For Shiza — who reads whole galaxies between the lines

Eighteen is the kind of number that feels like the first page of a book you've been waiting to write — the ink still wet, the ending gloriously unknown. Somewhere between one world and the next, that's exactly where you're standing today.

You've always had a way of noticing what everyone else scrolls past — the small ache in someone's voice, the colour of a sky nobody looked up to see. You feel things at full volume, sometimes for people who barely feel anything back, and that's not a flaw to file away. It's just a heart that reads the room in fantasy-novel detail.

So here's to the girl who turns strangers' sadness into her own, who finds a universe in a paperback and a poem in a Tuesday. May this year hand you stories worth staying up for, and people who are gentle with your heart the way you're gentle with everyone else's.

Happy 18th, Shiza. The next chapter is already glowing.