lily mock

To love is to let yourself be remade. To become someone else, not because you were incomplete, but because there are parts of you still waiting to be made real in the presence of another. And when you love someone like that, you offer them the same possibility: to explore their hidden selves and latent worlds, and to find, in your gaze, a home for... See more

In the end, maybe good friends and lovers are prompt engineers of the soul (forgive me for the AI metaphor). They suggest edits, and if we are willing to be warmed, rewoven, occasionally melted, the program of us runs cleaner, closer to what we hoped when we first began to write ourselves into being.

On the Sydney train, I sometimes like to play a quiet game with myself, where I imagine each commuter through the eyes of someone who adores them. The oil-stained man becomes a gentle, loving father. The teenage girl biting her sleeve becomes someone’s irreplaceable best friend. The elderly woman with the fierce stare becomes a widow whose late... See more

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention... See more

A few months ago, I read an essay that rearranged me: What is Love? by Qualia Computing, which frames love as a kind of neural annealing. In metallurgy, annealing is the process of heating metal until its internal structure loosens, then cooling it slowly so it hardens into a stronger, more resilient form. The lattice reorganises; the material... See more

To love well is to take part in someone else’s unfolding, even as they take part in yours.

Who we choose to orbit defines, over time, the texture and colour palette of our becoming.

Two minds meet, exchange a pattern of attention, and, almost invisibly, each begins to reorganise around the other. What starts as perception becomes structure.