The poem Blue Soda delicately captures the liminal emotional space between burnout and becoming—what happens when our tidy lives are disrupted by an untraceable, inexplicable emotional spill. The metaphor of “blue soda” becomes an image of emotional ambiguity—bright yet messy, artificial yet overwhelming.
I had everything labelled,
neatly shelved —
dreams in airtight jars,
grief folded under old T-shirts,
ambition stuck to post-its above the mirror.Then someone
(or maybe nothing at all)
poured blue soda all over my life.Sticky.
Fizzy.
Fake-coloured chaos.
The kind of mess that creeps
into corners you forgot you had.It seeped into my schedule,
bled through my plans,
made everything hum with a strange new buzz
I didn’t ask for.I stopped making lists.
Started sleeping through alarms.
Wore mismatched socks.
Laughed during deadlines.
Cried for no reason in public washrooms.Everyone said,
“Are you okay?”
I said,
“I think something spilled.”
But they couldn’t see the blue.It wasn’t depression.
It wasn’t joy.
It was something in between —
a spill that wouldn’t dry,
a version of me I never intended to become
but now I carry a damp shirt in the rain.
You may also like to read poetic reflections on perseverance, transformation, and progress. Read next Ray of Hope in Pitch Black – Never Lose Hope and I saw the devil hands like mine and eyes like yours reflections on oppression, complicity and silence.
