You pick up the pages, one at a time.

Faint cursive scribbles unevenly.

🪶

As always, some ambience to play while you read. 📖

This week materialized a new way of writing. A practice that involves zero pressure. The kind where I sit down and simply ask: who wants to speak today? What stories and scenarios are wanting to come through?

It began with International Women’s Day on March 8th, 2026. A talk with myself about rage, and how there is no place for it. For women everywhere. The arts are the only place where some of this can be exercised and expressed. One day there will be a longer piece about female rage, and rage in general. Perhaps next week.

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A woman named Sarah came through. She comes back different. Her husband Alan is cheating. If you haven’t heard of alpine divorce, it’s worth discussing. Alan doesn’t get the ending he thinks he’ll have. She arrived almost fully formed—which is what happens when I stop forcing and start receiving.

A group of ladybugs is called a loveliness. This is one of those bits of information, these poetic lines of text that come in once in a while. That strike me as beauty personified.

Six years ago today is when the COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates began. I remember it like it was yesterday. I first heard about it when I was out playing tennis. We all had no idea what that could mean, what would unfold. My first mask was a long sock, and then a yellow painter’s mask that made me look like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. Grocery stores were empty. Toilet paper gone. Lines extended outside the shop, only allowing a certain amount of people in at a time. Six feet apart. Masks. Uncertainty. It feels like yesterday and another life simultaneously—and I’m not sure those two things are contradictory.

Three people have bought my book, Under the Same Sky, so far this month. It came out two years ago in October. I’m glad people are still finding it.

There was a trend on Threads that went: And for the lady, perhaps… Mine were:

Both thousands of likes. Cumulatively over 100k views. I think about how easy it is to be heard when I’m just being myself.

I feel a subtle rhythm, a pulse underneath everything in life. It simply continues. So much can happen in a week—rage, ladybugs, anniversaries, Sarah, book sales, transmissions—and in enough time it all becomes memory. The little moments that make us into who we are. Who we become.

A group of ladybugs is called a loveliness.

I think that’s what this week was.

-K 🌹

Thumbnail art posted by GothicaandRoses on Pinterest. 🐞

Earlier, a man completely dominated a conversation with a woman at the table next to mine. Maybe she wanted to hear everything he had to say. Maybe not. Maybe they were coworkers, or maybe they were on a first date.

“It’s good to meet you in person, finally,” he told her.

“Likewise!” she said.

He prattled on about things that don’t matter. She listened.

In the corner, a small wiry dog started snarling at two lumbering older black labs named Lona and Maia, who couldn’t care less about his outburst. They smell, but they seem sweet. Their owners are eating overpriced but delicious avocado toast.

This is one of my favorite places to come and write because it makes me feel like a productive adult. I think if I just get out of the house, inspiration will strike. I’ll meet someone who pushes my life forward. I’ll be the girl of someone’s dreams. The sun will cascade over my skin just right, and for a moment, I’ll become mythical.

I think about other people’s thoughts too much. How do they perceive me? Or, just as devastatingly—perhaps they don’t.

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I tell myself I don’t know what to write about. I often feel it’s too much. That I’ll be judged, or told—no, not like that. Tell us who you are, but not like that. Say it better. Feel less. Say more.

I think about how much I’d love to live someplace that doesn’t exist. That everything here—this café, this lukewarm matcha, the subtle pang of hunger in my stomach, the way my fingers slide over my keyboard—is not enough. I imagine how much more interesting it would be if the sky suddenly opened and a dragon flew over Los Angeles.

I’ve always done this—when the present moment feels too small, my mind sometimes leaves Earth entirely.

I think about Wolftopia—the planet a NASA intern discovered in 2019, just three days into his internship. I only think of Wolftopia because of the imagery it inspired, the metaphor it keeps becoming. Its surface swirls blue and pink and white. The atmosphere is made of pink cotton candy and tastes like ice-cold sorbet. Wolftopia is for the girls and gays only. She is an escape. She is beauty personified. She is a refuge.

It’s easy to romanticize. I wish for better every moment of every day.

Maybe if I could learn to tolerate the present moment, I’d stop thinking about dragons over Los Angeles, or distant pastel planets, or the perfect version of everything. Maybe I’d find some peace.

But I am here again, at a café in Los Angeles, waiting for my meter to run out. My cup is empty.

Handwritten elegy.

Discovered on a ripped page in an old book in the east wing.

Long forgotten. Nearly buried.

Cataloguer’s note: Condition of discovery: nearly illegible; faint traces of salt.

I sit and send distress signals to other passing ships in the night.

I see the red light on the wall in their cabins, pulsing in rhythm with my words, yet there is no answer.

There should be help.

Another ship to respond with aid.

But none reply.

What is it to have lost everything and everyone you have ever loved?

A distress call unanswered.

There are no voices to answer yours, no hands to hold—only red blinking in a dark night, coming into and out of radiance.

One day the light will go out, and still, there will be no remembering of the call that was made.

People say they “care about your pain.”

They care—until it reminds them that they, too, are sinking.

Until it is easier to look away.

You are on your own.

But then again, you always have been.

I wish I could pretend that all distress calls are answered.

I wish I could say, after years of being alive, that there are selfless people.

Those only belong to the ethereal realm.

To what is unseen.

This is why, in solitude, when pain comes knocking, strength must rise from within.

It is formless, but it rises like the tide.

If you want to know how to live in the world, you must learn the dance of resilience.

The refusal to let your light go out.

The refusal to drown in a rocky sea.

The light is red.

The flag is red.

Everything is red to those who look toward the sinking ship.

Red does not belong on the ocean—like blood in the water.

If the ship is sinking, she is unrecoverable.

She is beyond help.

Why get close at all?

Why risk yourself for what is already lost?

There are hands reaching from the wreckage.

It is noble to care even when the weight of pain collapses the scaffolding.

I yearn for the ones who burn and give simultaneously.

The ones who don’t turn away from fire, or redness, or distress.

Not everyone can build a fortress in the night—can spin their own salvation from the pages of a journal.

Not everyone knows what it is to descend to the underworld and come out alive.

But I do.

My distress calls go unanswered.

They are dispatched in a language that has never been translated.

“Too much.”

Always too much.

We cannot understand the language, so why should we heed her calling?

Because it is human to do so.

It is greatness to extend a hand into the water and pull something living from the wreckage.

But you won’t.

To live in the world is to be surrounded by distress calls.

Most go unanswered.

Most cannot build temples for their own asylum.

And so I sit in my lighthouse, a steady yellow beam beckoning you closer,

While the world burns in a sea of red lights.

No further records found.

For the rest of the myth, become a patron of the library. 🕯️

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The following contents are taken from a letter found in the Postal Wing. Intent unknown.

The Folklore Library

Est. ???

Somewhere in the Austrian Alps

Where did the Folklore Library come from? When was it built?

Some say it arrived on the wind, raised stone by stone from forgotten memories.

Others say it has always been here, waiting to be found.


They say the Librarian is older than time.

A great dragon guards the door.

The hearths rise nine feet high, and the wine never runs dry.

You never have to leave if you don’t wish to.

There is no place to be.

No person to become.

Only stories, scattered across thousands of books, waiting to be read.

As I walk the Library’s winding corridors, I run my hand along the ancient spines.

How many of these stories are fragments of my own mythos?

How many are lived by someone—or something, else?

Are they fact or fiction?

I may never know.

But somewhere on the fringes of my imagination, I suspect the answer is yes.


Stories are living memories. The ones we remember become who we are.

The Folklore Library will not ask you to understand.

It only asks that you listen.

You already know.

This place is a mirror of truths and superstitions, myths and marrow.

To settle into a velvet chair here is to vanish from time.

To remember something you never knew you lost.

The fire is lit.

The door has closed.

You’re already inside,

discovering a story.

—K 🕯️

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Filed in: The East Wing

Status: Verified synchronicity

Date: April 8th, 2025

Filed by: The Librarian

⸻

It began with a photo.

I looked at it like I’d seen it before—and I had, of course. But not in the way it revealed itself to me this morning. It was a picture of me as a baby on the King Arthur carousel at Disneyland. My father holding me. A white horse painted red and blue. Familiar, in the way stories repeat themselves when no one is looking.

Because on my birthday this year, I unknowingly chose the same horse again.

Or perhaps, it chose me.

⸻

Later, a song played.

Its title: Le Carrousel.

🎠

I had not searched it. I had not summoned it.

It simply arrived.

And with it, a thread I couldn’t deny.

⸻

The day unfolded in rhythm.

Groceries.

Matcha.

Emails sent to Keepers of the Library.

And strawberries.

Which I never buy.

But I bought them today.

I ate them slowly while preparing the inner corridors of the Library.

And then, hours later, I stumbled across this quote by Van Gogh:

—

I laughed. And I paused.

Because something was happening.

The story was writing me.

I went to the gym today, too.

I picked a locker without thinking.

It was Locker 47.

The same number as the Library’s most recent book.

I hadn’t planned it.

I’d only been following the spiral.

Responding, not reaching.

And the spiral had circled back again.

—

Later, I looked up Van Gogh’s paintings.

A quick glance. A soft reverence.

And then, as the music continued playing…

a song came on.

Its name?

Van Gogh.

🎨

Of course it did.

Because the day had already chosen its palette.

And I had already been marked in color.

⸻

Van Gogh once wrote: “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke. If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means, paint, and that voice will be silenced.”

And so the carousel turns again. Stories leading back into themselves. There is a signature for those who listen—an undeniable pattern and echo of myths past.

The call of my father, reminding me that life is cyclical. We always come back again.

Locker 47. A playful wink from the spiral.

And a misunderstood artist from the past, whose fire and beauty burned brighter than he realized. Until the world came back around to sit and warm their hands.

His message still echoes through the Library’s walls.

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✧ Filed Notes:

I didn’t plan this.

I only listened.

And the myth made itself known.

This was not a day of performance.

It was a day of presence.

And in presence, the spiral always closes.

I believe my father said hello today.

I believe memory rode the carousel with me.

I believe Van Gogh still speaks.

And I believe the Library is alive.

🕯️

–K

For the rest of the thread, continue reading below…

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