well... who am i? who's Lexie is writing to remember?

hey there ! i am alexandre but my friends call me alex or lexie.

i’m thirty-three years old, born and raised in belgium to spanish immigrant parents who arrived here as children.

our house carried the weight of two languages, the scent of olive oil and rain. spanish lived in the corners, in the kitchen, in my mother’s soft scolding, in the songs that played when she cleaned on sunday mornings. it was the language of warmth, of food, of laughter that came from deep in the chest. french was sharper, colder, the language of school and survival. i grew up somewhere between the two, never quite belonging to either.

i never felt particularly close to the spanish culture, though it hums somewhere beneath my skin like an old song i never quite learned the words to. when people ask me if i feel spanish, i never know what to answer. i know the rhythm of it, the gestures, the loudness, the fire, but it feels like watching a movie i’ve seen too many times without ever remembering the ending.

and maybe it’s because so much of it reminds me of my father, his voice, his temper, his pride stitched tight as armor. everything about him feels like a language i stopped wanting to speak. everything is complicated when it comes to him to be honest.

and yes, i know. a gay man with a complicated relationship with his dad? shocking. revolutionary. someone call the press.

still, if i inherited anything from him, it’s this relentless need to prove myself. not to the world, though sometimes it looks that way, but to myself. i’m constantly running a quiet race against the version of me who could’ve done better, spoken softer, tried harder. i want to know i’ve earned my peace.

that trait has driven me through nine years of university, collecting degrees like emotional support diplomas. it’s also the reason i push myself too hard, to perform, to please, to succeed, even when my body asks me to rest. i’m learning, slowly, that perfection is not love.

on lighter notes (because balance is everything): i’m mildly obsessed with pastel colors. i’m a taylor swift enthusiast to an arguably concerning degree. i love writing everything in lower cases. and apparently, i make a killer tiramisu, my friends insist on it, and who am i to argue with my own legend? in every friend group, i’m the designated clown, the one who turns heartbreak into a bit, sadness into something you can laugh at without feeling guilty. humor is my favorite survival mechanism. i’ve turned pain into punchlines so often it’s practically my second language.

what keeps me anchored here, in this version of my life, are my friends. i have the rare privilege of being surrounded by people who love me loudly, who remind me that softness isn’t weakness, who make me laugh until my ribs ache. they’ve seen me at my most dramatic (and believe me, that’s saying something). they’ve held me through heartbreaks, through burnouts, through every failed attempt at pretending i’m fine. they are my chosen family, the home i built with love, not blood.

but beneath all that, i write. i always have. for a long time, writing meant sadness, heartbreak, disappointment, grief. i only ever picked up the pen when something ended. i used words like stitches, just to keep myself from falling apart. i wasn’t good at talking about emotions then. therapy helped with that, taught me that feelings don’t have to explode to exist, that softness can be loud in its own way.
and now, i’m learning to write about joy too, about the small, unremarkable forms of beauty that rebuild you quietly. about love when it works. about friendship that doesn’t fade. about the days when you look around and realize the storm has passed without asking for permission. writing has become my way of documenting both: the breaking and the becoming.

writing, for me, is not a hobby, it’s an extension of who i am. it’s how i speak when my voice hesitates. it’s how i distance myself from a feeling just enough to understand it. every time i write, i take something heavy from inside me and lay it down gently on the page, so it can stop haunting me. i turn chaos into form, ache into language, silence into meaning. it’s not about closure, it’s about clarity.

my words are queer because i am. but they are also human, and i hope that’s what you feel when you read me. love, loss, joy, fear, they don’t need translation. you don’t have to be queer to understand the ache of wanting, the sweetness of being seen, or the quiet violence of goodbye. we all know those languages, even if we speak them differently.

if i had to tell you what i want most from this space, it’s connection. i want someone, maybe you, to read a line and think: oh god, i’ve lived that too.
i want you to find yourself somewhere between my words, to feel less alone in your own story. that’s the magic of writing, it bridges the impossible distances between us.

these days, i don’t write just to survive. i write to remember that i survived.
every poem is a timestamp, a small piece of proof that i was here, that i felt something deeply, that i didn’t let life harden me beyond repair. i write to keep a trace of my passage through this world, the heartbreaks, the laughter, the lessons, the ghosts i’ve learned to live with.

if you’re here, reading this, i hope my words make you feel something. even if it’s small. even if it hurts a little. i hope they remind you that you’re not too much or too little, that your softness isn’t a flaw, and that every version of you, the breaking one, the blooming one, the still-in-between one, deserves to be seen.

and if i could tell my younger self one thing, it would be this:
”there are so many beautiful things waiting for you.
you haven’t met all the people who are going to love you yet.
and that, truly, is the most magical part”.

so welcome.
to my corner of the internet.
to my poems, my ghosts, my soft recoveries.
this is where i write to make sense of being alive.
this is where i leave traces of who i’ve been, and who i’m still becoming.

i am so glad you’re here!

xoxo,
Alexandre. Alex. Lexie.