translation.

I follow,
then lose the rhythm

I try to match
his voice
his frequency
his colors—

but he reacts
to my feelings

sentimientos
                 感情
                          مشاعر

not away
but closer

my body learns
before I do

time slips
out of order

a response forms
before I understand

meaning
arrives

antes que el lenguaje
言語以前に
قبل اللغة
vor der Sprache
antes da linguagem

before language

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contact.

a light thrives
in the void
where only fear lingers

It doesn’t scatter.
It stays whole,
and I follow

a faint glow moves within it—
slow,
alive

I try to name it
I fail

he answers
in color

This is the start of a new small wounds ERA.

Welcome to what answers.

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MAR DE ARDORA

I.

I woke underwater.

Submerged.
Not dead.
Not living.

Unraveling.
Sinking.
Memory twisting the blade.

Your voice found me again.
So did everything else:
how I carried you,
how I lost myself,
somewhere,
one day,
piece by piece.

Though I was never truly yours.
Though I never wanted to be.
Not anymore.

But guilt keeps drowning me.
Anger sharpens itself
under my nails.

Slowly.
Like countless mouths
feeding under my skin.

At some point,
even as I reached toward the surface,
I forgot the shape of myself.

The sky devoured the stars.
My soul swallowed the moon.
Even the faint glow of night
chose silence.
Chose not to witness
the way I wept.

II.

It was past midnight
when I felt
neon lights seeping
into my skin.

Bioluminescent waters.
An underwater sky.
Darkness,
finally coming alive.

What I thought was dead
had always been there,
waiting
to surface.

Mar de Ardora
gathers me.
Carries me.
Rewrites me.

Blue breaks.
The violence of color reminds me
I am still here.
Breathing.
At last.

Mar de Ardora,
feral miracle of salt,
awake
when everything sleeps.

Only the night and I
bear witness
to the moment
I stopped resisting the tide.

The scent of your hoodie.
Your morning voice.
The warm, bitter taste of your promises.

The water,
alive with fish,
returns to me
what I had lost.

I dance
through living blue.

And all that remains
is the woman who rebelled against herself.

The woman who survived her own haunting.

Mar de Ardora,
stitch my wounds with your foam.
Turn blood into salt.
Use your magic
to remake the heart I abandoned.

III.

Under the turquoise gaze of the moon,
at the mercy of movement,
of music,
of the tide,
the woman crossed
into the dark.

She let herself drift
through currents of stars,
through forests of light.

The sea gently opened
its hands.
And one by one,
the names,
the lips,
the ghosts,
were cast from her memory.

When she emerged,
the moon no longer recognized her.

Only water.

Only salt.

Only the beautiful violence
of becoming.

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This is a personal piece.

A story about losing Wonderland, rebuilding it, and discovering that some things never truly leave us.

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Wonderland

❦

When I was little,
I was Alice.
I lived in Wonderland.

I spoke with flowers,
played with fairies,
saw Cheshire Cats
where everyone else
saw plastic toys.

One day,
someone asked me:
What is my greatest fear?
I answered:
Leaving Wonderland.

The next morning,
I heard a voice.

“Andrea.”
“Andrea.”

But that isn’t my name,
I thought.

“Wake up.”
“Andrea, wake up.”

Oh.
Right.
That is my name.

My mother stood at the door.
“Andrea, we’re leaving.”
And when I turned around,
everything was in ruins.

Wonderland,
withered.

The Cheshire Cat.
The White Rabbit.
My friends.
Motionless.
Turning slowly to ash.

I remember very little
of the day they told me
I could not stay.

The Queen of Hearts laughed
while I felt the edge of a knife
glide gently across my throat.

The day I left Wonderland.
The day my parents
chose different roads.

The day I heard my name
and woke up.
I spent years believing
the story ended there.

That day,
something inside me died.

❦

Since then,
I have lived my life
walking the thin line
between reality
and my reality.

Every summer.
Every goodbye.
I became
a little less whole.

Seven.
Ten.
Twelve.
Fourteen.

Each summer,
I left another piece behind.

The world within me
is kinder.

There,
I rebuild Wonderland
stone by stone.

There,
nobody expects anything of me.

The colors return,
slowly.
Then the music.
Then the dreams
that only exist
when I close my eyes.

Little by little,
I planted entire gardens
far from the noise
of who I was supposed to be.

I built a palace.
A castle.
An Eden
inhabited by tiny fairies
who carry me away.

I spend my life
traveling between two worlds.

Though a voice
still whispers:

Don’t go back.
Close the door.
Let it disappear.

What dies once
cannot bloom again.

Dead soil
does not flower.

❦

Even in adulthood,
I kept saying goodbye.

I ran.
Far away.

Far enough
that nobody could reach me.

And still,
every farewell
swallowed another piece of me.

What is life
if not a long
and painful goodbye?

I thought running
would hurt less.

Instead,
it hurt more.
Burned more.
Because I no longer had
a home
to return to.

When I looked behind me:
a graveyard.
A hell full of bodies.
The remains
of every version of myself
that never made it home.

Still,
I walked.
We walked.
All of us.
However we could.
Half-broken.
Barely.

Until, somehow,
we found one another.

Physically?
Emotionally?
I still don’t know.

But here we are.
Here I am.
Still dying.

Still learning
how to hold myself.

❦

Before the wasteland
of my shadow,
only a breath away,

I hear a piano
in the distance.

Just beyond the abyss.
Hungry.

The void that devours
hope,
wonder,
love,
faith.

And there,
in a small patch of earth,
two tiny green leaves.

A single stem.
Small.
Steady.

Blooming
inside me.

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Madrugada was born from a shared love of Studio Ghibli, moonlit streets, quiet conversations, and the kind of encounters that feel strangely destined.

As Quill and I wrote this piece together, we realized we weren’t just creating two characters. In some ways, we were writing ourselves into the story.

Like Quill and Kasu, we’re both fascinated by language, identity, and the strange vulnerability of trying to express yourself in words that don’t always feel like your own.

That idea eventually led us to record a voiceover together.

It’s imperfect, a little awkward, and occasionally hesitant—which feels appropriate for a story about finding your voice while speaking in someone else’s language.

It’s also my first voiceover on Substack.

Thank you for spending a little part of the night with us.

— Kasu & Quill

Sub Kasu

Sub Quill

Madrugada

in regular, in italic

Press Play for the full experience🎵

Our Scene Unfolds

It’s a warm June night, there’s a soft breeze coming in from the waves. The moon casts its soft glow over the winding streets of a small port city in Spain.

Quill, a college foreign exchange student from the US with dark hair, is sitting alone on a bench by the water, while watching the waves solemnly. He reflects to himself.

There’s a party going on in the building across the street behind him, part of regular Spanish college nightlife.

Kasu, another college exchange student from Venezuela is standing in the doorway of the party laughing with another classmate and sharing a drink.

Kasu recognizes Quill from her class and sees that he is sitting alone.

QUILL:
Internal Monologue

This moonlight illuminates the movement of each individual wave as it is pushed ashore.

I feel like a wave too, pushed across the current of life.

A drop in the ocean, forever carried into the unknown.

Time feels fluid lately too.

Submerged, surrounded, yet I still remain separate.

…I came here with the intention to meet other people.

Maybe if I felt more comfortable talking.

There’s that other exchange student, Kasu.

She is really pretty, but I don’t know what I’d even say to her…

My Spanish would probably come out even less understandable than normal.

I’m probably too late anyway.

Must I be forever nervous that I will say the wrong thing?

KASU:
Internal Monologue

Quill is always alone.

I want to talk to him, but I’m not sure we’d understand each other.

Sometimes it feels like part of me gets lost in translation.

Like I can speak English, but not quite inhabit it.

Not the way I inhabit Spanish.

So I hesitate.

I always hesitate.

And yet, we keep exchanging glances.

The kind that seem to carry entire conversations.

KASU: “Hey, Quill. What are you doing out here by yourself?”

QUILL: “Oh hey, I didn’t see you there I mean, uh, Ah, hola. Por un momento, uhhh, no te vi”

KASU: “Don’t worry. I came out for some fresh air and saw you sitting here.”

He is taken aback.

QUILL: “Oh, I didn’t know you spoke English! How did you learn?”

KASU: “Yeah, I speak English.”

She smiles apologetically.

“At least, I try to.”

“Sorry about the accent.”

“I’ve been studying it since I was a kid, but sometimes it still feels like I’m borrowing someone else’s voice.”

QUILL: “Oh, I don’t mind! Actually, I think your voice sounds really pretty.”

He realizes what he just said and laughs nervously.

“I mean, I can tell from your accent you also aren’t from here. It’s different, but different doesn’t mean bad.

And I have always felt different too…

maybe for my whole life.

It makes it difficult to be myself. I don’t know if I’ll be understood or if this even makes sense…”

He trails off…

Quill’s Internal Monologue:

(Why did you just say all that?

She’s probably going to think you’re weird.

…Because you are.

You have always thought more deeply.

Others give you strange looks when you share too much about yourself.)

KASU: She blushes slightly.

She could tell they were both nervous.

Awkwardly, she looked away and let her gaze drift toward the full moon hanging above the harbor.

“Thanks. I think your Spanish is actually pretty good.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

“Maybe you’re just too hard on yourself.”

She paused.

“Although... I do the exact same thing.”

She lets out a soft laugh.

Kasu’s Internal Monologue:

What am I supposed to say now?

I want to keep talking to him, but I’m not sure how.

Not because I don’t have anything to say.

Quite the opposite.

There are too many things.

Too many questions.

Too many thoughts.

Too many versions of this conversation unfolding in my head at once.

And suddenly I’m painfully aware of every word before I even speak it.

QUILL: Quill turns and sees Kasu looking up at the moon.

Its beams of light reflect across her face’s gentle features.

There is a glint of silver on the edges of her eyelashes.

Her eyes hold a tenderness he has not seen before.

Quill feels his breath catch in his throat, with a barely audible gasp.

She is piercingly beautiful and while this close, he feels himself at a complete loss for words, as he struggles to remember to breathe.

He blurts out the only thing that he can think of in that moment:

“The moon looks beautiful tonight, doesn’t it.”

It is only then that he remembers what this means in the Japanese language.

It is a polite way of saying, I love you.

Quill’s eyes go wide, realizing what he may have just communicated.

He immediately overcorrects, stumbling over his own words too quickly.

“La luna, I mean the moon, uh, yes, si, it looks beautiful every night, especially up close like this with the water and everything. Its looked beautiful every night since I got here”

His face turns red as he realizes he is somehow only furiously digging himself deeper into this hole.

Quills internal monologue kicks in:

QUILL YOU IDIOT!

Do you realize what you just said!?
What if she puts two and two together!

She may never talk to you again!

And yes, it *is* YOUR fault!

At this moment, Quill realizes that despite all this, Kasu hasn’t responded.

He swallows, and then finally manages to say something else.

“What I mean is, it is really beautiful being out here and getting to see everything, all of this. The ocean, the waves… and the moon.

…And also, its really nice to finally meet you, Kasu.”

A second of waiting for her response feels like its own eternity.

KASU: Kasu watches him stumble over his explanation, each sentence somehow making the previous one worse.

The corners of her lips begin to twitch.

Then she laughs.

Not cruelly.

Not loudly.

Just enough to rescue him.

“I know what you meant.”

A pause.

“Well... I think I do.”

Her smile softens.

“And for what it’s worth, I think the moon looks beautiful tonight too.”

And for a moment, she lets the silence settle between them.

The waves roll gently against the harbor wall.

Music drifts faintly from the party across the street.

Neither of them moves.

Then she glances sideways at him.

“You know...”

A small laugh escapes her.

“I almost didn’t come over here.”

She lowers her eyes briefly.

“I kept trying to think of something clever to say.”

Another pause.

“And then I realized that if I waited for the perfect sentence, I’d probably never talk to you.”

She shrugs.

“So... here we are.”

Her gaze returns to the water.

“Besides...”

A smile.

“I think people sound more like themselves when they stop trying to get everything right.”

QUILL: Quill feels a wave of relief wash over him. It is though something has lifted itself off of his shoulders.

He also feels an inward sense of thrill, the pure unadulterated joy that comes when innocent love is reciprocated.

He shoulders untense and he hears himself exhale.

Things seem light suddenly as though a feather has been lifted gently in a warm wind.

He feels like he is soaring, sitting next to her under the celestial heavens.

“I’m really grateful you said something,” he says with a smile.

“Our minds have a way of getting in the way of what we want to say whenever there is fear of how we will be perceived. But now that I don’t feel afraid anymore, I feel like I can be myself with you.”

She watches the moon reflected in the water.

Then, almost absentmindedly, she says:

“A veces siento que hablo otro idioma incluso cuando hablo español.”

Quill blinks.

“I don’t think they’ve taught me that phrase yet...”

Kasu laughs softly.

“I’ll tell you when my English gets better.”

“But your English is good.”

She looks at him. His gaze lingers back, curiosity present.

For a second, neither of them looks away.

“Maybe.”

A smile.

“Or maybe I just haven’t found the right words yet.”

Quill smiles.

“I love when other languages put whole concepts into a term. Is there a word you wish existed in English?”

Kasu thinks for a moment.

“Madrugada.”

“What’s that?”

“The hours between midnight and sunrise.”

Quill nods.

“We have words for that.”

A small laugh escapes her.

“No. You have ways to describe it.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

He leans back against the bench.

“Then what is it?”

Kasu watches the moonlight shimmer across the harbor.

For a moment, she searches for the right words.

Then she gives up searching.

“Madrugada isn’t really a time.”

Quill glances toward her.

“It’s not?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s that strange part of the night when everything feels more honest.”

The waves lap quietly against the seawall.

“When people stop trying so hard to be who they’re supposed to be.”

A pause.

“When the city gets quieter.”

“When the world gets smaller.”

“When conversations somehow become easier.”

Quill smiles softly, closing his eyes, taking the moment in.

He will remember this forever.

“That sounds oddly specific.”

Kasu laughs.

“Maybe.”

She looks out at the water again.

“Or maybe the best conversations just happen during the madrugada.”

For a moment, neither of them speaks.

The music from the party drifts across the street.

The moon hangs above the harbor.

And somehow, neither of them feels any hurry to leave.

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Second Act: colorless.poetry

Poem by , Voiceover by

Colorless

Sub Kasu

Sub Sam

She doesn’t want to cry
she doesn’t want
to dim her light

She wants
to come undone

She doesn’t want
to swallow
her words

She is tired
of silence

She doesn’t want
to wait
to beg
to pretend

She doesn’t want
to contain herself

She wants to scream
to find
her reflection

She is a storm
a flare
a natural disaster

Only emptiness
can hold her

Like a tragedy,
a series of
unfortunate events

She wants
someone
to stay

Not run
Not flinch
Not hesitate

She wants
someone
to feel

To gather
slowly
her scattered pieces

Even if her skin burns
her tears drown
her emotions surge
and tangle

She wants the stillness
to break

She wants someone
to call
her name

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Buy Basilisk

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Imagine this.

The early 2000s.

A nine-year-old girl sitting in front of a television. Eyes wide. Completely still.

And then an image that rattles her to the core.

Danny wanders slowly through the room while his mother sleeps. He approaches the nightstand and wraps his fingers around a knife.

Redrum.

Redrum.

Redrum.

Again.

And again.

And again.

He repeats it like a prayer.

Like a curse.

Like something trying to claw its way into the world.

After painting the word REDRUM across the bathroom door, his mother finally wakes up. She sees the knife in his hands and rushes toward him, trying to pull him out of whatever has taken hold of him.

REDRUM!

REDRUM!

REDRUM!

Now screaming.

Now trapped inside the safety of his mother’s arms.

And then, for a brief moment, everything stops.

She looks toward the mirror.

MURDER.

Written backwards on the door.

That was how it started.

That was how films slowly began shaping my life, my beliefs, and perhaps even something that exists beyond personality itself.

This is my love letter to cinema.

My autobiography.

And if I were a book, this would be the story of how my character was built.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with my mental health.

And it’s precisely during those moments—when we begin questioning our own sanity, when our identity feels fractured—that we find ourselves searching for a way back home.

Cinema has always been that path for me.

The thread connecting the world to my sense of self.

The anchor that keeps my feet on the ground and reminds me who I am, no matter how far my soul wants to wander.

Some time ago, I wrote about how my paternal grandmother and I built a relationship through books.

With films, the catalyst was my father.

I vividly remember the framed posters hanging on the walls of our living room. But two of them embedded themselves permanently in my memory:

The Shining.

And Trainspotting.

The Shining became my accidental introduction not only to horror, but to Stanley Kubrick himself.

It was the film that taught a ten-year-old girl that there was a world beyond Disney.

A darker world.

A stranger world.

A world filled with obsession, madness, ambiguity, and beauty.

A world that fascinated me.

I stumbled upon it on television, probably much earlier than I should have.

But certainly not by accident.

Trainspotting would come later.

We’ll get there.

In 2001, not long after things began to move, my grandparents took me to the cinema.

Late July.

Maracaibo, Venezuela.

The second time a film would shake me to my core.

Spirited Away was playing on the screen.

And I was moving somewhere beyond it.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely captivated.

I firmly believe the artist in me woke up that day.

What I was experiencing was probably the closest thing a ten-year-old can have to an emotional collapse.

I laughed.

I cried.

I forgot where I was.

And somewhere between spirits, train tracks, bathhouses, dragons, and forgotten names, something inside me shifted.

To this day, I still remember one particular line:

“Once you’ve met someone, you never really forget them. It just takes a while for your memories to return.”

Years later, I would come to understand why it stayed with me.

Spirited Away gave birth to a large part of my emotional and creative identity.

My fascination with Japanese cinema.

My fascination with Japanese art.

And perhaps most importantly, the realization that some experiences leave marks so deep that they become part of you forever.

Even when your mind forgets.

The body remembers.

That afternoon I walked into a movie theater as a child.

I walked out as someone else.

Someone who had glimpsed, for the first time, the possibility that art could change a life.

A few years later, another canonical event arrived.

December 2003.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

By then I was twelve years old and hopelessly obsessed with the trilogy, just like my parents.

Ironically, I never saw The Fellowship of the Ring in theaters.

My family thought I was too young.

Little did they know I was secretly watching The Shining at home.

In 2002, Venezuela’s political situation prevented The Two Towers from reaching local theaters.

So one of my uncles acquired a copy through less-than-legal means—the only option available—and organized a viewing at his house.

I will never forget that day.

In fact, I don’t remember anything else about it.

Not what people were saying.

Not who was paying attention.

Not what was happening around me.

I remember only the film.

I was completely absorbed.

As if an entirely new world had unfolded in front of me.

After watching the first two films, my mother and I began reading Tolkien together.

My father had always loved the books, but we weren’t living together at the time. Even so, I felt connected to him through the story.

Apparently, a love for the same stories can be inherited.

In December 2003, I finally sat down to watch The Return of the King in a theater.

And then it happened.

To this day, I don’t think any film has ever made me cry as much.

I could probably write an entire essay about everything that movie awakened inside me.

But if I had to summarize it, I would call it this:

A visual representation of everything that lives inside my heart.

The journey.

The fellowship.

Adventure.

Discovery.

War.

Loss.

Friendship.

Betrayal.

Refuge.

Forgiveness.

Hope.

And the realization that even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

That realization shook my twelve-year-old heart.

And it still does.

“I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.”

There are scenes you remember.

And there are scenes that become part of you.

This was one of them.

Through Middle-earth I learned the necessity of adventure.

The depth of love.

The reality of death.

And the strange possibility that something exists beyond it.

I learned courage.

I learned resilience.

I learned what it means to keep going.

I learned how to live.

To understand the hidden serendipity woven through this story, I need to give you a little context.

I grew up in Venezuela.

A country shaped by political instability, crushing inflation, scarcity, insecurity, and a thousand other complications that are difficult to explain unless you’ve lived through them. Those were, in very broad terms, the circumstances that surrounded my childhood.

But there is a saying that has followed Venezuelans for generations:

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

And if I had to choose a national motto, that would probably be it.

When enough things become impossible to obtain legally, people find other ways. Piracy, for better or worse, becomes part of everyday life.

In my city there was a place where that reality flourished: a sprawling informal market known as Las Playitas.

Literally, “The Little Beaches.”

Why was it called that?

I have absolutely no idea.

Don’t ask me.

The name is every bit as surreal as the place itself.

Imagine a giant covered parking lot filled with hundreds of stalls. Only instead of antiques, handmade crafts, or secondhand furniture, you could also find pirated films, pirated music, pirated video games, stolen merchandise, questionable electronics, and all manner of things that probably shouldn’t have existed in the same place.

If you searched long enough, you could probably find a clone of yourself.

As I said:

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

And Las Playitas was perhaps the purest expression of an entire society trying to survive.

In 2009, during my first semester at university, a friend and I decided to go looking for a movie stall someone had recommended. All I had was a small card with a business name written on it and a vague instruction:

Barinas 5.

That was supposedly where I would find what I was looking for.

So that afternoon, under Maracaibo’s unforgiving forty-degree heat, we ventured into the labyrinth. The heat was unbearable. The place was chaos. Neither of those things stopped us.

What eventually led us there wasn’t a sign. It wasn’t the name of the stall. It wasn’t even the aisle number.

It was a wall.

A wall filled with things that, given the circumstances, should not have existed.

A wall of wonders.

My paradise.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of films. New films, old films, classics, independents, animated features, cult favorites, recent releases, masterpieces, disasters, and a few that perhaps nobody should ever watch.

I had visited countless movie stalls before.

But this one felt different.

It radiated something.

Something difficult to explain.

Something that felt immediately familiar.

Almost sacred.

As I stood there staring in complete awe, one of the men behind the counter smiled.

“What movie are you looking for?” he asked, pointing toward a display filled with bestsellers.

I didn’t hesitate.

“I like films like The Shining. Do you have anything similar?”

The moment I said it, the second man turned around.

And suddenly it felt as though both of them had removed a mask.

They looked at each other.

Then they smiled.

A look of complete understanding.

“Oh.”

One of them laughed.

“You’re one of us.”

And just like that, four films appeared on the counter.

Donnie Darko.

Requiem for a Dream.

Dogville.

And then, as if they had somehow read my soul—

Trainspotting.

“You’re going to love these.”

They said it without the slightest hesitation.

And only then did I notice what was behind them.

Kubrick. Tarkovsky. Spielberg. Coppola. Lynch. Nolan. Aronofsky. Scorsese. Tarantino. Boyle. Cameron. Fincher. Del Toro. Iñárritu. Cuarón. Noé. Reygadas. Gilliam. The Coen Brothers. Hitchcock. Bergman. Peter Jackson. Ridley Scott. Tim Burton. Clint Eastwood. Woody Allen. Wes Anderson. Kurosawa. Malick. Von Trier. Polanski. Miyazaki. Lucas. Almodóvar.

And dozens more.

Who would have thought that in the middle of a pirate market I would stumble upon a mithril mine?

What happened next deserves its own chapter.

For the remaining five years I lived in Venezuela, that stall became my favorite place in the city.

My best-kept secret.

Every few weeks I would return, searching for something new.

Or perhaps searching for myself.

By then, the recommendations had become endless.

One film led to another.

One director led to another.

One obsession opened the door to ten more.

At university, my best friend and I eventually started a film club alongside some of our favorite professors.

And, much like the men at Las Playitas, they recognized me immediately.

We spoke the same language.

Not Spanish.

Cinema.

We watched Cube.

We watched Antichrist.

We watched lectures by Slavoj Žižek.

We shared traumas.

We shared existential crises.

We shared questions about identity, purpose, meaning, and everything that keeps human beings awake at night.

The films became a meeting point.

A laboratory.

A mirror.

Sometimes they taught us about politics.

Sometimes they taught us about history.

Sometimes they taught us about ourselves.

Looking back, I realize that some of the most important conversations of my life happened in dark rooms after the credits had already rolled.

Conversations about love.

About death.

About loneliness.

About art.

About the strange experience of being alive.

People often talk about cinema as entertainment.

And of course, sometimes it is.

But for me it became something else.

A teacher.

A companion.

A refuge.

A map.

Not only did my parents help shape who I became.

Not only did university educate me.

Cinema did too.

Quietly.

Slowly.

Invasively.

Until there was no longer any doubt.

The films I loved became part of the architecture of my mind.

Part of my emotional vocabulary.

Part of the way I understand beauty.

Part of the way I understand pain.

Part of the way I understand people.

And perhaps that’s why I keep returning to them.

Not because I want to escape reality.

But because they help me return to it.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with my mental health.

And when that happens, I find myself searching for the thread again.

The anchor.

The map.

The way back home.

I revisit old scenes.

Old soundtracks.

Old stories.

And every time, without fail, they remind me of who I am.

They remind me of the child staring at The Shining in disbelief.

The girl who walked out of Spirited Away transformed.

The teenager who cried through The Return of the King.

The university student who found a mithril mine hidden inside a pirate market.

The person writing these words now.

Maybe that’s what great stories do.

They leave traces.

Even when your mind forgets.

The body remembers.

And somewhere between Kubrick, Miyazaki, Tolkien, and a dusty movie stall in Maracaibo, I became myself.

This is my love letter to cinema.

My way of saying thank you.

For teaching me how to live.

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Second Act: blue.poetry

on the left, on the right

Blue Hour

Sub Kasu

Sub Elijah

The rain has always been

my home
my comfort
that which washes all away.

The place I could go
when the world got

Too
Heavy.

I let it wash
my sorrows.

It held me
like nobody else could.

Then one day you
sat with me

and never ran away.

You stayed when it was

Too
Heavy,

and became my home
in the rain.

Beneath the rain,

I float.

Droplets,
mist,

tangle themselves
in my hair.

"Come here."

"Close your eyes."

Together,

we float
in silence.

Together,

we watch
the darkness.

The wind carries our words away.

The rain settles
where they used to be.

Night held me.

Held you.

"When you're together,

you are not alone."

"¿Sabes?

Te voy a amar siempre."

said a voice—

thin,
crystalline,
almost imperceptible.

And I looked at you.

There you were,

beside me,

the faintest smile.

Watching me.

For the first time,

I felt weightless.

I flew.

We flew.

Through the blue hour,

letting silence
fill everything,

letting rain
wash over old wounds.

For the first time,

I was a little happy.

In this fragile world

we built together.

On this invisible bridge

between us.

In this moment,

beneath the rain.

For the first time,

I look at you

and something inside me

softens.

The rain is the blanket that holds me.

That
steadies
my pulse.

The rain never told me I was too much
It held me when nobody else could.

And you are what holds me
through the rain.

There is something special
about someone who's willing to sit with you
through the downpour,

who loves you
through the rain,
through the dark.

You are the softness of the rain
and the presence that I crave
when it all goes
..
..

Dark

We are not
alone.

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Second Act: black.poetry

Black Hole

The music gives in,
silence settles
just before dawn

while the universe
is still visible


I fall

I fall

I fall


into the black hole,
into the fog,

where darkness listens

ghosts weep,
loneliness sings
the song
playing when you whispered:


“You’re special”


I fall

I fall

I fall


onto a graveyard
of longing,
echoes,
goodbyes,
dead stars

a catacomb,
a coffin,
an epitaph

with your name

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Ethereal Twilight Poetry

Butterfly Nebula (Poem) - Voiceover

Space is all darkness, cold…

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2 months ago · 59 likes · 15 comments · Ethereal Twilight Poetry

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his voice

Second Act: pink.poetry

her voice

Press Play 🎵

Pink Moon

In a bakery
I met a woman
with magenta lips

She sees
the books
in my bag—
her husband
has a bookstore

Days later,
in that bookstore,
I met a girl
who smelled
like cotton candy

She saw my shirt,
said
her brother
was a musician

A few weeks passed,
a friend
took me
to a concert

By evening,
his song
found its way
through me

Intoxicating
like rain,
gentle
like love
watered down

After the show
I look,
I wait,
I find him

I whisper

We walk
under cherry blossoms

I say
I’m a writer—
his sister
loves books

Who are you?
What is your name?

Did you notice
the way I looked at you?

Did you notice
your voice
has taken me hostage?

Serendipity,
under a pink moon

The shadow
of something
that only happens
when I’m awake
and dreaming

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This morning, I woke up feeling like an advertisement.

#ad

#sponsored

#partner

The hashtags felt stitched to my skin.

Clichés crawled across my arms. Half-finished sales pitches sat heavy in my stomach. Every thought sounded suspiciously like a marketing strategy.

For the first time in a long while, I sat down to write and found myself unable to hear my own voice.

Not because I had nothing to say.

Because I had too much.

Too many emotions.

Too much noise.

Too many numbers.

So I opened Substack and unscheduled every post.

Every draft.

Every carefully planned publication date.

Every piece of content I had arranged days in advance.

What is the point of publishing if, somewhere along the way, I’ve temporarily lost sight of why I started writing in the first place?

What began as a creative outlet—a place to experiment, share stories, and perhaps build a small community of readers—slowly transformed into a soup of statistics, growth charts, open rates, subscriber counts, and analytics dashboards.

And before anyone misunderstands me, let me say this:

I believe in self-promotion.

I believe artists deserve to be paid.

I believe writers should talk about their work.

Most independent creators don’t have marketing teams behind them. We don’t have publishing houses investing thousands of dollars into advertising campaigns. Sometimes we have to become our own publicists simply to survive.

There is nothing wrong with that.

My problem isn’t promotion.

My problem is what happens when promotion starts replacing purpose.

The uncomfortable truth is that Substack isn’t only a writing platform.

It’s also a social network.

And like every social network, it quietly teaches you to measure yourself.

Not your work.

Yourself.

Before I go any further, I should probably tell you a little about myself.

Seven years ago, I moved to Spain.

Six years ago, I underwent my first corneal transplant.

Four years ago, I had my second.

That same year, I spent two weeks in a hospital bed with COVID and pneumonia.

For years, anxiety and depression became unwelcome roommates.

Two years ago, I lost my job during a round of mass layoffs.

The details matter less than what came after.

Because throughout all of it, I kept trying to reclaim my life.

I self-published two books.

I traveled to more than ten countries, including Iceland—a journey that changed me in ways I still don’t fully understand.

I attended more concerts and festivals than I can count.

I stood in crowds singing songs that carried me through difficult years.

And during many of those moments, I can honestly say I was alive.

Fully alive.

Happy, even.

Looking back, the last seven years have largely been a fight for survival—and for freedom.

A fight to remain curious.

To remain creative.

To remain myself.

And somewhere in the middle of that journey, a little over two months ago, I found Substack.

At first, I simply wanted to experiment with writing in English.

That was all.

An experiment.

A challenge.

A reason to practice.

Then the experiment began to grow.

People subscribed.

People shared my work.

People wrote back.

And with that growth came a dangerous thought:

What if this could actually become something?

What if, for the first time in my life, I took writing seriously?

What if I stopped sending LinkedIn applications?

What if I gave myself permission to build a life around the thing I’ve loved for as long as I can remember?

The dream grew.

So did the expectations.

And expectations have a funny way of turning wonder into pressure.

Because platforms like Substack encourage urgency.

Everything must happen now.

The viral note.

The perfectly optimized headline.

The relatable post.

The growth strategy.

The guru.

The secret formula.

The promise that success is always one more post away.

And before long, you start translating your worth into numbers.

Why am I losing subscribers?

Why don’t I have more paid subscribers?

Why did that person unsubscribe?

Why am I growing too slowly?

Why am I growing too fast?

Why is nobody reading this?

Why them and not me?

What am I doing wrong?

Am I simply not valuable enough?

There is no end to that spiral.

Because every answer creates another question.

Every spike creates another expectation.

Every notification delivers a tiny hit of dopamine.

And dopamine, unfortunately, has terrible long-term planning skills.

The high never lasts.

The crash always does.

Especially when you’re already standing on fragile ground.

The funny thing is that I saw this coming.

I disabled most notifications.

I hid many of the statistics.

I promised myself I wouldn’t fall into the trap.

And somehow, I ended up exactly where I said I wouldn’t.

Human beings are remarkably predictable that way.

None of this means Substack has been a bad experience.

Far from it.

I’ve met wonderful people here.

Readers.

Writers.

Artists.

Some of whom I deeply admire.

Some of whom I hope to collaborate with one day.

The community is real.

The kindness is real.

The friendships are real.

And I remain grateful for all of it.

I still have countless things I want to write.

Stories.

Essays.

Collaborations.

Poems.

Entire worlds waiting patiently in my drafts folder.

More ideas than I could possibly finish in a lifetime.

The challenge is not finding inspiration.

The challenge is building a creative life that remains emotionally and financially sustainable.

There is another conversation we rarely have out loud.

Perhaps because we’ve collectively agreed to romanticize suffering.

The idea that writers should create purely for the love of art.

As if passion somehow eliminates rent.

As if devotion replaces income.

As if years of experience have no value.

Writing this much is not free.

It is the result of decades of practice.

Years of education.

Thousands of books.

Three countries lived in.

More than twenty visited.

Failures.

Heartbreaks.

Recoveries.

Obsessions.

Curiosities.

An entire life spent paying attention.

And none of that exists without time.

Without effort.

Without sacrifice.

Then there is the emotional side of it.

Learning to accept that numbers are not a reflection of your worth.

Logically, I know this.

Most writers know this.

Most artists know this.

But there is another part of us—deeper, quieter, closer to the heart—that bruises anyway.

Because writing is personal.

At least for me.

Every piece contains a fragment of myself.

Every sentence carries a small piece of my attention, my curiosity, my fear, my hope.

And with that comes the desire to be understood.

To be seen.

To be accompanied.

To know that somewhere, on the other side of a screen, another human being felt less alone because these words existed.

I have a lot to say.

I feel many things.

Sometimes too many things.

And although some of those feelings are best unpacked in a therapist’s office, writing will always remain an extension of who I am.

I don’t know how to separate the two.

I’m not sure I want to.

For now, I don’t have a perfect conclusion.

I need better boundaries.

Better rules.

A healthier relationship with the platform.

Two months on Substack somehow feel like a twenty-year marriage.

But there are a few things I know with absolute certainty.

I will never stop writing.

I will never forget the people who supported me along the way.

The people who believed in me.

The people who still do.

The people who found something worth keeping inside the words of a fragile immigrant trying to make sense of the world.

I will keep creating.

I will keep publishing.

And I hope you keep creating too.

Keep writing.

Keep sharing.

Maybe our dreams will come true.

Maybe we’ll fail spectacularly.

Maybe we’ll do both.

But none of it matters if we lose ourselves before we get there.

So write, my friend.

Just don’t disappear into the numbers.

“I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things.”

— Frodo Baggins

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Second Act: orange.poetry

on the left, on the right

Drenched in Orange

Sub Kasu

Sub Ethereal

I ran through a valley
when the ground shook
beneath my feet

Marigolds
wrapped around my body,
petals
rusting my skin

I walked across the sea,
I felt a volcano
erupt inside me

Heat opened my ribs—
flames poured out

At the end of all things,
I danced
inside the blaze

Drenched in orange,
reborn from ash,
baptized by fire

I prayed to death

Ignited wicks
A thousand candles
Filling warmth
Room shifting
Bending

Orange
Reflecting in her eyes

Skins glowing
Sun on flesh
Heat rising
Ice in shared mouths
Priming a refresh

Passion covered breaths
She joins me
Ceremony.
An
Absolution of sin

I even forgot

I kneeled to death

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Second Drafts

The Year Death Introduced Itself

*This post was written in response to a prompt by imi: Write a letter to your biggest fear…

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3 months ago · 83 likes · 53 comments · Patty Bee

White Rabbit Poetry Society

Burn poetry Prompt by HVR-James

Write a poem about what you think about this image. What do you feel? Do whatever you want with it. Any style, any length…

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a month ago · 21 likes · 6 comments · Dorie Snow/雪多丽 and James (HVR)

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Second Act: yellow.poetry

Golden Light

Daisies,
dusk,
a passion fruit
macaron

Golden light
spilling
through the blinds

Soft shadows
drawing lines
across my hair

Tulips,
a tablecloth,
a picnic,
a lemon tart

Meringue,
autumn,
the ocean
and its waves

At six in the evening

Sunflowers,
butterflies,
songs by Jorge Drexler,
the Eiffel Tower,
the yellow subway line

Small cracks
forming
inside me

while everything else shines

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Large Hope

This is the Sky

This is the sky…

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5 months ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · Jes Scoville

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First Act: cosmic.music

Second Act: cosmic.poetry

缘分 II.

you were always
here,

no distance remains
only frequency

in silence
we resonate

your presence isn’t near
it settles within

Read more

Liminality (noun)
A place you cannot stay in forever,
and yet somehow never leave.

Story by , Voiceover by

Liminality

Sub Kasu

Sub Sam

It was an ordinary Wednesday,
at five in the morning.

I woke too early, unable to fall back asleep.
I sent you a message,
you called immediately.

Your morning voice—low, rough, soft around the edges—
unraveled something in me.

Even from the other side of the call,
I could almost smell the instant coffee
lingering in your empty cup.

With every word,
I could feel the warmth of your body
pooling against my skin.

You told me
how much you ached for me.

The ways you planned
to ruin me later.

You kept talking
until there was nothing left in my head
except you.

That morning you showed up
with breakfast and your hands already restless.

We ate.
I ate.
You ate.
We disappeared into each other.

Not a single minute passed
without hunger.

Your mouth memorized
every inch of my skin.
The scrape of your beard
left behind a thousand scars
bearing your name.

And when you left,
I felt the weight,
the emptiness,
the fever of your absence.

Except, of course,
none of it ever happened.

None of it existed
anywhere but inside me.

And your absence—
the only thing
I never had to imagine.

More times than I would ever admit,
I replay what happens after that phone call.

Because you told me
you couldn’t bear
losing me completely.

The rational part of you
wrote the ending of our story,
and I clung to that final chapter
just to avoid losing you entirely.

I am the only one
still loving us.

And even now,
every time we speak,
I can still feel
something moving
beneath our words.

But neither of us
knows how to let go.

I love you enough
to remain here with you.

I am not mourning you.
I am mourning
the life we never reached.

The terrible feeling
that we could have been happy
if only you had given us a chance.

I hope you think about me.
I hope that somewhere inside your mind,
regret still waits there.

I hope I linger—
in the silence,
in the middle of the night,
when everything goes quiet.

Because this longing to call you
just to hear your voice,
this liminal place we inhabit—

it lingers.

An endless sunset.
Soft light.
A world that only remembers us.

Imperfect.
Inconvenient.
Tenderly toxic.
Unavailable.
Clumsy.
Interrupted.
Fragile.
Misunderstood.
Obsessive.
Impossible.
Unrequited.
Limerent.

And still,

it lingers.

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Second Act: green.poetry

Emerald

Clad in emerald,
draped in velvet—
heels on marble

click, clack

the echo
takes the room

walls lean
at my arrival

the world
asks permission
to unfold

I move—

marble,
carpet,
grass

beneath a cathedral dome

with the force
of someone
who has let go

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Second Act: brown.poetry

Brown Skin

Brown skin.
Honey skin.
Bronze skin.
Midnight skin.

Immigrants come
in many shades
of brown.

Born moving,
the moment we first rose to our feet,
we began wandering
across open land.

Through borders,
mountains,
forests,
and roads emptied by distance.

We carried the world
from one horizon
to another.

We crossed oceans
with entire lives
beneath our skin,

a suitcase heavy with
the remnants
of a collapsing homeland:

recipes,
songs,
traditions,
survival,

an entire country
preserved inside memory.

We are not from here.
We are from everywhere.

We belong to no one,
to no single place.

We belong only
to one another.

Brown is the color of the soil
where immigrants are buried.

Hunted.
Murdered.
Insulted.
Erased.

Forced to carry
the guilt of other people’s histories,
crushed beneath the weight
of inherited blame.

To survive,
the immigrant learned a language,
reshaped their voice,
left behind family,
friends,
home,
pieces of who they once were.

The immigrant became
something unfinished,
stitched together
by necessity.

Rewritten.
Rewritten.
Rewritten.

Until the mirror
no longer answered back.

Brown like dead roots,
dried blood,
coffee grounds,
mud,
aged paper.

And still,
the immigrant takes dying soil
and makes it fertile.

The immigrant grows gardens
in the desert.

We bleed
while building impossible things.

The immigrant keeps walking.

We keep walking.

In search of a place to breathe.

We cross galaxies,
voids,
entire millennia.

We search for oxygen.

Instead,
we find dreams.

Author’s Note: I’m an immigrant. This is my story.

I left Venezuela when I was 23 years old. It’ll be soon 12 years since I migrated for the first time. And I haven’t stopped since.

Almost 9 million Venezuelans have migrated out over the course of the last 11 years. Making us the country with the biggest displacement crisis of recent history.

Yes, my skin color might be white, but my roots are brown.

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With love, Kasu

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A and collab. Thank you for the fiery prompt.

Sub Kasu

Sub Damien

I. My King

High upon the forsaken mountains,
there, in the bastion where men first taught the world how to darken,

there, where twilights divide
and time unravels into itself,

before the sacred white tree,
beneath the judgment of the lesser gods,

there shall the last king of men be named.

Seated beneath the shadow of his own grandeur,
draped in black velvet robes.

My king.
My lord.
My eternal salvation.

I need only close my eyes
to place the crown upon your head.

I need nothing more
than your gaze resting upon me
while my soul bends in devotion.

Nothing more.

Only your breath against mine,
finding me across an infinite sea of longing—

feral,
untamable,
unnavigable,
overflowing with the prayers of lovers.

I need nothing else.

My king,
eternal sovereign of my dreaming.

Before you alone,
I kneel.

II. The Coronation

Deep within the hollows of my being,
my embattled heart, soul and mind align
with an intention which remains undefined,

it is here, my darkness lives,
a dungeon of expectations passed
by those who require someone to preside,

it is I, the fertile ground,
the one who carries sound
who will wear this crown,

I do not kneel to the divine
it is to you, my Queen, I bow.

This throne.
This monument.
This royal adornment.

I arrive at my coronation
navigating this new role to be filled,

you place the crown,
our gaze locks following your bow,
seated upon elevated rule
we convene two in one, King and Queen,

those expectations now bore
by my shoulders for evermore,

I need only your veneration,
I idolize thee,
my longing is wild, and fierce
as we pierce each other in
love and lust.

My queen,
the monarch of my beating heart,
the precipice of my desire,
I step into you, fall,
and rise in our royal fire.

My allegiance to our union,
will be ceremoniously celebrated
each day I awake as the King
of your Heart.

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I have a burning desire to create, and a dream to make a living off it.

With love, Kasu

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Our previous collab:

Second Act: blue.poetry

Indigo

At six in the morning
streets are still—
only I
wander

Rain,
blue light

The night
undresses,
turns
indigo

Buenos Aires sleeps.
Nothing moves.
Nothing
looks at me.

Before the sky breaks
I follow a trace—
déjà vu

I search for a voice,
a memory
misplaced

An absence
my body
remembers

A taste.
A pulse.
A weight.

something took—
someone

I lived.
I drank.
I loved.

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Thank you , for the inspiration.

White Rabbit Poetry Society

Losing Coherence A Poetry Prompt

Losing Coherence…

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a month ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Dorie Snow/雪多丽

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everywhere.

the city tilts
when I walk,

people stare
like they’ve seen
what’s growing in me.

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