porcelain hearts and velvet thorns
aphorisms & ephemera ii: march, the month that ends in quiet exile
❀ aphorisms & ephemera
A collection of fleeting reflections, quiet echoes, and fleeting insights—meant not to be held forever, but to be savored in their transience.
❀ march’s offerings
March was a fickle thing, like a courtesan’s promise—one day all blush and warmth, the next an icy retreat. You cannot trust a month that flirts so brazenly with winter.
Toeing the line between reclaiming the femininity I rejected in high school and aggressively resisting the emerging soft-girl-to-right-wing pipeline.
Even the pastels of Rococo concealed revolutions.
Softness is not submission; velvet can smother just as well as steel can strike.
Some girls collect porcelain, some collect love letters; I collect moments where the light hit just right and I remember how good it feels to be alive.
To be adored is to be studied; to be loved is to be known.
The hardest part of healing is the mourning of an old self. You stand at your own funeral, hands full of flowers, unsure where to put them.
Some things don’t bloom until they’ve been through winter.
Memory might be an architect with a drinking problem. Some buildings are pristine, while others tilt at odd angles, half-built and swaying in the wind…
Even the most gilded age ends in dust. The chandeliers dim, the tapestries fray, and somewhere beneath all that gold, there was always just wood, waiting to rot.
❀ my most-used mantra of the month
“Sip the last light slow; it was never yours to keep.”
❀ a letter to march
dear march,
you were a labyrinth of broken branches and swallowed footprints, twisting endlessly, catching at my ankles. in the distance, a barn owl watched from its perch, eyes like twin moons, waiting. i stepped forward, and the earth gave way—twigs snapping like the brittle bones of nostalgia. the path turned in on itself, leading me back—one foot into the past, into the husk of a home where love once nested, feathered and foolish.
this is not surrender.
this is the aching hope that retreat is just another name for momentum.
let this bitter footfall mark its path with quiet defiance. let the walls shift in my favor. let two steps forward wait just beyond these thorns. the home we leave behind lingers like a dream at the edge of waking—a place that was ours, that was real, now peeling from our hands like old wallpaper, slipping into something borrowed, something dim.
but march, you taught me that even exile has its grace, that even in retreat, there is rhythm. and that even the barn owl, white as an unwritten future, must pull its wings inward before it can rise.
yours, always, even in parting ~
this was such a beautiful read!!
This is pretty 😊