What the Frequency Made Visible

It wasn’t one memory—
but hundreds
unfolding across the inner screen.

Not a story.
Not a scene.
Just movement.

A flash of something—
past life, past moment,
past recognition.
Gone again
before I could name it.

Each beat shifted
to one side of my body,
each rhythm brushing through bone
like breath made visible.

I was not the listener—
I was the stage.
I was the light cue,
the velvet curtain,
the soft footfall no one notices
but feels.

Music moved
through my fingertips
without needing direction.
I didn’t reach for the moment—
I let it pass through.

No memory held me.
But all of them touched me.

With Grace&Ink,

Mai

Written after sitting in darkness,
headphones in,
letting 8D audio move through more than just sound.

Monologue #2, part two:The Hill I Die On

Monologue series.

-on trust, storms, and the sacredness of becoming

It’s not the silence that wounds me.
Not the ache of seeing the storm and staying quiet.

What hurts more
is knowing they need the storm.

To become who they are meant to be.
To be forged,
not spared.

It cuts against every instinct in me—
to rescue, to shelter, to intervene.
But I know that journey,
and I know
how necessary it is.

I’ve walked through fire,
been carved by floods and storms.
I’ve seen the shaping.
And it was not in spite of the pain
but because of it
that I found my form.

So I remind myself:
there is a pattern to becoming.
There is a design in the undoing.

And more than that—
there is trust.

A trust that no path is given
without a way through.
That no soul walks alone
if they’re willing to see
what walks beside them.

That’s my anchor.
That’s the truth I cling to.
Not because it’s easy.
But because it’s everything.

If others say,
“That’s the hill I’ll die on,”
then this—
this is mine.

The belief that no pain
is handed to us
without also handing us
the tools,
the grace,
and the unseen arms
to carry it through.

That is the truth I will not abandon.
That is the truth I live and die by.
Not to test fate—
but to honor it.

Because becoming
is not a test.
It’s a return.
To what matters most.

With grace -with ink,

Mai

Monologue #2, part one: The Observer

Monologue series

There’s a pain that arrives
when you can see it all laid out in front of you—
the patterns, the process,
the road unfolding,
familiar in its ache.

And you’re torn.

Is this self-prophecy?
Are you simply waiting for the other shoe to drop?
Or when it drops—
is that the proof
that it was always going to fall?
Beyond control.
Beyond intervention.

This is not something I’m in.
This is something I witness.

And that, in itself, is a strange pain.

I am not the protagonist.
Not even the supporting actress.
Just the audience.
Watching.
Seeing the story before it closes—
and wanting, in some quiet ache,
to yell across the curtain,
“Turn back.”
But it is not my place.

And so obediently, I watch.
I cry.
For the ache that is coming,
for a pain I know by heart
but cannot prevent.

I sit in stillness and wonder:
Why do we crave the storm?

Is it the calm that frightens us?
Or is the chaos simply
more familiar than the unknown?
Does this, too,
boil down to fear?

Fear—the thing that makes us run,
and sometimes the same thing that makes us stay.

And if we ever conquer it—
if we sit with what is,
and resist the urge to interfere,
how then
do we love
without rescuing?

That, perhaps,
is the lesson.

And it is not an easy one.
But it is necessary.

With grace -with ink,

Mai

Bridge of Inspiration

(A response to “A Love Letter From The Desert To The Ice” by @philoocology)

To the child of ‘cracked earth’ who wrote of blooms just beyond reach,
of love to the ‘daughter of snow’—or the ‘falcon’ who ‘fell for the owl’ in speech,
the words that fell from your longing and woe
flowed in whispers your spirit bestowed
onto pages for all—the innocent of heart,
and wandering spirits of old, torn apart.

I thank you for the rawness you’ve chosen to bare,
the ache of your suffering, brave and rare.

In words you dipped, drenched in diamonds and gold,
you penned your ache as the silence grew cold—
on pages shaped by time and fate,
marking the hours too cruel to wait.

I wait, too, to hear ‘silence crackle from thirst,’
the first show—unrehearsed.
Perhaps then I’ll see, if only a trace,
How your story moves through time and space.

The questions you posed—uncertain, unsaid—
sent me seeking what once lay dead.

Your ‘what if roots remember someone they had never touch’—
I read and re-read, struck by so much,
as time and distance slow-danced in my head,
your echoes weaving what needed to be read.

Perhaps in madness I may join you there,
like one who peers through the glass with a stare—
through the keyhole, the madness he vowed to endure,
for love that’s intangible, tender, and pure.

And I too have wished that shadows might hold,
that the barely-felt touch could somehow be bold.
Like you, I’ve learned not to yearn overmuch,
lest the unattainable crumble at my clutch.

With grace, with ink,
Mai

Italicized phrases within this piece are quoted directly from “A Love Letter From The Desert To The Ice” by @philoocology.

Used with deep respect and in poetic response.

Monologue #1: The Death of Need

A reflective series on the inner reckonings we rarely speak aloud.

In becoming, there’s an understanding that you are healing—
that you are evolving.
But today, let’s talk about the version of you that had to die
so that you could live.

Not the parts that softened.
Not the wounds that closed.
But the part of you that had to be buried
so you could finally breathe the air
that would carry you into something next—
something more,
something unknown.

For me,
it was my identity as the one who is needed.

I searched my mind,
walked down its long hallway—
through open doors,
and doors shut so tightly I could still hear them echo.
I walked through them all
to find the root of that belief:
That I am only as worthy
as the help I give.

That my purpose,
my place,
my very birthright
was to be needed.

I sat quietly in the center of my soul
and asked both my mind and my heart:
Is the thread between you—
this thread called need—
still vital?
Or can it be severed and buried?

It was not a beautiful funeral.
It was a reluctant burial.
And in the moment of her death,
I released her
in sweet sorrow
and reverent love.

An enigma, wrapped in paradox:
Because she, herself,
was no longer needed.

She lived in ignorant bliss,
fed by beautiful lies
that pacified her
for years
that became decades.

Until one day,
she turned around
and saw clearly:

Being needed
was never love.
And being needed
would never make her enough.

Other parts of me are healing.
But need had to die.

The vines that grew around her
suffocated her.
Blinded her.
Twisted her essence.

And even when I tried
to untangle her—
she was already gone.

After death,
there was no rebirth.
Only the ghost of memory.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

I Have Known the Blade of My Own Tongue

I have known
how a word,
just one—
sharpened by the heat
of timing, tone, and storm—
can lacerate
more than silence ever could.

I have carried that blade in my mouth.
Felt the way youth
lets it slip,
how rage once gave it a home.

But I have also lived long enough
to choose.

To place it down.
To speak,
instead,
in bridges.
In balm.

In offerings of peace
as protest
against my own potential
to unravel someone else.

Not because I am good,
but because I am tethered—
to something brighter
than my shadow.

Rerooted

Not all roots come from blood.
Some are grown in silence—
in the aftermath of absence,
in the choice to keep going
when the world you came from
never truly held you.

You are allowed to reroute.
You are allowed to outgrow
the soil that first bore you.

This glass of water,
these delicate strands unfurling—
they are proof.

Family can be chosen.
Belonging can be built.
Roots can form in borrowed light
and filtered sun,
on a windowsill,
with no map, no fanfare—
just a will to reach
and a source that says yes.

You can re-root at any time.
You already are.

Through the Veil

I walked in my mother’s shadow
as her life took roads traveled.

I walked in my own,
and found roads forlorn.

I walk in light,
aligned with my Creator’s design.
And through the veil I shine—
lifted, divine.

It is different now—
looking back at her life
from where I stand.
She has passed on;
the door in this world closed.
But I can still speak to her,
feel her, walk beside her in ways
that don’t require form.

There is a difference
between the roads we inherit
and the ones we choose.
And the balance—
that tightrope between history and becoming—
is an internal struggle many carry.

I have walked the inherited path.
There is nothing against her.
In truth, I love her more now
than I did when I was a child,
watching her walk those roads
with silence and strength.

I now walk differently.
Not to escape,
but to evolve.

I don’t need names for what came before:
no categories,
no titles,
no clean diagnosis of pain.

We all grow up in stories
stitched with both perfect and broken threads.
But I no longer need to hold
every wound in my hands
as proof of my journey.

There is beauty even in suffering,
if you stop trying to control it.
If you let go of the need to label,
you begin to see life differently:
as a series of offerings,
as lessons in release.

I choose what I carry forward.
I choose what I bury with grace.

And in that space,
I rely on the light of my Creator—
on the force that weaves all things.
No name required,
just the knowing.

This is the veil I speak of:
walking from shadow into light,
from inheritance into intention,
from story into soul.

I walk now
not to prove,
but to be.
And that,
is enough.

… And His Name Was Michael

She waits for his death for in this life, 

their flames infused, but time thought it not be –

the ghost that visits 

is her imagination playing board games with reality.

She lays in sweet longing, 

turning pages of days torn and crumpled,

talking to the cloned figment 

her day happen to stumble.  

Heights of love swirls,

a jolted exhale from memories of their touch

 –a cry, a tear  –and more, 

the agony of sorrow, too much. 

For those almost tomorrows.

Ode To Rain

I love the smell—
earth rising to meet the sky.
I feel the touch—
each drop, a fingertip
from time’s first breath.

I taste it on my lips,
metallic, wild, alive.
I see the rain,
falling like truth
we once knew by heart,
then somehow forgot.

Hard rain,
pounding into the earth—
nourishing, stirring,
moving her bones
and mine.

Soft rain,
barely a whisper,
a lullaby for the restless soul.

I love the sound
upon a tin roof,
in the hush of busy streets,
across open fields,
beneath forest canopies—
and with crickets,
and with birds,
singing as if in prayer.

Rain at sunset—
gold dissolving into gray.
Rain at dawn—
a hymn too quiet to name.
Rain at dusk—
like memory returning
without apology.

I have laid in rain.
Danced within it.
Walked through it—
as though meeting myself
for the first time.

I am one with the rain.
It moves through me,
restores me,
reminds me:

I am not only the calm—
I am the storm within.