Dreamers With Empty Hearts And Frozen Hands,

These days, beauty is packaged and sold.

That box there is this weirdly specific hair

colour whose name

sounds like a desperate student’s last ditch

efforts to meet the word count

That shampoo is a scent that sounds like an

overenthusiastic writer’s sensory description

That t-shirt is designed to make you look slim

Mirrors are our enemies

Make-up our allies

and we gobble it up,

Burying our identities in

Consumer debt and social expectations.

— y.c.

Forest path

Chivalry isn’t just dead.

We beat it out of us with a stick

(society)

and carved it from our souls with a scalpel

(normalization)

and now

We don’t know any different.

— y.c.

You fall asleep to the sound of your heart

Trying to break free from your chest

And wake to your thoughts trying desperately

To escape your brain.

What does it say about you when your own

organs

Want to escape your body?

— y.c.

She was a bright soul who

loved dark things—

Demons

Regrets

Heartbreak

and

Me

Maybe it was because she

fancied herself

enough

to redeem all of them.

— Yushan C.

Who Decides?

Who decides what is right and what is wrong? Is it us— our hearts, our beliefs? Is it society— feeding us lies and truth in equal measure our whole lives? Or is it nature— the ever-present, slow-changing world we grow to love? Besides, who are we to choose? Right doesn’t come as pure white. Wrong doesn’t appear as stark black. Shades of grey dominate our world, and everyone is trying to decide which shades are worse than others. Our whole lives are founded on what we believe in our hearts. In that way, no one is a villain. Everyone is only trying to make their way in a world where good and evil are undefinable.

So don’t be so quick to judge. Battles are rarely fought in plain sight of others; rather, they occur in our hearts and souls and we wear our scars like trophies. Time and time again, we fight for the good in us. We fight to meet our own goals, to conquer our own worlds and fears and insecurities. Because demons will always lose to angels, if you put your mind to it. After all, without angels, demons would exist. And without demons, angels would have no meaning.

There are endings, and there are endings. 

-

It was snowing, I think, that last day. Snowing the way it hadn’t yet, that year. 

The thing with snow:

It wipes away everything you’ve left behind, 

Buries it, 

like a pirate burying hoarded gold. 

We lay down our half-finished hopes, the midnight musings we’d  incanted into streetlight-lit hollowness. 

Hello! we cried. We are here. We are

Here, 

Like footprints in the mud and the branches of a fallen tree jutting up from the ground, we are

Here. 

There was moonlight, stealing away our

whispers 

like the wind borrows secrets, 

like a faerie steals a child. 

-

Count down from five, love. 

The snow is falling, and the stars are bright, and

the moon is listening. 

Count down from five—

promise me you’ll remember this is not the

ending it seems to be. 

-

—this is what it means to begin (y.c.)