Ruby Blaire
A little closer . . .
And in some shape or form, are we not all the margins of errors we distinguish others to be?
Ruby Blaire
The Shape of Her
I am sitting in a well lit room, at a little bistro table I found in some reclamation store and loved for no practical reason other than that it felt like it had already lived before it found me. The chair does not match it at all, but I do not care. It is just a chair. One of my legs is folded up beside me while the other swings loose, my toes brushing against the cold stone tile every now and then like I need the grounding of it without fully thinking about why. There is a cigarette in my mouth that I have been ignoring for long enough that it has become more of a prop than a habit, and just beyond the window, through sheer eggshell colored curtains hanging from a pewter rod, I can see the rain.This feels more like where I actually begin.I do not think in a loud, linear voice the way some people seem to. My mind does not narrate me back to myself in neat little sentences. It paints. It gathers. It notices. I live in images, in atmosphere, in feeling, in thoughtful awareness. I understand things by the shape they make inside me. Sometimes I know something long before I can explain it. Sometimes it arrives as a scene, a mood, a pull in my chest, and only later do the words catch up. That is how I think. That is how I create. That is how I move through the world.I have always felt like someone who lives from the inside outward. Meaning matters to me. Depth matters to me. I cannot live for what is hollow, performative, or merely polished on the surface. I need things to be real. I need them to carry weight. I need them to mean something in my bones. I am an INFP in every way that actually matters to me. I am imaginative, deeply feeling, intuitive, and drawn toward beauty, truth, and emotional sincerity. I do not want a life that simply looks good. I want one that feels honest. I want one that feels alive.The way I love is no different. I love with reverence. I love deeply, wholly, and with intention. When I care for someone, it is never casual to me. I do not know how to give people only pieces of myself and call that love. I want closeness that is real. I want to be met, understood, chosen with care, and I love in that same spirit. I am tender, but that tenderness is not weakness. It is something that has survived. It is something that has remained soft without becoming empty. Even after hurt, even after disappointment, even after all the reasons I might have had to go cold, I still find myself reaching for beauty, for connection, for something genuine. That says more about me than anything else ever could.I was born in 1987, a Fire Rabbit, and I think that lives in me more than people might realize at first glance. There is softness in me. Perception. Quietness. A kind of inward gentleness. But there is also fire. Not the kind that throws itself against the walls just to be seen. Not the kind that demands attention. Mine feels more like an ember. Steady. Warm. Lasting. I am also a Leo, born at the beginning of August, but I have always felt like a mellow Leo. I do not move through the world like a roar. I move through it like warmth. Like light that stays. Like a presence that does not need to announce itself to be felt.I think that is what I am, if I am being honest. I am soft, but not fragile. I am emotional, but not careless. I am thoughtful, intuitive, and quietly intense in ways that are not always visible right away. There is a whole inner landscape in me that most people do not see at first. Maybe that is why I am so drawn to imagery, to atmosphere, to the unspoken things that sit between words. They feel truer to me than plain facts do. They feel closer to the actual architecture of who I am.I notice everything. I notice tone. I notice absence. I notice the shift in a room, the weight in a silence, the feeling behind what someone says and what they cannot quite say. I live with a kind of awareness that is hard to reduce into something simple. It is not constant analysis. It is not chatter. It is more like being in conversation with texture, with meaning, with the emotional weather of things. I do not always explain myself quickly because what I know tends to come as a whole picture first. I have to sit with it. Feel it. Turn it in the light. Then I find the language.And maybe that is why I am here like this now, at this little mismatched table, cigarette forgotten between my lips, rain feathering the world outside the window, writing not because I want to define myself into something tidy, but because I want to tell the truth. The truth is that I am a quiet kind of fire. A woman who thinks in images and loves with reverence. A heart that has been bruised and still remains open. A person who needs beauty, meaning, and sincerity the way other people need noise. I am soft as a rabbit, warm as a Leo, inwardly bright in a way that does not beg to be seen.I am not loud, but I am there.
I am not simple, but I am honest.
I am not made for the surface of things.
I am made for what lives underneath.
Ruby Blaire
Her, at a Glance
Soft spoken. Intuitive. Quietly intense.I think in images, feel in depth, and notice more than I often say. I am an INFP, a Fire Rabbit, and a mellow Leo. Tender, thoughtful, and inwardly bright, I move through the world with feeling, meaning, and a quiet kind of fire.I love with reverence.
I live beneath the surface.
More ember than wildfire.
More poetry than noise.
And a talent to rival.
I live with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Diabetes, Psoriatic Arthritis, and Severe Bipolar II Depression. These are quiet battles I carry daily, woven into the shape of my life, my body, and my becoming.
Scribbles
Ruby Blaire
Journal
❦ 04, April ❦
I can see more clearly now, not because anything has become easy, but because I am no longer standing with my back turned to myself.For a long time, I was facing one thing so completely that everything else behind me blurred into shadow. One grief. One longing. One story I kept touching like a bruise. And while I stood there, fixed on what was gone, there was an entire shelf of my life waiting quietly at my back. Patient. Unmoved. Still mine.Now when I turn and look at it, I can finally see what has been there all along.The little trinkets of my life. My grandmother. My childhood. Small sacred remnants of who I have been and what has made me. Pieces of memory with their own soft weight. And there, at the center of it all, is something unfinished.Something living.Something that belongs only to me.It is my self love, and when I look at it, I do not see a mirror. I do not see some polished version of healing, clean and complete and easy to name. I see a blossoming cherry tree.Its trunk is strong and healthy, warm brown and steady, carrying every branch with quiet certainty. The leaves are bright and alive, that beautiful living green that only belongs to something truly growing. And there are buds everywhere. So many buds. A few have already opened into blossoms, soft and delicate and real, but most of them are still waiting. Still gathering themselves. Still becoming.And somehow that does not make it feel unfinished in a sad way.It feels honest.It feels like looking at myself and seeing that I am not barren. I am not broken earth. I am not something that failed to bloom. I am something in season. Something still opening. Something already alive, even in the places that have not yet flowered.What stays with me most is the feeling beneath it.Under those branches, it is warm. Not bright in a harsh way. Not exposed. Just warm in that quiet, enveloping way that makes the body unclench before the mind even catches up. Safe. Inviting. The kind of place where I feel as though I could sit forever without needing to explain myself to anyone. I could curl up beneath it and let the shade hold me. I could fall asleep there. I could wake again and look up through the branches and still find beauty waiting for me.There is something so tender about that.To imagine myself resting beneath my own becoming. To feel my own growth not as pressure, but as shelter. Not as something demanding more from me, but as something already strong enough to hold me while I continue.It feels like a soft warm hug.And maybe that is what moves me most. That when I finally looked at the unfinished piece meant for me, I did not find emptiness there. I did not find ruin. I found a tree. Rooted. Flourishing. Gentle. A little incomplete, yes, but deeply alive. Beautiful not because every bud has opened, but because it is still willing to bloom.I think that means something.I think it means that somewhere at the center of me, there is still a place that knows how to grow toward light. A place that has not given up on tenderness. A place that is becoming its own kind of sanctuary.And when I picture that tree, I do not just see healing.I see home.
❦ 02, April ❦
Lately I have been thinking about how loneliness is not always an empty room.Sometimes it is a room full of people who know how to approach, but not how to arrive. People who know how to engage, but not how to remain. People who know how to enjoy warmth, but not how to tend it.That is the kind of loneliness I have come to know.It is not dramatic. It is not loud. It is a quieter thing than that. A slow recognition. A pattern that keeps repeating until it becomes impossible not to see. So many interactions now feel less like meeting and more like exchange. Less like depth and more like quiet negotiation. Someone wants comfort. Someone wants attention. Someone wants access. Someone wants to feel less alone for a little while. But very rarely does it feel as though they want to know me simply to know me.That is the part that leaves such a strange silence behind.It happens in romance, but not only there. It happens everywhere. In friendships. In conversation. In the soft openings of things that suggest meaning and then reveal appetite instead. A person reaches out, and for a moment it almost feels like closeness, until the shape of it clarifies. Until I can feel that I am being approached not as a soul, but as a function. A comfort. A reflection. A softness to lean against. A place for someone else to set their need.I think what unsettles me most is how common it has become.This thinning of depth.
This loss of sincerity.
This quiet habit people have of treating one another like temporary answers rather than living, interior beings.It is not that I expect perfection from people. I do not. But I do long for presence. For curiosity without agenda. For care that is not always leaning toward self interest. For interactions that are not subtly scanning for use, leverage, or emotional return.I do not want to be valuable only in the places where I am useful.I do not want to be kept nearby for what I can provide.I do not want to mistake being needed for being known.And maybe that is why I withdraw when I do. Not because I have nothing to say, but because too much of what passes for connection now feels hollow to me. I find myself returning to writing, to imagery, to atmosphere, to those quieter interior places where meaning still feels intact. Where feeling has not yet been flattened into transaction. Where tenderness can still exist without being immediately repurposed into currency.I have never been made for shallow things.
I have never known how to offer only fractions of myself and call it closeness.
I have never been able to feel at home in the kind of connection that hovers at the surface and mistakes proximity for intimacy.There is a particular solitude in that.Not because I have nothing around me, but because what I value seems increasingly rare. Depth. Presence. Reciprocity. The simple dignity of being met without being measured first.And still, I remain myself.Still thoughtful.
Still inward.
Still unwilling to make peace with hollowness just because it is common.If anything, what I feel is not desperation, but disappointment. A quiet grief for the ways people reach for one another now. For how often connection is treated as consumption. For how rarely sincerity is allowed to stand on its own without being bent toward utility.I know what I offer.
I know the weight and care with which I love.
I know the difference between being cherished and being used gently enough to confuse the two.So yes, there are times I feel alone.Not because no one comes near.
Because so few seem to come near without wanting something first.And perhaps that is the clearest way to say it.I am not lonely because I have no depth to give.
I am lonely because depth is so rarely what is being asked for.