Dear reader,

What do you see when you look in the mirror - a true reflection, or a vortex of thought? A surface of silver glass, or an endless pool of water where faces ripple never staying the same? While you move, do you bend, do you warp, do you fracture into someone else with every word burned into your subconscious? A stranger dressed in your skin, or a ghost repeating your every gesture? I see an enemy and a confidant at once. How can I love my reflection and still hold a blade against it, wishing for…

Let me tell you a story of a demon not the kind that creeps from the dark, but the kind who sits beside you, smiling in the shape of a friend. Cunning, shifting, growing on power and gold, the kind that gives demons a bad name.

Around a table, they met: the canary and the head of black. Spilling into a poem that tasted of future, their minds collided in a beautiful spark.
“Oh, how wonderful the beauty of creation,” said the dark-haired one, raising a cup in salute to many more. The canary answered with coins…

Dear Shadow,
The days are slowly turning into gloomy heavens, swollen with unbreakable weight and I am waiting restless for the right time to release what has been pressing against my ribs. There was once a glimpse of light, the faint touch of an angel and it felt inevitable, written somewhere before I was born. I treaded carefully, afraid to disturb it, but it slipped under my skin all the same. The hunger for perfection turned bitter in my mouth, curdling into mistakes and misjudgements I could not take…

"And what did you think?" - the Shadow said - “That I was going to let you off the hook that easily?” The words weren’t loud, they didn’t need to be, they slid into my skull like they’d always been there, coiled around the soft parts, tightening until I could feel the pulse in my temples. I wondered how long this whirlpool would keep spinning, thoughts knotted in the claws of darkness, the weight of them pushing my head down as though to drown me. I’m holding a human skull under the candlelight, watching…

Dear Shadow,

The sensation of cold in the absence of light has never been unfamiliar, yet this time it spills outward from me, spreading frost through the air and hardening sound into sculptures whose shapes I do not recognise. Each hour I spend carving these frozen fragments in search of meaning leaves me bleeding, my hands trembling with fear for what might emerge. I keep carving at them, hours gone, skin split, blood slicking the ice, wondering what will happen if I break them open? What if the pieces…