What We Keep Alive in the Dark

There are stories I write because they entertain me.
And then there are stories I write because if I don’t, I will suffocate.

My current novel-in-progress is the second kind.

It began as a whisper; not a loud declaration, but a breath against the edge of thought.
A voice that said something had been lost… but not extinguished.
That it was still here, hidden, waiting for someone to see it and say, I recognise you.

I thought I was writing about loss.
But the deeper I went, the more I realised I was writing about survival.
Not the obvious kind. Not blood and bone and pulse, but the subtler, quieter survival that happens in the places no one can measure.

Because grief is a kind of exile.
It takes you out of the place you knew and deposits you somewhere you can’t name on a map.
It changes your language until it’s nothing but single syllables.
It erases your old coordinates.
And yet, in the middle of that unfamiliar darkness, there is something unkillable: the small, stubborn ember that refuses to go out.

Love, when it is real, is not the opposite of grief.
It is what makes grief possible in the first place.
They are twins. They share the same pulse, the same insistence that this mattered.

The work I create is for those who live with that ember.
For the ones who carry a secret warmth through the coldest corridors.
For anyone who has been told they are too much or not enough.

It is for those who love like contraband: precious, dangerous, smuggled past the checkpoints of what is “allowed.”
For those who know the weight of something they cannot name but cannot release.
For those who have felt the impossible truth: that grief, when held with reverence, can become the fiercest form of love.

I write about what we refuse to surrender.
The parts of ourselves we hide in lullabies, in unspoken glances, in the silence between two people who know without saying.
I write about connection: the kind that survives dismantling, survives exile, sometimes even survives the grave.

Some loves are loud. They declare themselves in grand gestures, in light everyone can see.
Others are quiet: a private language spoken in the pauses between words.
I have always been drawn to the second kind.
The loves that live in the breath, in the glance, in the palm that lingers just long enough to say I’m here.

Grief has its own language too.
It speaks in shadows, in empty chairs, in the way you reach for something that is no longer there.
But if you listen closely, you find that grief is just love with nowhere to go.
It is not an ending. It is an echo that keeps returning until it finds a place to rest.

The work I create lives in that meeting place: where love and loss are not enemies but siblings.
Where longing is not a weakness, but proof that something mattered enough to leave an imprint.
Where memory is not a chain, but a thread you can follow back to yourself.

These are not gentle stories, though they are tender.
They are made of sharp edges and soft centres, of the ways we break and the stranger ways we put ourselves back together.
They are about what we refuse to let die.
About how the human heart smuggles its own survival past the guards.

And yes, they are also shaped by the small men.
The ones who dressed like men but could not stand in the heat of real love.
The ones who lied, vanished, or shrank the moment they were truly seen.
The ones I once excused with elaborate metaphors they never earned.
Their absence left its own blueprint: a hollow space that taught me exactly what a real man is not, and what love must be. I fill it now with women who refuse to be erased, and with love stories big enough to survive the truth.

If you have ever loved like it was a secret…
If you have ever carried someone inside you long after the world forgot their name…
If you have ever believed that the smallest ember can survive the darkest night…
Then you will know the ground my work is planted in.

Some things cannot be silenced.
Some things will outlive us.
And maybe that is what love is for.

And here is the truth that keeps pressing at the edges of every page I write:
There is no border the soul cannot cross.
No wall that love will not find a way through.
No silence deep enough to bury recognition when it arrives.

I believe in the moment two people find each other across impossible distance.
Not because the world permits it.
But because something in them insists they were always meant to meet here, now, in this life.
I believe in the ways the human heart carries its own survival into the future.

So maybe, in the quietest part of me, this is what I’m trying to say:
We are never as alone as the world would have us believe.
Not in grief.
Not in love.
Not in the spaces between.

Some stories ask to be told.
Others demand it.
This one demanded it.