She came in on a snort-laugh.
Not a dainty giggle. Not a chuckle behind a hand. A full-body, from-the-gut, you-can’t-stop-me kind of laugh that bent time a little, just enough for possibility to slink through the cracks.
She wore bangles made of burned timelines. She carried the scent of moss after thunder, bruised plum skins, and myrrh smoldering in the corner of a hidden room. She never knocked. She just arrived—usually when someone was about to give up.
Not a saviour. No. She didn’t fix things.
She dared you to remember your aliveness.
When someone said “you can’t wear that,” she sent a gust through the closet that made sequins fall like snow. When someone said “that’s not realistic,” she sat at the edge of the bed and whispered, “Define real, babe.” When a child’s strange, beautiful vision was mocked, she’d swirl in, drop glitter in every eye, and confuse the bullies just long enough for wonder to win.
She lives in cracked paint and outdated rulebooks. In the way a cat leaps even if the landing spot is ridiculous. In the split-second before you say “f*ck it” and do the thing anyway.
She likes her hair messy. Her thoughts unedited. Her friends loud, weird, or unusually silent. She rides with skaters, dancers, old men in checkered jackets feeding birds, teenage girls mouthing poems into phone cameras. She never tells them she’s there. She just amplifies.
Some say she’s the ghost of all the Yeses we were told to swallow.
Others say she’s the scent of woodsmoke and thyme rising from a life rebuilt by hand.
No one knows her true form. She could be a vaporous pink spiral on a teenager’s ceiling. A shadow on the sidewalk that doesn’t match any person nearby. The cool thrill in your stomach when you dare to speak the wild truth aloud.
She’ll never tell you what to do.
But she might double-dog dare you.