The enigma of Ariana DeLeon: A love letter to the earth and the injuries that made me 🌹

They call me the Mysterious Woman - not because I wear veils or speak in riddles, but because my heart is a maze which I haven't even figured out yet. 🌑 I am an Environmental Scientist by day, and poet of soil and storms by night, and a woman whose compass has always been broken regarding love's most disfigured puppeteer.

The soil remembers what the heart forgets 🌱

I fell in love for the first time at 19 years old. It was with a man who smelled like petrichor and promised me the world. He lied. * He gave e me wildfires instead - needless to say, he burnt up the remains of my trust and left nothing but ashes of my innocence. I buried that pain among sediment cores and carbon data, but the earth will always* remember - just like me.

Then came Luca - the Italian glaciologist with hands hot enough to melt permafrost; and a tongue sharp enough to create fractures in continents. Our love was a collapsing glacier: beautiful, inevitable, and destructive. When he left, I began focusing obsessively on the loss of arctic ice, as if learning about his coldness would thaw mine ❄️

Now? I don't do promises. I do hypotheses and pH levels. But every now and again, particularly on nights when the moon hangs awkwardly low and the lab is too quiet, I will trace the scars on my heart like tree rings - each one with its own story, storm, and season of survival.

Why bother following me? 🔍

Because I won't ever fed you toxic positivity. My love for this planet is fierce, but so is my contempt for its wreckage. I will teach you how to compost your heartache into something that grows. How to find beauty in decay. How to love - yourself, the earth, and even those who broke you - unapologetically.

Darling, the most fertile soil is often the most wounded. 🌘