I confess, I have absolutely no words.
Or rather, I have too many. And none of them feel right.
I haven’t published anything since my article in February, which I still cringe at the thought of reading, and somehow, I haven’t written a solid body of work since either. I have bent over backwards this entire year trying to write my best body of work, the most important thing I’ve ever written — my Magnum Opus. To no avail, I have tried to combine every poem I’ve ever written and summarize my life into a series of stanzas and a mountain of metaphors.. I’m stuck at the base of this Everest, fully decked, crampons on. I’d been struck with a case of writer’s block so intense it rendered me speechless. Yes, I who rambles, spews, slurs, screams, sings, and sobs — I have silence. The very silence that I just opened up about filling with outside noise has seeped inside me. The music is still playing, but I have stopped.
But I have to admit that writing long-form is hard for me. Especially when it’s not about politics or poetry. Especially when it’s about me. Lately, it feels like I’m being graded by an invisible audience. Usually, I write for myself and I write to myself. I’m the author and the reader, always. But now, I feel unsure about how my voice should sound when it’s not just heard, but read. I’m terrified of sounding arrogant, of coming off like someone who thinks her every sentence is profound. That is my greatest fear as a writer: to appear hubristic, hollow in hymn. Because truthfully, I am not profound. Or revolutionary. And I am just now learning how to sit with my own mediocrity, how to let it humble me. I overthink every sentence, nitpick every paragraph, not because I think I’m a genius, but because I’m scared. Scared of being too much or not enough. Of being misunderstood, or worse, dismissed. So many of the questions I’m asking both myself and you can be answered with one simple sentence: You’re just 20. And that means everything. I am young. Naive. Confused. Transforming. And yes, I know I’m not alone. I have people who love me. People who see me. And still, I feel alone. That’s the thing about loneliness, it doesn’t care how full the room is. You could be shoulder to shoulder with strangers in a packed New York subway and still feel like it’s just you. Just your heart pounding. Just your head screaming. Loneliness is someone saying, You’re not alone, and you feeling lonelier for it.
Another confession: I always feel like I have to explain my entire backstory just to be understood. I’m not easy to digest. I don’t do well with small talk. I’m a big girl filled with big thoughts and big feelings, so I’m a poor performer in small, intimate spaces. Especially on a quiet school website and a lone page with my lone name at the head. I’ve spent the last decade of my life chasing something bigger than myself — always reaching, always writing, always looking for the next thing to say. The next insight. The next transformation. That’s what we’re taught, right? That life should be a lesson. That there should be a single purpose for it all. So yes, every sentence crumbled under the pressure of trying to mean something. I’ve rewritten, rearranged, and resented every word. For months, I was paralyzed by the need for perfection and the fear of insignificance. I’ve always wanted my own I Have a Dream. My own Pride and Prejudice, my Caged Bird, my Great Gatsby, my Hamlet.
And then I remembered that the phrase Magnum Opus doesn’t mean “perfect masterpiece,” it means “the great work.” In alchemy and Jungian thought, it’s not about one final product, but about the lifelong, messy, spiritual process of turning the raw and ruined parts of yourself into something whole. The alchemists mapped this transformation in four symbolic stages: Nigredo, the blackening, Albedo, the whitening, Citrinitas, the yellowing, and Rubedo, the reddening. Each one a season of the self. A death, a cleansing, a dawning, and a return.
I realized I wasn’t writing a great work. I was living it.
So instead of trying to force one finished masterpiece into being, I’ve decided to offer what I do have: fragments from writings I’ve never finished, completed, and revealed. This is the process. This is my Magnum Opus, forever unfinished, as I am living it now. As we are together.
Nigredo: The Buffalo and the Bird
“It’s strange how silence can grow louder the more you try to fill it. I thought I was ready to write something important, to finally speak. But instead, I found myself swallowed by a voice I could no longer recognize. This was my beginning — the blackness, the breakdown, the darkening of everything I thought I was. I have no choice but to unpack it.”
I don’t like the word trauma — it’s run into the dirt and abused. But that doesn’t make it untrue or unfelt. They say misery loves company, but mine loves solitude. It doesn’t seek attention, no, it broods in silence, breeding shame. I don’t hold grudges — they hold me. In medicine, trauma is defined as a significant injury such as a wound, a rupture, or a forceful impact from the outside world that marks the body or the mind. But I do not feel wounded by my trauma. Not exactly. Wound implies weakness, passivity, and being broken. But my trauma doesn’t sit in the past like a scar, rather, it breathes and shifts. Sometimes I feed it by accident, and sometimes, in moments I hate to admit, I feed it on purpose. And in return, it feeds me too. My trauma gives me language, fire, and reason. It pushes me forward even as it tries to pull me under. It seems we are in a relationship. A strange, often volatile, almost symbiotic, bond — one that I’m trying to navigate with intention, not just to survive it, but to understand it. I don’t want to conquer my trauma, I want to coexist with it. Because the truth is, my trauma has become a companion — not a foe exactly, but not quite a friend. It takes and gives in unequal measure. It whispers in my quietest hours. It reminds me of who I used to be. It warns me of who I might become. I used to think healing meant erasing it. Now I wonder if it just means learning how to live beside it, without letting it drive the car. Especially because It likes to be in control. My lows are best described in one word: grotesque. Not just sad or heavy, but monstrous. Out of body. As if my own mind has turned against me. Anxiety, depression, and PMDD, they hollow me out and twist the remains. It’s not a place I can easily explain. If you look behind my right ear, you’ll find a semicolon tattooed there. That’s how I tell you, so I don’t have to say aloud.
I’ve spoken about this all before, but now I can be thorough. Over time, I’ve learned to live with my darkness. Not by conquering it, but by coexisting with it — like the buffalo and the red-billed oxpecker, an unlikely, symbiotic pair. The bird eats the buffalo’s parasites and sounds the alarm when predators draw near. The buffalo provides safety and sustenance. A quiet exchange, discomfort in return for survival. That’s what my trauma became, a relationship. I care for it and in return, it alerts me to danger. It’s no longer my enemy. It’s simply mine. And I must accept my mess for all it is. Yes, despite all that can hold me back, the trauma that bonds to me, I still rose. Still, I fought. I’ve fallen in love, and it was for me. When I graduate again, it will be for me. None of my decisions belong to my flaws, nor to my nay-sayers. Because only you taste the salt in your tears. Only you feel the hunger in your laughter. Only you know what it’s like to live, to ache, to rebuild as yourself.
And that, too, is a kind of beginning.
One day, I will reap what I’ve endured. The fruits of my labor will not be for anyone else’s table; they will be mine. My orchard will overflow. My bushes will burst with berries. I, the farmer, the gatherer, the grower, will always have a garden. As long as my tears water it and my soul stays fertile enough to grow from.
This is the dark soil.
And from here, everything begins.
ALbedo
“But even the darkest night starts to lift. After so much screaming into the void, I started whispering to myself. And for the first time, I listened. What I found wasn’t peace, not yet, but a gentler kind of pain. Something less monstrous, more honest. This was the start of purification. The soft white light after the smoke clears.”
This quote marks the threshold of the Albedo stage; the washing and the illumination where clarity begins to follow chaos. After the chaos and calcination of the Nigredo, I now find myself in unfamiliar territory — writing about love. I’ve avoided it for years. It once felt like exposure, like surrendering too much. But, something shifted in the silence after the screaming. The act of turning inward, of whispering instead of warring, revealed a gentler ache, the kind that doesn’t destroy, but reveals. This is where the great work continues — in letting love become part of my alchemy, examined honestly as fear, as longing, as resistance, and ultimately, as transmutation. Writing about love is not a break from the work; it is the work. It is through confronting what I’ve long avoided — intimacy, tenderness, and connection — that the purification begins. The smoke has cleared just enough to see what remains. And what remains is love, waiting to be named.
So what is love?
I don’t know.
I’ve Googled it and the results are vague, contradictory, or historical. Search who invented it, no one will show. Search what it is, and you get everything and nothing. Science says its neural pathways and hormonal floods, but still calls it too complex to classify. Religion says God is love. Poets say it’s pain. And still, no one really knows. Especially not me.
But I do know what you came here for — a love story. But I’ve never really written about love. Not in a poem, not in an article. Maybe because I’m afraid. Afraid of sounding cliché, of being wrong, of how much it scares me to experience it. Still, I have fallen in romantic love once –- real, dizzying, terrifying, head-first, high school love. And yes, miraculously, I’m still swimming in it. No, falling is the wrong word. I was pulled. I didn’t leap, I was lured — quietly, gently, and then all at once. Locker kisses. Prom night hands. Names in the yearbook under “Sweethearts.” I remember how a simple hug from a boy felt like the most intense thing I’d ever survived. Looking back, it was never really me falling, it was love pulling me in like tide to shore.
It’s true when you’re young — intimacy is almost criminal in its thrill. You learn how to kiss, and then you never stop. It’s a language. Lips say more when they’re speaking into another pair. It’s a silent speech, but the audience within you applauds ferociously. And when it’s mutual, it’s choreography. A dance you didn’t learn, you just knew. Your souls sync like frequencies on an old television. It’s not just lust. It’s a hunger for understanding, a curiosity about how someone else sees the world, and how you might fit inside it. This is remembering every song you’ve ever danced to together, and daydreaming to the bridge over and over. That’s my love story — a high school mixtape memory I’ll always carry. But if I’m honest, I prefer love when it ages. When it ferments and thickens like wine. I like to know, and I like to know deeply. Which is why I often tell my lover that love is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. And it’s true because I don’t know what I’m doing. Honestly, it’s my first time trying to do it correctly. I’ve loved wrong, I’ve loved right. I’ll probably do both again. But I know now, you have to be loved wrong at least once. And you have to love wrong at least once. That’s how you learn what right even means. Love must be dismantled, confused, and corrupted before it can be clarified.
The truth is that love is in everything. In the hush of fingers before a surprise. In the ache of goodbye. In your mother calling you “Georgia” when the rest of the world calls you Maella, loving you into someone new. In friendships that grew up beside you, that stayed up late talking about nothing you knew anything about, learning too much unintentionally. Now, we search each other intentionally. Now, it’s buckets and shovels, trying to dig into our lover’s pasts just enough to avoid repeating the pain our parents taught. Love is not always pretty. Sometimes it feels like the plot of a romance movie. Sometimes it feels like war. But always, it’s quiet, invisible. In the camera roll of blurry friends. In the tears that well when you mention your brothers. In every unspoken gesture that says, you are safe here. It’s in the distance of accepting you’ll never be a daddy’s girl, and still dreaming of being daddy’s little girl. Love is even in that strained relationship — yes, love dwells in the pain. This, too, is the soft white light that doesn’t blind, but clarifies. A gentler kind of seeing. Love not as resolution, but as the lens through which purification becomes possible.
Obviously, I am no Venus. I am but a woman fumbling towards all love, one mistake at a time. Still, I believe in it ferociously. I don’t seek it out, but if it finds me, I let it in. If it possesses me, I let it consume. So honestly, it’s all just true. What Google says, what the sonnets say, and what your mother says. What is love but everything? What is love but nothing? Nothing, if unfelt. Everything, if real. I have no idea, and yet I know exactly. That is love.
Alright I’ll humor you. Everyone has a favorite love story, a favorite romance. I’ll tell you a secret — mine comes from a cartoon. A gentle, glittering revolution disguised as a children’s show.
In Steven Universe, a line is spoken that I’ve carried in my pocket like a gemstone:
“When a gem is made, it’s for a reason. They burst out of the ground already knowing what they’re supposed to be and then that’s what they are. Forever. But you? You’re supposed to change. You’re never the same, even moment to moment. You’re allowed and expected to invent who you are. What an incredible power. The ability to grow up.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA3PUEoQQ9o
That’s it. That’s alchemy. That’s the white fire of becoming — not fixed, but fluid. Not designed, but discovered. Not a gemstone, but a person. Steven Universe is a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a love story that is not just romantic, but transformational. It centers on Steven, a half-human, half-Gem boy raised by alien guardians called the Crystal Gems. Among them is Garnet: stoic, warm, composed. The unshakable leader. But Garnet, we learn, is not just one Gem. She is a fusion, the literal embodiment of Ruby and Sapphire, two Gems in love. In this world, fusion is the physical and metaphysical merging of two beings. A new entity with shared thoughts, feelings, and purpose. It represents deep trust, intimacy, and harmony when done right. Some fusions are volatile. Violent. Incompatible. But Garnet? Garnet is grace. She is balance. She is the evidence that love, real, reciprocal love, is not just felt, it’s lived. Yet, in the society Garnet comes from, fusion between different gem types is taboo, forbidden, and seen as perverse because it disrupts order. It challenges rigidity. How familiar that sounds. Steven Universe, like all great art, has always said more than it showed. Garnet, as a cross-gem fusion, is a quiet metaphor for queer love. For interracial love. For any kind of connection that defies expectation and still endures and thrives. She’s not just Ruby and Sapphire holding hands in secret. She is their fury. Their patience. Their conversation.
The line, “I am a conversation” in the song Garnet sings during the episode “Jailbreak” struck me. Because love is not still. Love is not a product. Love is process. It is the moment when two people decide not to become one, but to become something new together. Neither of them can be alone, and it’s a choice. Before I become a wife, maybe even a mother, before I take on anything more sacred, I want that. I want a Garnet love. One that is steady, complex, and brave. One that doesn’t erase us, but builds us. A home where I remain myself, and still grow. A love that is not perfect, but integrated. In a world that says become this, do it in this order, be digestible –- I’d rather be a fusion. I’d rather be love in motion. White-hot. Ever-changing.
And stronger than you.
Citrinitas
“Reflection becomes revelation when you stop trying to be clean and start trying to be whole. Somewhere in the quiet, I started to recognize myself in love, in memory, in every question I was too afraid to ask out loud. The white turned to gold. I was waking up to my own becoming.”
Sadness is easy. Not in its depth, but in its certainty. It arrives uninvited and floods everything. It’s heavy, obvious, and hard to miss, like the slow shadow of a passing plane, vast and looming. But nostalgia? Nostalgia is cruel. She’s seductive. She dances with your joy just long enough to remind you it’s gone. She gives you sugar, then salt. She’s the real reason I struggle to write about the future, because I’m still tangled in the past, waltzing with ghosts in last decade’s light.
Grieve them with me.
My nostalgia begins where I began: Cotonou, Benin, West Africa. Every time I return, my lungs fill with contradiction; motorcycle exhaust and fried street food and beneath it, something stickier: guilt. Why? I don’t fully know. Maybe it’s the grief of the life I never lived. The unchosen version of me haunts the streets there. Who would I be if I’d stayed? There’s no way to know. And that’s the most painful kind of nostalgia: the unbeknownst. Missing what never was.
From there, nostalgia grows. It graduates to childhood, where it softens and sharpens all at once. It’s always tear jerking. Do you remember strawberry milk cartons in elementary school? How the little triangular cardboard spout you’d pull out would get soggier with every sip? Those thick plastic lunch trays that seemed to arrive scuffed up? Those peach folders we used to shield our answers during tests? The stiff rugs we sat on in the library, the printed lunch menus, or the way the sun seemed honest back then?
I do.
I can feel the grit and rust blackening my palms as I scramble to fix my bike chain and my cousins zoom past me with my siblings alongside them. I can hear our parents calling us back home from the window. I can hear everyone I’ve ever played with or fought with. I can remember what my brothers’ smiles looked like. Before braces, before age made them scarce to me. I miss how excited I’d get when my father would announce that we’d gotten cable again when he could afford it. I miss thinking I knew everything from Disney channel shows, and fearing everything after watching Cartoon Network ones. I can remember how my mother and father looked at me, the delicious simplicity that swirled in the stew of their gaze. As I aged, so did the tech around me. I wish it didn’t. If I think hard enough I can remember exactly how to clear storage on every phone I’ve ever had. My devices at the time never had enough for the pictures I’d take, desperately trying to capture it all, to remember. As early as I could, I tried to remember. Even then, I knew it wouldn’t last. This period is the most painful. It’s before middle school got serious, it’s before high school hurt, it’s before I knew anything. Yes, that innocence. It haunts us all. Like Eve, I wonder where the garden went.
Then comes the teenage nostalgia, the kind that stings because I knew to savor it, and didn’t. This one is tainted with regret. I miss driving lessons with my mom by the airport. I miss her old Toyota, the one I crashed. I miss before I knew how to contour anything or that my shoes were too big. I miss before I knew embarrassment or heartbreak.
God, I miss being 17. You never think you’ll say that when you’re 17.
I can still feel the blue lockers cold on my fingertips and hear the fluorescent lights hum. If I close my eyes, I smell Bath and Body Works Champagne Toast, fresh paper, and the faint memory of crayons we no longer used on the first day of school. If I swallow hard enough, I can even taste the butterflies. This nostalgia missed the idea of womanhood, because it was much more romantic than the reality. This nostalgia hates that the memories are just out of reach.
And yet, despite all this, I’ve found one kind of nostalgia that doesn’t hurt, not exactly.
Music. As you know I cling to it, but it chases me back, more faithfully than my shadow. It rings louder than memory and gentler than grief. It turns recollection into a private cinema, soundtracked by joy, not sorrow. Maybe nostalgia isn’t a chain after all. Maybe it’s a mirror. I am filled with tears, the color orange, too much lip gloss, many hairstyles, and Arizona tea. I am the most famous Fleetwood Mac song and the raunchiest dances. I am made of half finished art and lost retainers. I am simply stretch marks and ingrown hairs. I am made of memory. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s embarrassing sometimes, how long I’ve lived in the past while running from the future. But honestly, it’s innate, my anxiety tells me that I don’t know what the future holds. All because the past and I know each other, every version. Every feeling. Familiarity is better than sex. It embraces you so intimately. Familiarity is my vice. But presence is my new virtue. So let me remember the now, before I spend forever trying to undo forget. I’ll try harder, I promise.
Rubedo
“And then, without warning, the fire became mine. Not something I ran from, not something I stood in, but something I carried. Everything I had seen, everything I had lost, everything I had loved, it all fused here. I was not healed, but I was whole. I had become the work.”
Of course, I have to end with something corny. I owe that to myself. I’ve spent my 20th year thus far trying to bottle two decades of living into one sentence. One phrase. One piece of writing that could carry the weight of me. I wanted to earn my own love. Prove my worth. Validate this body. This mind. This voice. And still, I search for it just bartering in the back alleys of my own psyche.
Still unsure. Still desperate. Still whole.
I am both the love of my life and the villain in my story. The miracle and the mess. The mind is a devilishly complex place. Share this with me. Flirt with it.
I, Maella, am my Magnum Opus. I am the great work. Not what I write, not what I create, me. This body of breath and blood. This spirit that keeps showing up. It’s terrifying to realize that everything I will ever make is smaller than the person who made it. How do you value the hands over the masterpiece? The voice over the song? You don’t. You just look in the mirror and accept that you are the masterpiece, and you are simply mid sculpt. In my madness, I’ve come to love the chaos. I am a fool and a romantic and an unapologetic expert in both fields. If I can leave you with one true thing, let it be this.
Be hopelessly romantic.
About the moon. About your bruises. About folding your laundry. About your voice cracking when you lie and the way your hands tremble when you’re telling the truth. Fall in love with the way you think. The way you feel. Romanticize the pain, the failure, the learning. Romanticize the becoming. I did, all year. I turned agony into something new. I stretched heartache into prose. Because to be written is to have lived first.
And damn it, we are living.
So may you live.
May you be seen and misunderstood.
May you be described in paragraphs you didn’t write.
May you be hated and may you forgive.
May you adore yourself so deeply it embarrasses you.
Make your mark.
And then mark what you’ve made.
Care too much.
Laugh too hard.
Cry in public.
Say the wrong thing so you know what the right one sounds like next time.
Love terribly. Love too soon. Love with your whole chest.
And after it all, let your body show it.
Let yourself wrinkle more than sheets, let time tattoo you.
Show me your bruises. Show me your scars!
I want to see the stories you couldn’t write engraved in your grin.
Let your crow’s feet speak in braille, tell me where the laughter lives as I cup your face.
Let your smile lines map your joy like topography, so I can trace it.
And when we meet and your hands shake with age, let the veins stand proud.
May they declare your years before your name.
Be proof of your story, first and foremost.
;M