Hi, I'm Cindy --

I didn’t grow up thinking I’d be a poet. Honestly, I spent most of my life trying very hard not to be one. I’ve always written. I even switched my major to English because it felt like the most practical choice — not because of the job outlook, but because writing is the only place where beginnings, middles, and ends learn how to hold each other up. That made sense to me. Still does. Everyone else called it impractical, which I found hilarious, because I used that exact logic to talk my way into every job I ever had. I tried other roles for years — church work, corporate work, startups, whatever life threw at me — but none of them aligned the way a sentence does when it finally knows where it’s going. Poetry was the only thing that ever did.

I built whole personalities on top of that truth, trying to be someone more sensible, more contained, more recognizable. I survived on competence and quietness while my real life hummed several layers down. For years, I lived with a mind that wasn’t safe or still — a world inside me that overruled the one I was trying to exist in. No one tells you how exhausting it is to be both the storm and the person trying to predict its path — a forecast I revised hourly and still got wrong.

Poetry was the first thing that didn’t ask me to pretend.

I arrived the way people arrive at truth: tired, cracked open, carrying pieces of myself I didn’t have names for. And somehow, poetry held. It made room for the chaos and the clarity, the ache and the absurdity, the beauty that shows up exactly when you’re not looking for it.

These days, writing is the only time I disappear on purpose. My husband will stand over me talking, and I won’t hear a word. He just smiles now — he knows I’ve slipped beneath the surface again.

I write from that place.

The seam between ache and wonder.

The strange space where life is too honest to fake and too beautiful to explain.

Subtext is where my truths come up for air — raw, tender, unpolished, sometimes darkly funny in a way that surprises even me.

If you’re here, maybe you’ve lived a little strangely too — a little deeper, a little sideways, a little apart from the version of yourself everyone else thought you were. Maybe you’ve carried things you never named. Maybe you’ve loved harder than was reasonable. Maybe you’ve broken and rebuilt yourself with the same hands.

You’re not alone.

Not here.

I’m not offering answers or advice.

Just the truth as I know it — the kind you feel in your ribs.

Welcome to Subtext.

Stay as long as you need.

The surface will manage without us for a while.