Sometimes everything unfolds exactly as it should — the timing, the ceremony, the perfect execution — and you find yourself somewhere unexpected within it. This one is for the moments that shift something quietly, without asking permission.

Doodles in the Margin is a podcast of original poetry and essays by Jade. New episodes every Monday & Friday. Read more at doodlesinthemargin.substack.com

Sometimes joy arrives quietly — through a speakeasy door, a flight of gin, and an astronomer pointing at the sky. This one is for the nights that remind you where you are, and who you're with.

Doodles in the Margin is a podcast of original poetry and essays by Jade. New episodes every Monday & Friday. Read more at doodlesinthemargin.substack.com

No pause.No recalibration.

Just the quiet implication —everybody does.

Face warm.Mouth closed.Body numb.

Because if everybody does,then I should be able to.

Like everybody else.

What I meant was —leave me alone.Let me move at the pacemy nervous system can survive.

Let me build a lifewith negotiable volume.

Let me existwithout racing you.

Instead, I paid injoy,energy,sanity.

For years.

Until one dayI stopped explaining.Stopped performing capacity.Stopped racing to prove I could.

I did not become smaller.I did not become difficult.

I stopped stretchingto meet standardsthat were never built for me.

Not a person laid to rest, but a longing. A quiet, persistent hunger that shaped the architecture of a life.

Some children grow up steadied by softness. Others learn to steady themselves. I learned early how to read the temperature of a room before I learned how to read my own body. I learned that attention did not always mean safety. That love could shift tone without warning. That perceptiveness was often more protective than expression.

What I wanted was not extraordinary. I wanted to be chosen without performance. I wanted pride that did not hinge on usefulness. I wanted warmth that did not require anticipation, management, or emotional labour to access.

Instead, I developed an appetite for steadiness and spent years trying to manufacture it.

I mistook vigilance for devotion. I believed responsiveness was love. I believed that if I stayed available enough, quick enough, composed enough, something in the atmosphere would settle and I would finally feel secure inside it. If I managed the temperature well enough, perhaps I would be chosen within it.

But hunger does not quiet when you feed it the wrong thing.

There is a familiar panic that rises when you stop answering an old call. It feels dangerous at first, like you are breaking a rule that was never written but always enforced. The body braces. The chest tightens. A voice insists you are being cruel.

And then, if you hold your ground, something steadier emerges.

Relief.

The recognition that you are no longer required to carry what was never yours to manage.

The hunger shaped me. It made me observant. Capable. Adaptive. It taught me how to step aside without collapsing. But it also convinced me that love was something to be earned through vigilance, that silence was abandonment, that not responding was harm.

That belief ends here.

If the teenager I once was could see me now — see me choose stillness over scrambling, see me allow space where there once would have been urgency — she would not feel guilt. She would feel power. Not because someone else transformed, but because we did.

This is not an elegy for a villain. It is an elegy for a hope. For the version of me who believed effort could produce warmth. For the hunger that kept reaching toward hands that did not know how to hold it.

The steadiness I needed did not arrive in the form I imagined. I no longer wait at the door.

The hunger was real. It shaped me. It sharpened me, but it is no longer in charge.

Rest now. I choose myself.

a shitty little Kyocera phone pressed to my ear.

He was packing to go to his dad’s.

I had a taekwondo tournament.

We wouldn’t see each other for a few days,

which felt longer than it should have.

I told him I’d call when I got a chance.

He said, please, do.

We loved each other in burned CDs.

Songs chosen carefully, in order,

passed like something fragile.

Robyn on repeat —

he was obsessed with her.

I loved that about him.

There was a pause.

The kind that doesn’t ask for anything.

The kind where nothing is being measured.

Then he said it,

like it had always been true.

I love you.

And without thinking,

without checking myself,

without wondering if I was allowed —

I love you too.

We hung up.

I felt peace.

Freedom.

That rare, light feeling of being fully alive

without being watched.

There was no policing.

No erasure.

No judgment.

No questioning.

Just two people who trusted each other

enough to be exactly where they were.

I giggled.

My mom opened the door and asked

what that was

and why I’d say something like that.

I said, because I love him.

She looked stunned.

I didn’t care.

Some loves don’t last forever.

But they show you the kind

you should make room for

for the rest of your life.

My mind does a little dance — just chill, you aren’t Aretha — as if humor could pass for wisdom, as if restraint were the same as humility.

I know this choreography by heart. The step back before the sound leans forward. How to disappear half a breath early.

But when I stop listening — when I give the note it’s due something ancient wakes up.

My hands start keeping time. A beat forms where doubt used to live. I sing without an instrument and my body remembers it was one.

There is a place I go when I stop watching myself sing.

A stage. Empty. Warm. I’m dressed like the night expects something formal, champagne light against my skin, no audience to negotiate with.

Nothing matters there except me and the music finding each other again.

The voices that once told me don’t, can’t, pointless fall quiet — not because they were defeated, but because they were never invited.

This isn’t about hitting the note. It’s about arriving.

I will never reach what I don’t send myself toward. So maybe this time I don’t pull back.

This time I let the sound finish its sentence.

From now on I sing like my bones are listening and trust that they know exactly where to go.

Doodles in the Margin is a podcast of original poetry and essays by Jade. New episodes every Monday. Read more at doodlesinthemargin.substack.com

The kind that makes distance look intentional and turns reaching into something you’re accused of instead of seen for.

I kept moving toward a familiar shape, though its stature had changed. It stood like a monument I no longer recognized—close enough to name, far enough to doubt my own hands.

There was a presence in the mist, not loud, not sharp, just heavy.

Claiming the space between us and calling it care.

It was cold—harm wearing such soft verbiage. Silence enveloped me. This isn’t supposed to happen to those who love gently and show up without an audience.

I stepped back into the grey, the way you retreat from a shadow before it takes a shape you can’t outrun. I moved without turning my back, choosing the exit before the light failed completely.

I put the car in reverse.

And as I went, I pictured the fog thinning—just enough light for the grip to loosen and a familiar shape to finally learn how to walk on its own. A momentary dream, left in the mirror.

The fog stayed, the myth stayed, and distance did what words never could.