you come from a woman from a body that carried you without question, from hands that knew you before you spoke, from a kind of care you never had to ask for
you were held before you understood what holding was, fed before you knew hunger, loved before you knew how to return it
you were soothed when you didn’t understand your own discomfort you were seen before you knew how to be seen, you were answered before you knew how to ask
and then you grow into a world that teaches you distance teaches you how to move forward, how to leave, how to harden, how to forget what it felt like to be kept
and you come back to us as men standing in front of women as if we are something new, something to figure out, something to reach
but we are not new
we are the same place you once lived inside
so why do you do this
why do you stand so close and still not see us
why do you reach without knowing what you’re reaching for
why do you touch without understanding what you’re holding
why do you move through us as if we are surface
not all of you but most of you
and it repeats
the same distance the same absence the same quiet disconnect as if something in you chose forgetting over remembering
because you don’t know us
not the way we feel you before you speak
not the way we notice what you don’t say
not the way we hold what passes through you without you ever stopping to see it
we feel your hesitation your distraction, your presence when it’s real and your absence when it isn’t
we feel when you arrive and when you don’t
and still
we are expected to remain
as if closeness is something that happens just because you are near
but it is not
it is as if you forgot completely what it was like to be known without asking, to be cared for without earning it, to be held without having to arrive
and now you move through us as if we are surface—but we are not
we are still that same quiet place, still able to hold, still able to know
still capable of seeing you in ways you don’t yet —see yourself
but no longer willing to be forgotten while you stand inside us
It came the way certain things do. Without asking, without a plan.
As if something in me had grown tired of remaining hidden.
Nothing here is finished. Nothing has been made whole.
This digital space holds what has shifted, what softened, what could not return to where it once rested.
If there is tenderness, it is small and easily missed.
If there is opening, it is not sudden, only a slow turning toward something.
I am still learning to trust.
There was a time I believed that staying closed was the only way to remain intact.
That if I held myself carefully enough, quietly enough, nothing could reach me that might take more than I was willing to give.
And I became very good at it.
I learned how to remain how to speak, how to move through the world with precision, with control, with a kind of quiet restraint that made everything appear unchanged.
But there is a quiet cost to that kind of living.
You begin to disappear from yourself.
You begin to forget what it feels like to exist without guarding every part of you.
You begin to live as something contained, not something alive.
And somewhere in that without my permission something in me began to resist.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
Just enough to make it impossible to return to what I was.
And that is where these words come from.
From the place I kept hidden, not because it was empty, but because it was too full.
From a self that has always spoken in images
In petals that refuse their bloom.
In soil that remembers everything.
In light that does not arrive but waits until it is allowed.
My metaphors are not decoration.
They are translation.
They are the closest I can come to saying what I have carried, without breaking it open too quickly.
Without losing what it means to me in the telling.
If you know how to read them.
You will know me.
Not entirely.
But in the places where language hesitates.
Where meaning slips.
Where something is felt before it is understood.
Because . .
That is where I live.
Between what I can say and what I cannot.
Between clarity and concealment.
Between the self I offer.
And the one I keep just out of reach.
Words arrive to me.
And I must place them somewhere, before they begin to weep within me.
They do not come when I am ready.
They come when I am unguarded.
Late, when the world has quieted.
When the hour no longer belongs to anything but what I have kept inside.
Words keep me awake.
They find me in the stillness of 1 a.m.
Insistent, unresolved as if they have been waiting for the moment I can no longer hold them back.
And I write not because I choose to, but because I cannot leave them there.
Unplaced.
Unspoken.
Turning inward until they begin to break me open.
So this . .
All of this.
Is not a narrative.
It is not a resolution.
It is a record of what happens when I allow myself to remain present with what I feel.
Without forcing it into something easier, cleaner, or more complete.
Read this as you would something living.
With patience.
With care, without needing it to become anything other than what it is.
Because I am still here learning how to exist within myself without retreating.
Learning how to stay when every instinct tells me to close.
Learning how to let something be seen without disappearing in the process.
You arrive here not as a beginning—but as something rewritten by its own hands.
Your children have stepped out of your body into their own weather, calling you less, needing you in quieter ways—like a photograph still warm from the sun.
Your parents soften into time, their voices folding, their strength becoming memory while they are still standing.
And you—you are no longer who you were when everything required you.
Now, you require yourself. You move differently—with a kind of knowing that drips slowly from the center of your chest.
This is not loss.
This is space.
A clearing where your name sounds new again.
Your hands—once full of everyone—begin to open, and in that opening something wild and unrestrained begins to breathe.
You are not starting over.
You are rearranging—like light when it realizes it no longer has to prove its brightness.
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