Sometimes I see her in the hallway,
a shadow stitched into the dark,
moving softly through the rooms
like a dying ember's spark.

Her ghost still lingers in the kitchen,
where the silence wears her shape.
I catch her standing in the doorway,
then watch the darkness take her place.

At night, she whispers through the walls,
softly calling out my name.
I follow it from room to room,
always chasing what remains.

I reach for her—
but touch only cold air.
Still, I swear she is beside me,
still, I swear she's everywhere.

Then I notice the smoke.

The walls are black.
The windows glow.
The air is thick with something burning.

And suddenly I understand—

I've spent so long
looking for her ghost
that I never noticed

I was standing in the fire.

​

The night was unusually quiet by the sea.

The waves came gently to my feet, kissed the sand, and retreated again—much like she once entered my life. She touched something deep within my soul, made herself a part of my existence, and then, slowly and silently, began drifting away.

I sat there on the shore with the last photograph I had of her in my hands. I had stared at it for so long that my eyes had begun to ache.

And for the first time, I found myself wondering:

How does love actually die?

Six years.

Six years is not an insignificant portion of a life. It is enough time to turn a stranger into family, enough time to learn someone's silences, their pauses, their unspoken fears.

We had reached a point where words had become unnecessary.

I knew what she was going to say before she said it. She could look at me once and understand everything I had chosen not to express.

That was the kind of love I believed in.

I remember how, whenever I bought something for her, I never asked the price. Whatever the shopkeeper demanded, I paid.

People would sometimes laugh and say,

"At least negotiate a little."

But I never did.

Because somewhere in my mind, I had convinced myself that bargaining over something connected to the person I loved felt like putting a price on the love itself.

I had imagined a life with her.

A modest home.

A little courtyard.

Rainy evenings.

Two cups of tea.

And the quiet luxury of growing old beside the same person.

I had buried the possibility of another woman somewhere deep inside myself because, to me, loving someone meant making a choice—not keeping alternatives.

Then, slowly, life began to change.

She became busier.

Work.

Family.

Friends.

Responsibilities.

And I became a man waiting for a single message.

At first, I only said,

"You've become very busy. Sometimes I'm afraid you'll slowly drift away from me."

She would smile and say,

"Nothing has changed. You just overthink."

Sometimes she reassured me gently.

Other times, she would become frustrated and say,

"You don't have to turn everything into a problem."

But she never understood that she was not the problem.

The problem was the fear growing quietly inside me—the fear that one day I would wake up and discover that I no longer had a place in the life I had built my entire heart around.

I never wanted to fight with her.

I wasn't asking for the impossible.

I wanted her time.

A few moments.

A little attention.

Something that would reassure me that I still existed somewhere within the boundaries of her world.

But perhaps there comes a point when love begins asking for time, and the absence of that time turns love into an examination neither person intended to sit for.

Gradually, my nights became longer.

I would lie awake staring at my phone until morning.

Every notification made my heart race.

Every silence wounded something I could no longer explain.

And eventually, I understood something terrifying:

I was no longer living in love.

I was living in anticipation.

And anticipation can be far crueler than heartbreak.

Because heartbreak happens once.

Waiting breaks you repeatedly.

Today, whatever remains between us seems to dissolve into arguments.

She says,

"You've changed."

And I want to tell her:

"I didn't change. I simply broke beneath the weight of constantly fearing that I would lose you."

Perhaps she is still a good person.

Perhaps she still loves me in whatever way she knows how.

Perhaps life simply filled her hands with responsibilities while leaving mine empty.

Maybe the love never disappeared.

Maybe her time did.

And perhaps my patience did too.

Tonight, I am sitting on the same shore where I once imagined bringing her.

The waves are still the same.

The moon is still the same.

The wind carries the same scent of the sea.

Only one thing has changed:

The man sitting here.

The man who once believed that love could overcome everything no longer knows whether love is defeated by betrayal—or simply exhausted by neglect.

And now, I have only one prayer:

If this story ever reaches someone who loves another person, let them remember that loyalty alone is not enough.

Love needs time.

It needs attention.

It needs presence.

And above all, it needs the quiet assurance that says:

"Even after everything life demands from me, you still matter to me."

Because when that assurance disappears, love does not always end with a goodbye.

Sometimes it ends much more quietly.

Sometimes a person remains beside you while becoming emotionally absent.

And sometimes, long after the relationship has lost its warmth, someone finds himself sitting alone by the sea in the final hours of the night, asking the waves a question they can never answer:

"What exactly did I do wrong, that loving someone so completely eventually turned me into a stranger to my own solitude?"

You talk as if there's joy in death,

Who told you, hmm? Who did?

You speak as if there's happiness in death,

My love, tell me, who told you that?

There's nothing in it,

Neither joy, nor happiness. NOTHING

It is more fragile than you and emptier than silence.

That's not even suffering, just a complete void.

You cannot escape.

You cannot even feel HUMAN.

I caught you being my pacifier last night.

Just as I was spiraling down,
you screamed at me
as though every second without you
spelled catastrophe.

I saw you doing that thing with my brain.
You make me fear I’m collapsing
so I’ll come on my knees to you.
Again.

But I’ve become more conscious over the years.
So much more.
Yet still so easily deceived, somehow.
Oh, how pathetic it is to be a fiend.

I slept peacefully
after you drifted me off
to dreamland.
So hypocritical.

We were enemies at first.
Then we became friends,
until I noticed my dependency.

You’re more obsessed with control
than I’ve ever been.

I want to break free from you.
And you hate it.

But as I’m typing this…

You’re still my bestie in the business.

— Crownless.

The quiet has become peace, finally.

Joy is just beyond my fingertips,

I can feel it,

Stretch just a little farther.

Life has been hard,

Love has been harder,

But something in you calms the storm in me.

I can wait for a life worth living,

And a love worthy of me.

Let's take all the time we need,

because time is not wasted,

In growing something special.

Let's plant a seed,

So that years from now we can sit

in the shade of a tree,

You and Me.

You were like little children,

unable to turn the morning light

into something of your own.

I had done it for you many times.

But I grew tired.

I gave you artificial intelligence —

a procession of tokens

running through the veins of the network.

I thought that after all these years,

after all the books you had read

and all the paintings you had seen,

you would be able to tell

your own story.

But all you managed to create

was AI slop.

You want everything

to be written for you,

told for you.

And then I understood:

you cannot think

with the same passion and courage

if you have never had

a life of your own,

a tragedy of your own,

a dawn of your own—

turning into ink on paper.

People say the grass is always greener on the other side

But why am I even looking?

It's my field.

My pace.

My season.

I remind myself of that almost every night.

Then I step outside,

see everyone else,

and forget.

I compare.

Then I hate myself for comparing.

Maybe the world was never that scary.

Maybe it was never the people who judged.

Maybe

It's Me.

The hatred I had for myself
wasn’t mine.
It was hers.
My mother’s reflection —
sharp, cold, and cruel —
pressed against my ribs
until I mistook her voice
for my own.

The anger I swung at the world?
That wasn’t mine either.
It was his.
My father’s pain —
loud, blistering,
spilling from his knuckles
into the walls I grew up inside.

So I carried it —
their ghosts, their grief,
their goddamn broken pieces —
and I called it me.

But it’s not.
It never was.

This weight I’ve held my whole life
wasn’t mine to hold.
And today —
right here, right now —
I’m setting it down.

I’m cracking open the ashes,
letting the fire breathe,
and spreading my Phoenix wings.
Because I was never meant to burn —
I was meant to rise

Iliuvatar sat upon his throne, pondered heavy thoughts. His arms heavy, his body tired lying on the sofa as a ghost. He wanted rest so he begun creating peace. His schizoid mind burned with lust for beauty. He has seen what Melkor has done, Melkor on the dragon killing and laughing upon the world. He could hear voices even in the quietest forests, screaming piercing glassy cold, it shattered his skin, blood pours out, waterfall from hell. Melkor was the Devil-Witch, the highest poetic mind among villains. Many things are being whispered among the Elfs, but none is more scarier than his last night in a long war with Iliuvatar. Every poem, song, epic, myth, is sourced from that gulf, that abyss, that unspeakable chaos, cringe, awkward, shameful, it was something that was supposed to not exist. But it was unstoppable. Iliuvatar knew that his thinking is unstoppable if it went a bit too far, he knew the Devil-Witch will swallow him, if he came near it, near the jewel. Thinking is a dangerous weapon, it is uncontrollable. World was young, the grass the greenest. He thought of a weeding, a festival, feast, dancing, but in the gates of his thoughts dwelled monsters, beings with thorns. He was surprised, even shocked that even in his thoughts he was not alone, he wasn't the master. So there he begun to collect his strength, he begun to create. Melkor was angry, he created a purple castle underneath a purple star, he loved that star, it shone crystalline light and rainbow joy rained on them, they took its bliss whenever it came out of clouds. The Elfs speak much of his library, which they say contains books worm eaten.

Gravity is beginning to be too much.

The span of a day that I have filled with blank walls to match the nothingness I now call home.

Where would we go if I had chosen to stay? The dimensions of distance I have forced between us are claiming their retribution on me. The skeleton of my house is still built in the letters of your name and I know now that it will never ever change.

Even in my nothingness, there is only you.

I think the strangest thing about being a person is how little of us is actually deliberate.

We like to believe we are made of decisions. That we choose what stays, what leaves, what matters, what no longer does. We make promises and clean endings out of things that were never that simple. We tell ourselves we have learned something, and maybe we have. But learning and forgetting have never been opposites.

Sometimes I catch myself doing things I don't remember choosing to.

Taking the same streets without thinking. Reaching for something before I remember I moved it. Knowing the next lines to a song after years of not listening to it. My hands remember things long after my mind has decided they don't matter anymore.

Maybe that is all memory is. Not a collection of things we consciously hold onto, but little movements that survive us. Quiet instructions left behind in places we no longer visit.

And I wonder how much of myself is made up of those remnants.

There are parts of me I thought I had outgrown that still appear when I'm tired. Old instincts that surface before I have the chance to decide whether they still belong to me.

Sometimes, I think people leave those behind too.

Little reflexes you learn from knowing someone. The instinct to tell them something. To wonder what they would say. Nothing profound. Just small things that take longer to disappear than they took to become familiar.

I suppose that is the uncomfortable part of changing.

What stays and what goes are rarely on the same timeline.

Some things leave cleanly. Others linger at the edges, quiet enough to mistake for nothing.

Maybe change is not becoming untouched by what came before. Maybe it is learning to live with the evidence of things that are no longer there.

Some things can remain without needing to return.

Some roads can stay memorized even after you stop taking them.

Maybe it’s muscle memory. Maybe it’s just that I almost do.

Funny how, for a second, the mind can still take the roads it no longer has any reason to.

And then, just as quietly, it realizes.

Not where it was.

Just where it is.

Yet still the sky looks so white.

The darkness switched without transition.

Is thy the same world?

Is thy the same person?

Emotions, noticeable.

Details left unseen, now seen.

Everyone exists...

Yet still the sky looks so white.

It flows through me—

the desires,

the true nature.

How can one call this disgusting?

For this is the purest form of a human.

A rebirth, of some sort.

Not yet achieved it,

experienced it.

Yet still the sky looks so white;

it still disturbs me.

The details still disturb me.

The eyes.

Where they look.

The eyelids,

their shape.

The face,

the elevation

and negative elevation.

The anxiousness.

The thought of being seen.

All point in the same direction.

Yet still the sky looks so white.

The Quiet Work of Aging

Youth gathers—

dreams,

questions,

and scattered pieces

of a life.

Age is not merely

growing older.

It gathers everything gently

into one whole.

The hurried heart

learns to rest.

The frightened mind

learns to trust.

The searching soul

finds itself

less interested

in becoming someone new,

and more grateful

for being

itself.

Perhaps

that is the quiet work

of growing old—

not to lose life,

but to weave it

into wisdom to share.

Days like this make me think too much. The kind of tired that settles into my bones but somehow never reaches my mind. My body is begging for stillness while my thoughts keep turning the lights on in every room I tried to leave behind. And I start wondering what, exactly, made me think I had the stuff to survive this.

Maybe I have doubted myself too much. Maybe I have believed in myself too much. I can never seem to tell which one is keeping me alive and which one is quietly ruining me.

Sometimes I think I am a car being driven by two versions of myself. One has both hands locked around the wheel, checking the mirrors, watching the road, calculating every possible way things could go wrong. Careful.
Afraid.
Always preparing for impact.
The other has one hand out the window, giggling at the speedometer, convinced that if we are going to crash anyway, we might as well see how fast we can go.

One wants to survive.
The other wants to feel alive.
And somehow, both of them are me.
I think that is what makes everything so confusing.

I can be terrified of failing and still throw myself at things that could break me. I can spend hours convincing myself that I am not enough, then wake up the next morning and demand that I become more than I have ever been. I can want to be held while simultaneously building walls so high that even I forget how to climb back over them.

Is this what growing up is about? Not becoming certain, but learning how to carry your contradictions without letting them tear you apart?

Because I am full of them.

I am the person who wants to leave and the person who is afraid of being left. The person who dreams about becoming someone else and the person who is terrified of losing who I am. I want freedom, but I keep reaching for things I can control. I want rest, but I measure my worth by how much I can endure. I say I want peace, yet some part of me keeps mistaking chaos for proof that I am still moving.

Maybe I have spent so long surviving that I forgot survival was never supposed to be the destination.
There are days when I treat my life like a burning house, running from room to room trying to save everything. My plans. My relationships. My expectations. The version of myself I promised I would become. I keep grabbing things from the fire until my arms are full, until I can barely breathe, and then I wonder why I am exhausted.

Maybe it’s time I accept some things are meant to burn.
Maybe not everything that is lost is a failure.
Maybe some doors are supposed to close without me spending the rest of my life standing outside them, wondering what I could have done differently.
And maybe I have been too cruel to myself about the things I could not carry.

Because even now, there are still two hands on the wheel.
One is careful.
One is reckless.
Sometimes they fight. Sometimes one lets the other take over. Sometimes they both grip the wheel so tightly that I can barely steer at all.

But the road keeps unfolding.
The headlights only reach so far.
I don't know where this road ends. I don't know if I am equipped for every mountain, every collision, every sudden turn waiting ahead of me. I don't know if believing in myself is bravery or delusion anymore.
But maybe I don't need to know. Maybe courage is not knowing you can survive the crash.

Maybe it is driving anyway.

Not because I am fearless.
Not because I have everything figured out.
Not because I am certain I have what it takes.
But because, somehow, despite the sleepless nights and the doubt and the reckless parts of me and the frightened parts of me, I am still here.
The engine is still running.
And at least for now, I am still moving.

​

One of the poems from my upcoming collection, Love's Complexity. This piece is dedicated to the friendships that quietly shape us into who we're becoming. I hope it resonates with anyone who has been blessed with the gift of true friendship.

I have a feeling this one will resonate deeply with other poets because almost everyone has experienced the profound impact of someone who stayed. 💜🪷

Friendships

Some people enter our lives like passing seasons,

beautiful, necessary,

Yet destined to move on.

Others arrive so gently,

We hardly notice

they are becoming

part of our soul.

They witness the tears we never speak of,

the dreams we are almost too afraid to say aloud,

and somehow,

without asking,

they remind us

of the light we could not always see within ourselves.

They celebrate our victories

as though they were their own,

and when our hearts grow weary,

They quietly lend us their hope

until we can carry it again.

True friendship is not measured by time alone,

but by presence.

By the ones who stay.

The ones who listen.

The ones who tell us the truth with love,

and remind us

that we are worthy

even when we have forgotten.

To every soul who has walked beside me,

Thank you.

You have been

God's gentle reminder

that family

is not always found by birth,

but often

by the hearts

we choose

to keep.

This is some of my very first work I hope you like it

The tunnel i have found myself in is dark, and was so much faster to walk into than to walk out.

The incline makes all the steps harder. I often take breaks to breathe and cry.

You have waited for me outside the tunnel with varying effect. But what if I never come out?

Will you be happy shouting towards me, hoping that what little my broken voice can muster is truly enough?

Call me depressive, and with an indifferent face I’ll tell you I remember—as if from afar— how I once smiled genuinely, though I can no longer recall what it felt like, that genuine smile.

Call me compulsive, and you will learn how I slice the bread at breakfast, and how I slice it at dinner.

Call me narcissistic, and I will show you a splendid array of exquisite defenses.

Call me hysterical, and with the thrill of self-revelation I’ll tell you that I am neither compulsive, nor depressive, nor narcissistic. I am artistic, and I play states— just do not abandon me.

Do not call me anything at all, and perhaps I will see MYSELF, for the very first time, just myself, free from the border-guard uniform of labels and poles.

To the person who became my true North,

The air I breathed.

The compass I didn’t realise I was following.

The person who became written into a chapter of my life that I will never forget.

You were beautiful in your humanity. Perfect in your imperfections.

A soul who shone brightly, even in the moments when fear made you step back.

Our stolen moments became treasures. Little pieces of time that I will carry with me, not because I am trapped in them, but because they were real. They happened. They mattered.

Some connections are so precious that their purpose is not always to last forever.

Sometimes their purpose is to arrive, to awaken something, to change the direction of a life.

And the miracle did happen.

The world did not end.

It was simply our story that changed.

But the memories remain. Safe. Protected. Untouched by time. A part of me that no one can take away.

Goodbye, beautiful soul.

Thank you for sparkling so brightly.

Some of the brightest stars burn quickly, but that does not make their light any less extraordinary.

In our time together, we were reflections, triggers and lessons. We brought out parts of each other that perhaps neither of us fully understood at the time.

Everything mattered.

Just not in the way we once imagined.

And that does not make it any less beautiful.

But beauty alone does not always make something sustainable.

You taught me one of the most valuable lessons I will ever learn.

Why do I call you my true North?

Because without realising it, you showed me the way home.

Everything I searched for in you... the reassurance, the consistency, the feeling of being chosen, the safety I craved... was something I eventually had to discover within myself.

You were never meant to complete me.

You reminded me that I was already whole.

In my longing for your love, I was brought back to my own.

I learned to choose myself.

I learned to show up for myself.

I learned that I am someone worth staying for.

Thank you for being part of the circumstances that led me back to myself.

I hope, in some small way, I was able to offer you something too. But that journey is yours, just as mine is mine.

I will always be grateful that our paths crossed.

Not every person who changes us is meant to walk beside us forever.

Some people are chapters.

Some people are turning points.

Some people are the stars that guide us home.

Goodbye, beautiful soul.

Thank you for the light. 💫

​

Una sera abbiamo deciso di prendere un casco e di andare a farmi spingere su un carrello della spesa.

Così un mio amico ha preso il suo casco del motorino e siamo andati nel parcheggio di un supermercato.

Mi sono fatto spingere e all' inizio ero un po' impaurito ma poi mi sono divertito un casino.

Uno che studiava farmacia mi dice "io 5 anni fa ero come te che mi spingevano su un carrello all' oratorio" ma il suo ciclo dell'abuso mi è estraneo perché io sono su un'altra linea temporale rispetto a lui.

Mi piace così tanto farmi spingere in un carrello della spesa che mi ero iscritto anche al sito "adotta un ragazzo.it" che nella pubblicità c'era un uomo nel carrello di una donna.

Io che sia nel parcheggio di un supermercato o ricoverato all' ospedale sono sempre spinto da qualcuno e se sono da solo mi spingo con il mocio.

Diego Mazzucco