Swipe Left On Perfection

I count heartbeats in purrs,
dose myself on whiskered chemistry—
soft paws kneading my chest
until oxytocin opens like a window.
I need nothing here,
but the universe feels owed to me anyway—
not in gold, not in thunder,
only in the right to breathe without apology.

When I see animals, I become water.
A doe tilts its head, and I spill.
My cats blink slow trust, and the world
puts down its weapons.
My ribs loosen.
I remember I am not a fortress,
I am an open field.

I made myself smaller online—
a whisper where I used to be a flare—
and somehow my days got wider,
my footsteps longer,
my yes more honest.
I became the room I enter,
the tteokbokki I stir,
the friend who listens
to the sound of wind on the window
and calls it music.

I have no regrets,
only old misunderstandings set down like stones
beside a river that kept moving.
Once, I prayed for one person to understand me,
to carry my map and find the hidden clearing.
Now I laugh at my pockets—empty—
then pull out a brush, a pen, a handful of breath,
and draw the clearing myself.

Creation was always the answer—
the door that didn’t creak because it never closed.
I write in the margins of quiet,
paint with silence and cat fur and late light.
I learn depth by living simply:
a bowl, a book,
a window where the moon cleanses my healing crystals,
the small movements of a cat’s shoulder blade
rising and falling against my palm.

I need nothing, and I deserve everything:
the everything of a life that fits,
of mornings that open like fruit,
of nights that forgive.

And now I’ve found art—
or maybe it found me,
scratching at the screen door like a stray,
then curling, sure as gravity, in my lap.
Purr by purr, I become
the person I once wanted to meet,
the page that writes back,
the quiet that blooms into color.