May those who court you
return as promised,
speak as intended,
and arrive as announced.
May your correspondence never be left unanswered,
your invitations never neglected,
and your peace never be made contingent upon another’s manners.
Anything less is poor breeding.
One need not entertain it.
Recorded for posterity.
The strongest crowns are rarely given. They are grown.
What part of yourself have you finally chosen?
I started playing chess late in life. I won’t say exactly how late. Let’s just say I wasn’t a child prodigy…
While other children were sacrificing queens in brilliant combinations before they lost their baby teeth, I was… doing considerably less impressive things.
I only discovered chess later… much later.
Which, as it turns out, is still early enough to make spectacular blunders.
Recently, I stumbled across something called Solo Chess in the Chess.com app. And there are three modes in Solo Chess: Challenge Mode, Practice Mode, and Crazy Mode.
After dabbling in the Challenge and Practice modes for a couple of weeks, my ego became so inflated it apparently affected my brain. Because my brain whispered “I think we’re ready for the Crazy Mode“.
The description for the Crazy Mode was reassuringly modest, as you can see from the screenshot above.
Naturally, I tapped it.
For the uninitiated, Solo Chess isn’t about checkmate.
Every move must be a capture.
Every piece may only move twice.
Your objective is to eliminate every piece except one (if there is a king on the board, the king must be the last piece standing).
It sounds perfectly reasonable until your rook quietly turns black because you’ve forgotten it has already moved twice, and your entire strategy collapses around you.
If you solved the puzzle on the first attempt, you get a green tick. If it took several attempts to solve it, the tick is red.
My early attempts followed a familiar pattern.
I would spend several minutes constructing what I believed was an ingenious sequence of captures, only to discover I’d trapped myself with two lonely black pieces staring at each other across the board.
Before long, I developed a policy.
The bishops had to go.
Bishops are snipers.
Leave one alive for too long and it quietly ruins your plans from the opposite side of the board.
I wasn’t about to negotiate with that.
Needless to say, the first few ticks were red.
But because I was still delusional, I challenged myself to get a green tick. Preferably before the year is out.
Cue 16 hours later.
After several red ticks and more resets than I care to admit, something unexpected happened.
I solved a Crazy Mode puzzle.
On the first attempt.
A green tick appeared.
I did it.
In under 24 hours.
Looking back, the green tick wasn’t the interesting part.
The interesting part was realising that somewhere between “I have to trace the knight’s L-shaped moves with my finger” and “Experts Only“, my brain had quietly rewired itself.
Apparently that’s how progress works.
It doesn’t arrive with a fanfare.
It arrives disguised as a small green square with a tick.
I bought a fountain pen from a pen retailer in the United States even though it came with exorbitant shipping because it looked like a P-51 Mustang.
This is not the strangest sentence I have ever written, but it is certainly in the running.
The pen is a limited-edition Retro 51 Tornado fountain pen inspired by the legendary WWII fighter aircraft. It is covered in rivets, military markings, weathered aluminium, and enough aviation detail to make any history enthusiast smile.
And yes, the rivets are real. Someone at Retro 51 was meticulous enough to think of physically indenting the rivets into the barrel. As a result, owners of the pen were able to run their fingers over the barrel and feel the aircraft skin beneath their fingers.
I have always been drawn to objects with stories attached to them. Beautiful objects are nice. Beautiful objects that carry history are irresistible.
The P-51 Mustang was not just another fighter aircraft. Introduced during World War II, it became one of the most important aircraft of the war. Equipped with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and long-range fuel tanks, it could escort American bombers deep into Germany and bring them safely home.
Before the Mustang, bomber crews often found themselves unprotected once they flew beyond the range of escort fighters. German aircraft would attack the bombers, inflicting devastating losses. The Mustang changed that. It could accompany bombers all the way to their targets and back again while engaging enemy fighters along the way.
Historians generally regard it as one of the aircraft that helped the Allies gain air superiority over Europe. It was fast, dependable, heavily armed, and beloved by the pilots who flew it.
In other words, it earned its reputation.
Which is probably why I find it so appealing.
The pen itself looks as though it was assembled from salvaged aircraft parts. It has a weathered metal finish, rivet details, squadron-style markings, and even a bright checkerboard nose pattern reminiscent of those seen on wartime aircraft.
It is quite possibly, the only fountain pen I own that appears capable of escorting a formation of bombers over occupied Europe.
Unfortunately, my particular fighter plane spent several months grounded. The nib wrote poorly enough that I rarely used it, despite loving everything else about the pen. Recently, I had the nib adjusted by a nibmeister. The result was transformative.
My Mustang can now fly.
I inked it with Platinum Carbon Blue, a permanent blue-black ink that seems perfectly suited to a pen inspired by military aviation.
Perhaps that is the real reason I love fountain pens. They are not merely tools. They are tiny vessels for stories.
Some tell stories about literature. Some tell stories about art. Some tell stories about travel.
And some tell stories about a fighter aircraft that helped change the course of history.
Not bad for a pen.
I found this on a street in Sarajevo.
A single word, repeated three times: MIR.
In Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian, mir means both peace and quiet. The word appeared not on a pristine monument or carefully curated mural, but on a wall crowded with torn advertisements, graffiti, and the accumulated marks of a city that has lived through more than its share of history.
That felt appropriate.
Peace rarely arrives as a clean slate. More often, it exists alongside noise, scars, interruptions, and unfinished stories. It persists beneath layers of what came before and what continues to happen around it.
What drew me to this scene was not the perfection of the message, but its persistence. The blue paint was weathered. The surrounding wall was chaotic. Yet the word remained visible.
Perhaps this is what peace looks like in the real world – not untouched by conflict, but surviving it.
Imperfect Light is a collection of photographs that remind me that beauty does not require perfection, only presence.
Some silences teach us how to endure.
Others teach us when to leave.
What silence have you outgrown?
The answer, apparently, is still not enough.
I was playing a game against Dr. Wolf when something extraordinary happened. One pawn promoted. Then another. And another. Before long, my side of the board looked less like a chess game and more like a constitutional crisis in a matriarchal kingdom.
At one point I had five queens on the board.
Five.
The black king sat on e2, contemplating his life choices while surrounded by enough royal women to form a small government.
What aggravated me most was that despite commanding what was essentially an entire dynasty, I still had to be careful. Anyone who has ever played chess knows that having overwhelming material – especially overwhelming material of the most powerful piece – doesn’t automatically mean victory. In fact, it’s surprisingly easy to blunder into stalemate when your army consists of multiple queens all trying to help at the same time.
The saying “too many cooks spoil the broth” has never been more appropriate. The game ended in stalemate nine times before I finally managed to checkmate the king.
The screenshot above captures the aftermath. The game is effectively over. The black king has nowhere meaningful to go, while my queens occupy strategic squares across the board like overenthusiastic wedding planners coordinating the same event.
And yet, looking at the position made me think about something beyond chess.
Sometimes in life we spend so much time worrying about what we’re missing that we fail to notice how much we’ve already accumulated. We focus on the piece that was captured, the opportunity that disappeared, or the plan that went wrong. Meanwhile, there may already be four queens on our side of the board.
Experience.
Wisdom.
Resilience.
Skills we didn’t have a year ago.
Proof that we survived every position life has thrown at us so far.
The goal isn’t necessarily to collect queens, of course. But every now and then, it’s worth pausing to appreciate just how far your pawns have travelled.
After all, every queen on that board started life as a humble pawn.
And if you’re wondering whether five queens is too many queens, the answer is simple:
When your opponent’s king is still standing, the correct number of queens is always one more.
Preferably before accidentally stalemating the opponent’s king again.
There comes a point in every woman’s life when she asks herself an important question:
“What if I tried online dating?”
That is usually followed by a second question:
“How difficult could it possibly be?”
The answer, as it turns out, is:
Much more difficult than becoming a lesbian cat.
Several years ago, I joined Dating.com.
My expectations were modest.
I wasn’t looking for a billionaire.
I wasn’t looking for a prince.
I wasn’t even looking for a man who owned a vineyard in Tuscany and wrote poetry by moonlight.
I was merely looking for a reasonably functional human male.
The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard.
Yet somehow, Dating.com managed to limbo beneath it.
Within minutes of creating my profile, my inbox exploded.
Men from every corner of the globe were suddenly desperate to speak to me.
The speed at which they appeared was remarkable.
My Spidey senses tingled when every message followed the same general pattern:
“Hello beautiful”
“Hello dear”
“You seem very special”
As I began interacting with a few of the men, a pattern emerged.
Every interaction seemed to require credits.
Credits to read messages.
Credits to send messages.
Credits to continue conversations.
Credits to open letters and “gifts” the men sent.
Presumably credits to blink.
At this point I began to suspect that the platform’s true purpose was not matchmaking.
It was harvesting credit card information with the enthusiasm of a combine harvester during wheat season.
Naturally, I decided to leave.
This should have been simple.
Normal websites allow you to close an account and move on with your life.
Dating.com appeared to view this as an optional feature.
The experience felt less like cancelling an account and more like trying to resign from a secret society.
At my wits’ end, it suddenly occurred to me:
If I could not escape as myself, perhaps I could reinvent myself.
History is full of great transformations.
The caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
The tadpole becomes a frog.
The frog becomes a prince (although sometimes it’s the other way around).
And apparently, I was about to become a cat.
First, I changed my profile photo.
Out went my human face.
In came my cat.
I have to say that she’s far more photogenic than I have ever been.
And she had better cheekbones.
Next, I changed my name.
If one is going to become a cat, one should commit fully.
I became:
Kitty Purry.
At this point, I was no longer sure whether I was deleting a dating profile or launching a music career.
Finally, I adjusted my dating preferences.
Since I was now a cat, I reasoned that normal rules no longer applied.
I selected:
Interested in women.
And with that, my transformation was complete.
I had entered the platform as a heterosexual woman.
I left as a lesbian cat.
Investigator’s Notes
No cats were harmed during this identity transformation event.
The author has since returned to being human.
Kitty Purry’s current whereabouts remain unknown.
i cornered him
again today
the slippery little wretch
stood there in the corner
surrounded by my rook
my king
and the full weight
of my emotional investment
“stalemate”
said dr wolf
as though this
was not clearly
a victory
as though I had not
spent thirty minutes
herding this man
across the board
like an emotionally unavailable lover
apparently
the black king
must still feel
“threatened”
which feels like
an unnecessary technicality
i have threatened him
with my entire nervous system
