The Lines I Drew

There was a time I didn’t believe in lines. I thought love meant tearing them down, letting someone walk freely across your soul as though it were open land. I thought closeness meant letting people in without a door, without a lock, without even the question of should I?

But here’s what no one tells you—without lines, you lose the shape of yourself.

For the longest time, I let mine blur. I saw how you held your own boundaries like iron gates, thick and immovable. You never wavered. You drew yours in ink. And me? I was all smudges, all softness. I let my edges dissolve whenever you pushed, because I told myself that was what devotion looked like—being endlessly accommodating, endlessly open.

And it worked. For a while. Until it didn’t.

Because one day, I noticed. I noticed how I honored your line, but you never cared for mine. I noticed how you kept yourself safe behind your wall while I was left bare, stretched thin, bleeding from the weight of being endlessly available. I saw the imbalance for what it was—me emptying myself just so you could stay full.

So I drew a line.

Not for you, but for me. At first, it was thin, tentative, almost apologetic. But the more I stood behind it, the more I realized how much I needed it. And when you tested it, when you pressed against it, I darkened it. I made it bold. I carved it so deep it couldn’t be mistaken for hesitation anymore.

And that was when the shift happened.

You didn’t lean closer to understand. You didn’t ask why I needed it. Instead, you stepped back. You walked further away, as if my boundary were an insult rather than survival. And it stung—God, it stung—to realize that the very moment I began protecting myself, you began abandoning me.

That’s the twisted truth about boundaries. The moment you decide to value yourself, some people reveal they never valued you at all.

But here’s the thing—lines are not punishments. They’re not prisons. They’re not drawn to lock people out. They’re drawn to keep you alive inside your own skin. People think boundaries mean rejection. They don’t. They mean preservation. They mean I will not collapse just to make you comfortable.

So, yes—I drew my lines. In bold, dark strokes. And I won’t apologize for it. Because every wall I’ve built has been mortared with lessons learned the hardest way.

And if you find yourself on the other side of it, don’t mistake my silence for cruelty. Don’t call me cold. Understand this instead: I only ever built the wall because of what happened when I didn’t.

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For You

If someone resents your boundaries, it’s not because they don’t understand them. It’s because they benefitted when you had none.

So draw them. Dark, unapologetic, unmovable. Draw them for the version of you that once stayed quiet, that once bled out in the name of being “understanding.”

Because blurred lines won’t save you.

But bold ones will.

The Graveyard Between Adoration and Love

I’ve adored people I could never love.

Strange, isn’t it? To admit that. To confess that I can look at someone, see every detail of them—how they laugh, how their eyes catch light, how their flaws line up like crooked stars—and still know, deep down, that love is not what I can give them.

Adoration is easy. You see someone. You like what you see. You put them on a shelf inside your mind and dust them with gold. You whisper to yourself, this is beautiful, this is precious, and you keep staring. Adoration asks nothing of you. It’s clean. It’s surface. It doesn’t demand skin or soul.

But love? Love is savage.

Love drags you into places you didn’t plan to go. It’s not about “loving the person,” not really—it’s about drowning yourself inside that love. And I can’t always do it. I can’t always hand myself over, stripped bare, ready to be consumed. Sometimes I don’t want to bleed for it. Sometimes I don’t even know how.

That’s the cruelty no one talks about: some of us can adore someone to the core yet be incapable of loving them. Not because they don’t deserve it. Not because we’re heartless. But because love requires a surrender some of us can’t make.

I’ve seen people lose themselves in love. They fold their edges inward, hide their scars, repaint themselves until they’re almost unrecognizable. They cherish someone so deeply that they start erasing themselves in the process. And everyone claps for it—calls it devotion, sacrifice, romance.

But it isn’t. It’s slow suicide.

And maybe that’s why I stop short. Why I get stuck in adoration but never quite slip into love. Because I know what love asks for—it wants the skin, the blood, the ugliness you spend years hiding. It wants the flaws you pretend don’t exist. It wants you raw, and it doesn’t care if you can survive the exposure.

And sometimes, I can’t give that.

So I stay in the safer place. The twisted place. Where I can adore from a distance, marvel at someone without burning myself alive to keep the flame going. Where I can hold someone in the shrine of my mind without destroying myself to love them in reality.

It sounds cruel, I know. But it’s honest.

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For You

If you’ve ever felt the same—if you’ve adored someone but couldn’t love them—don’t call yourself broken. Don’t force yourself into cages of love that demand you strip away every piece of yourself.

Adoration is not lesser. It’s not betrayal. It’s just different.

But here’s the warning: if you ever step into love, do it with eyes open. Don’t lose yourself to keep someone else whole. Don’t erase your flaws to deserve them. If love demands your disappearance, it isn’t love.

It’s a grave. 

The Flower and the Throne It Forgot

 

I used to think of myself as the flower. Soft. Bright. Fragile. The kind of thing people admired but never really touched unless they wanted to own it. And like every flower, I had a throne—a crown of thorns that nobody praised, nobody noticed, but one that held me upright when I was nothing more than a trembling bud.

The thorns were ugly. Sharp. They kept people away. They hurt to touch. But without them, I wouldn’t have survived. They were the reason I wasn’t crushed when I was still small, still breakable. They were my first defense. My invisible protector.

And then I bloomed.

The moment petals opened, the throne was forgotten. People don’t love thorns—they love flowers. They want beauty, not the pain that made beauty possible. I saw it in the way people looked at me: suddenly, I was decoration. Something to be placed in a vase, trimmed of its ugliness, stripped of its crown.

And the cruelest part? I played along. I despised the very thing that had carried me through my fragile years. I wanted to be wanted, so I learned to look down on my own thorns. I turned away from them, pretended I didn’t need them.

But flowers don’t stay in vases forever. They wilt. They wither. And as I sat there, fading under the gaze of those who once admired me, I remembered. I remembered the sting, the blood, the pain that kept me alive long before anyone called me beautiful.

And I asked myself: how can I remember a protector I abandoned? How can I honor what I once despised?

That question haunts me. Because the truth is, I wouldn’t exist without the throne. Without the sting. Without the ugly, unseen part that nobody claps for.

Maybe that’s why I’ve started to see myself differently. Maybe I was never just the flower. Maybe I am the throne too—the sharpness, the defense, the blood that proves I can wound as much as I can be admired.

And maybe that’s the only way to survive.

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For You

We all have thorns. The dark parts. The defenses. The sting that others recoil from. And too often, when the world finally notices our bloom, we cut those parts away to be loved, to be chosen, to be placed somewhere pretty.

But beauty without defense is a decoration waiting to die.

Don’t forget the throne that raised you. Don’t despise the sharpness that kept you alive. The world will celebrate your petals but secretly depend on your thorns.

And when you’re plucked, when you’re stripped, when you’re left to wither in someone else’s vase—let your scars remind you: you were never just a flower.

You were always the throne.

I Ain’t a Saint — And I Don’t Pretend to Be

They tried to tell me what holiness looked like. Quiet. Polite. Patient. Kneeling in pews, folding hands neatly, smiling when the world spits on you. Saints, they said, are remembered for their silence, for their restraint, for the way they bled without complaint.

But I’ve never been good at swallowing my fire.

The truth is, the world I grew up in wasn’t holy. It wasn’t painted in gold or cushioned in hymns. It was grit under the nails, blood on the knuckles, lies whispered sweet enough to rot your teeth. I learned early that smiles don’t mean safety, and promises break faster than glass bottles.

Men’s words are fog. Soft. Sweet. Thick enough to blind you until it’s too late. And I was tired of choking on it. That’s why I reached for steel. Because steel cuts through fog. Steel tells the truth.

I didn’t pick up the sword to look strong. I didn’t pick it up to be feared. I picked it up because nothing else was real anymore. Words failed me, prayers drowned in silence, mercy felt like a joke no one laughed at. But the hiss of metal, the weight of it in my hands—that was something I could trust.

So no, I don’t kneel. I don’t fold my fire into something softer just to make others comfortable. My breath burns like smoke. My chest is a furnace, alive with anger and resolve. Every scar on my body is a record, every wound a line in a story that says: I survived. Not clean. Not saintly. But alive.

And alive is enough.

Here’s the thing: sainthood is just another word for chains. Chains polished until they shine, draped in holy words so you don’t realize you’re trapped. Be good. Be pure. Be forgiving. Be silent. All the while, you rot inside. That was never for me. I was not carved to fit inside a cage. I was made for storms. And storms do not kneel.

People call me dangerous. They call me sinner. They say I’ve gone too far, that my hands are dirty, that I should be ashamed. But shame is another kind of cage, and I threw that key away a long time ago.

While saints polish their halos, I stand in the dust. My sword is scarred, but it remembers how to cut. And when the world breaks—and it always does—it won’t be the saints who come down from their marble thrones to save it.

It’ll be the ones who bleed. The ones who fight in the dirt. The ones who whisper His name through broken teeth, with blood still hot on their lips.

That’s who I am. Not chosen. Not holy. Just the storm you thought you had tamed. The blade you left to rust, now sharpened by rage.

And if that path is sin, then sin is the only prayer I’ll ever know.

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For You

Stop waiting until you’re spotless. Stop waiting until you’ve earned permission to fight. That day doesn’t come. And if it did, the world would find a new way to dirty you.

Don’t kneel to cages dressed as virtue. Don’t waste your fire just to look good in someone else’s story.

Because this world doesn’t need saints.

It needs storms. It needs people unafraid to bleed, unafraid to stand with scars wide open, unafraid to burn if that’s what survival demands.

And if you are reading this with fire in your chest, trembling hands, and the ache of scars you wish you could hide—remember: you don’t have to be holy. You just have to be alive.

Alive is enough.