is the spell. That is the warning.

Do not fear the collapse.
Do not run from the falling bricks of your old self.
Stand in the dust.
Breathe it in like incense.
You are not only the one being undone —
you are the witch, the witness, and the builder of what comes next.

Demolition is never the end.
It is the clearing for your awakening. 

The Circle Returns

Written by Selahmon Risingsun Photo by hello aesthe

I tried to run from the roots.
Tried to outrun the ghosts of my bloodline.
Four years of silence carved between me and my father,
a silence born of wounds,
boundaries,
and the kind of pain you tuck away like knives under the bed.

I swore I’d never come back.
But circles are sacred.
And life is a circle.

Here I am.
Not because I lost—
but because the circle called me home.

The girl I was once trembled in shadows,
but the woman I am now stands in firelight.
Her eyes are not the same.
Her bones have been baptized in storms.
She knows that return is not regression.
Return is resurrection.

We try to break from our family’s threads,
but threads become roots,
and roots always remember.
The stillness of this moment says:
stop fighting.
Look again.
See what has grown in the ruins.

The past has claws, yes.
But I do not bleed for it anymore.
The grudge is a chain.
And I am not meant to be bound.

So I forgive—
not to erase,
but to exhale.
I release—
not to excuse,
but to live.

This is the alchemy:
to turn bitterness into breath,
to turn history into healing,
to turn a wound into a window.

Full circle is not a prison.
It is a spell.
It is medicine.
It is where I remember that roots are not cages.
Roots are where the magic begins.

Lesson

Return is not defeat; it’s initiation.
Look with new eyes.
Let forgiveness free you and boundaries keep you whole.
Judge the now, not the story then—are they repairing, am I growing?
If yes: root and rise.
If no: bless and go.
Either way, I become.

"The Truth About Empaths No One Talks About (From Empath Diaries)

Article written by © yourrrr_soul Photo by Hasnain Babar

"...many people think that an empath is a person who has grown up in love, harmony and understanding and therefore can feel  everything. 

That’s not exactly true.

The strongest and most talented empaths, on the contrary, grew up in narcissistic families where they were underestimated, their abilities devalued, where they were not heard, silenced and where no one understood them. 

They grew up in families where emotions were punished and where emotions were considered shameful and where it was customary to hide them.

These children smiled in the company and cried at home, but no one paid attention to it. 

The strongest and most talented empaths grew up behind a narcissistic facade with parents who did not know how to love and often thought that love was control."

Empath Diaries ©yourrrr_soul

If this is you you should to remember:

you’re not “too emotional.”

You’re not “too much.”

You’re a miracle of resilience.

Affirmations for the Empath Who Is Reclaiming Their Power

• I honor my emotions — they are my guidance system.

• My sensitivity is not a weakness; it is my superpower.

• I release the shame that was never mine to carry.

• I am safe to feel, safe to speak, safe to exist fully.

• I choose people who respect my heart, not silence it.

• My intuition is sacred, sharp, and always right.

• I am not who hurt me — I am who I became despite it.

It depends on us how our children’s lives turn out  and it is not the children’s fault that their parents are cold. 

When you are an empath who grew up behind the narcissistic facade you don’t get mad at your parents. 

Children love their parents for what they gave them life. 

You draw the main lesson in your life - a lesson on self-worth. 

You will never prove your worth to anyone ever again. 

And you also know exactly what parent you will never be for your child.

Oleksandra Fomichova (yourrrr_soul) is a Ukrainian writer and the author of the memoir “Under My Skin.” Her work explores twin-flame connections, healing from narcissistic trauma, and the alchemy of self-love through pain, irony, and spiritual awakening.

Instagram: @yourrrr_soul

Website: https://q170810.wixsite.com/under-my-skin-twin-f

Real Life Integration: The Everyday Witch

Written by Epifania Arriagada Photo by Emily Underworld

There is a truth many of us avoid saying out loud.
We are all witches in one way or another.

Some of us live fully in the craft with candles, herbs, sigils, covens, moon charts, and altar rooms that look like museums of inherited magic. Some of us are wild witches who practice in the quiet and the unseen. And many of us fall somewhere along that spectrum, moving back and forth depending on the season of our lives.

The point is never how much you own or how elaborate your rituals look. The point is the heart behind the work.

At its core, the simplest spell we will ever cast comes from our mouths and our intentions. A whispered prayer. A sentence spoken with conviction. A promise to ourselves that we honor. These are spells too. They do not need ceremonial candles or séance strength. They only need our good will and belief in ourselves.

What more powerful force exists than intention that comes from truth.

Tradition has given us so much. It has shown us the ways of the past and the rituals our ancestors built with their hands, their bodies, and their hopes. Their teachings are gifts and we should use them. We should learn from their mistakes, their victories, their rituals, and the ways they found power in a world that tried to silence them. But we must also grow. We are not meant to live only as replicas of the past. We are meant to evolve.

Many witches live a split life.
At work, they clock in, answer emails, pay bills, raise children, and carry responsibilities that feel completely separate from their spiritual selves. Their magic stays tucked in pockets and drawers, hidden behind schedules and social expectations. The witch in them lives in the shadows because the world taught them it needed to.

But integration is simpler than we think.
Start simple.
Stay simple.
Start difficult.
Grow difficult.
It does not matter.

The craft is art.
The craft is play.
The craft is permission to be fully ourselves.

If lighting a candle before work helps you connect, do it.
If speaking a blessing over your morning coffee feels right, do it.
If your magic comes in the form of protecting your peace, honoring your boundaries, praying for your children, writing a truth in your journal, or speaking life into your own name, honor that.

There is no correct way to be a witch.
There is only your way.

Let your practice fit into your real life.
Let it be yours.
Let it be fun.
Let it be sacred.
Let it be light.
Let it be powerful.

Most of all, let it remind you that magic was never something distant.
It was always in your hands.

When You’re a Girl on a Twin Flame Journey

By Oleksandra Fomichova
Pen name: yourrrr_soul
Instagram: @yourrrr_soul
Originally published on Medium: Read the original article

“Twin flames aren’t just a fairy tale. For a girl on this journey, pain is real, invisible battles are constant, and the ultimate lesson is learning to love yourself.”
Self-love is the magic that heals the deepest wounds.

Do You Know What It Means to Be a Girl on a Twin Flame Journey?

You may have heard about twin flames, and maybe you’ve been told it’s just a beautiful fairy tale. Many people don’t believe they exist because twin flames are so rare. But rare doesn’t mean unreal.

Twin flames are real, and the greatest proof of their existence is the endless pain you carry for years, a pain that never fades away.

So what does it mean to be a girl on a twin flame journey?
It means being a constant target and a trigger.
It means nobody around you believes you, and worse, you feel invisible because the world keeps trying to convince you that you don’t exist or that you’re just a joke.

Crazy? Exactly.

Time goes on, and slowly, a girl’s heart almost stops beating. Yet she doesn’t stop loving. She doesn’t stop feeling. In fact, she begins to love and feel even more deeply. And then she realizes the truth: love must begin with herself.

That’s when the magic happens.
Her wounded heart begins to shine.

The Awakening Within

The twin flame journey proves one thing: self-love heals even the deepest wounds. Love can heal the world, but it has to start with you. Because if every person truly loved and valued themselves, there wouldn’t be a single unhappy soul left on earth.

And maybe, we go through this pain only to finally understand that.

This reflection is inspired by my memoir Under My Skin, a raw, ironic, and spiritual story about twin flames, pain, and transformation.

Editorial Reflection

For readers of Bruja Magazine, Oleksandra’s story is both medicine and mirror, a reminder that the alchemy of love begins with truth. The New Moon in Scorpio is a portal of emotional depth and shadow work, making this the perfect lunar window to release her words back into the world. The Waxing Crescent in Sagittarius, just days later, will carry that truth outward, expansive, daring, and bright.

Let this story reach the hearts that need it most, those learning that self-love is not a luxury but a lifeline.

I Picked Him Up Today…

Written by Leah Hannon

I picked him up today. I didn’t think it would hit me so hard. The drive there felt ordinary: red lights, traffic, even passing his old apartment. It was more sad than gut-wrenching. But when I pulled in, I froze. I couldn’t go inside. I didn’t want to see the tchotchkes. I didn’t want to see the cards. And I absolutely didn’t want him in my car. Not because I didn’t want to be with him, but because I did.

Still, I did what I had to do. I went inside. The woman at the desk asked for my ID. Confused, I asked why. “So the right person goes home with you,” she said. Fair enough. I signed the papers, gathered his things, and a kind man helped me carry him to the car. I buckled him into the front seat. No sense putting him in the back. By then the tears blurred the windshield.

My kid had suggested going through a drive-thru since he was coming home with me. You know what? That was brilliant. I got a Coke and some fries. He loved Coke. And fries—well, potatoes in any form. It felt like the perfect tribute. I managed to hold it together until I got home, because it is hard to drive when you’re crying.

Once I got him home, I settled him in the spare room. I looked around and thought about how we would eventually have to make it usable. But that was a problem for another day. I sat down at my computer, and that’s when my heart cracked open.

I sobbed for our dads, for what they had lost. Then I smiled for what they had gained. I thought about their kids and grandkids, how proud they were of them. I even felt a small, guilty relief—no more trips to that Walgreens where everyone seemed dumber than a box of hammers. The thought made me laugh through my tears. I remembered their stubbornness, Irish and German tempers shaking fists at the people they loved most. I chuckled at all their antics over the years. But mostly, I felt the warmth of knowing how much they loved me, my man, and my kid. How special we were to them. How much we still mean. Always.

I cried again for what we had all lost—for their families, for their friends, both now and twenty years ago. And I smiled once more, imagining them together, raising hell and probably instigating half of it.

I picked him up today. And it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Image courtesy Leah Hannon

‘Mercy’ by Stephanie Alvarez

Written by Epi Arriagada. Photography and Narration by Stephanie Alvarez. Visuals by Epi Arriagada

Artist Feature: Stephanie Alvarez

Stephanie Alvarez is a poet whose work dwells in the borderlands of grief, transformation, and desire. Her writing does not shy away from darkness—instead, it inhabits it fully, letting readers witness how pain splinters and reshapes the soul. What sets her apart is the way she threads resilience through despair, allowing even the heaviest words to carry a strange and haunting beauty.

Her poetry feels like a mirror to the body’s inner weather: frozen stillness, sudden fire, and finally, the soft possibility of awakening. Each piece offers a visceral reminder that brokenness does not end the story—it becomes the very material from which new worlds are formed.

Image credit: Stephanie Alvarez

Mercy

Only, lonely, lovely,
Hello.

Once upon a time became
30 below.

Hearts touched by Death’s cool kiss
Lay quietly still in
Hypnotically cruel bliss.

A deliberately coy trist
And a motion of the wrist,
All breaks down to this -

Loving, Unloving, Fateful,
Unfaithful, Missed.

Miscommunication plus
Misinterpretation
Equal grief stricken
Heartache times three.

Then comes the thaw.

Tiny winding splinters through veins
Inescapable pain
Inexplicably remains.

Climbing high and dropping low.
Rapidly, fire builds in the depths and rages,
Races,
Screaming towards the top.

Towards light and open air
And once it is there
It meets a flame.

No name, no hope.
No pain that any ear can hear.

Only lonely and lovely.
Hold me.
Hello, sweet Mercy.

Mercy is a portrait of heartbreak in motion, unfolding through images of freeze, fracture, fire, and fragile surrender. Alvarez begins with repetition—“Only, lonely, lovely”—a chant that frames the entire poem. These three words don’t just describe emotion; they create a rhythm, a pulse of contradiction where isolation and beauty exist in the same breath.

The first half of the poem carries the weight of disconnection. Relationships collapse into miscommunication and misinterpretation, and love is reduced to arithmetic: “Equal grief stricken / Heartache times three.” Her use of numbers to measure pain shows how heartbreak defies language—reduced to cold calculation when words themselves fail.

Then the thaw comes, and the poem changes shape. Pain is no longer silent; it moves like splinters in the veins, building into a fire that cannot be contained. Alvarez captures the body of grief—how it climbs, drops, rages, and races toward release. This physicality is what makes the poem visceral: it doesn’t describe pain from afar, it inhabits it.

Yet even the eruption offers no easy resolution. The flame that greets the reader at the peak is nameless, hopeless, and unheard. It is both climax and void, the raw space where suffering becomes too vast for expression.

Still, the closing refrain circles back: “Only lonely and lovely. / Hold me. / Hello, sweet Mercy.” The poem does not offer resolution in the traditional sense, but what it does offer is invocation. Mercy becomes the whispered presence that grief calls to—not the erasure of pain, but the grace to live with it.

Visual Interpretation

The video extends this cycle without explaining it: stillness in nature, the body at rest, a hand at the cold window, fire breaking through, and an awakening into a dreamlike world. These images move with the poem rather than define it, creating another way of entering its rhythm—quiet, eruptive, and searching.

The Petal’s Guidance

photo by KBRofficial

Artist Feature: Kat Robinson

“Poetry has been something dear to my heart from a young age. Every time I was dealing with a low point in my life, I turned to writing poetry. It wasn't until high school when I started sharing a bit of my work. Since then, I have worked on refining my writing and making poetry that makes people feel things. I hope these pieces resonate with you, and inspire you to make your own art.”
— Kat Robinson

Kat Robinson is a writer, photographer, and model based out of Phoenix, Arizona. Her work explores the quiet resilience of nature, feminine transformation, and the art of blooming through adversity. Whether behind the lens or on the page, she captures the beauty of becoming.

Her story is one of struggle and renewal. Through her creative practice, she has taken life’s lowest moments and transmuted them into art that is not only palpable but healing. You can see this journey of overcoming most clearly in her poetry, which carries the imprint of both shadow and light.

‘The Petal’s Guidance’

I let the flowers guide my soul
The perennials have always taken my breath away
For even though they wilt, they are still beautiful
May all the flowers continue to influence my heart
I cherish the lesson I’ve learned from the flora
Should your petals begin to fall
Prevail the storms and bloom again

Robinson’s poem radiates the quiet wisdom of nature as a teacher. She draws from the perennial cycle—bloom, wilt, and return—to mirror the human journey through hardship and recovery. What is striking is her framing of beauty not only in the blossoming but also in the wilting; she reminds us that imperfection and decline are part of what makes life sacred.

The language is gentle but directive: “I let the flowers guide my soul” suggests surrender to nature’s rhythm, while the closing lines shift into encouragement, almost like an invocation for resilience—“Prevail the storms and bloom again.” In doing so, Robinson redefines resilience not as resistance, but as an acceptance of cycles, trusting that renewal always follows loss.

The poem ultimately feels like both a reflection and a gift. It carries the intimacy of someone who has endured and come out transformed, yet it extends that transformation outward to the reader, offering a roadmap of how to turn fragility into strength.