canceled

journal entry 2: i was just a seed, dreaming of the ruin of becoming

The sky splits its lip on a crocus bloom, bleeding morning onto pavement, and I am here, ankle-deep in the wreckage of a life that should have been elsewhere. It should mean something, shouldn’t it? This slow rupture of color spilling from the wound. A sign, an omen, a poetic assurance of something more. But all it means is that the sky is bleeding, and I am standing beneath it, looking up.

I was supposed to be far away from this, stepping off a plane into the arms of a distant, yet familiar city—one with my name tucked into its costal grooves. A place that would hold me like lungs cradle breath, tight and inevitable. I had already written the poetry of that life, licked the ink of transformation off my fingers, tasted the bite of untethered aloneness, and called it something sweet. My hands were meant to press against unfamiliar doorframes, my name rolling off the tongue of some indifferent barista who does not yet know my order, my hesitations, my desire to be perceived as something whole.

But that journey is canceled…

How do I romanticize this now?

How do I make music from the sound of my knees hitting the floor? How do I learn to love the dirt when I was promised sky? How do I learn to stay when I was already gone?

I was just a seed, dreaming of the ruin of becoming, and I thought the breaking would be grand—a crescendo, a crash, a fanfare of falling apart. But it is a quiet rot. A surrender without ceremony.

John William Waterhouse – The Soul of the Rose (1908)

But this is my forte, isn’t it? The pink poet who spins suffering into something worthy of celebration. The weeping cherry tree, soft in its dying, still heavy with bloom.

If I must decay, let it be beautiful.

If I must break, let my splinters catch the light.

So here is my hymn to persisting. The romance is in the clawing, the gripping, the refusal to let go even when the earth itself tilts to shake me loose.

I do not yet have the words to make this beautiful. But I will find them. I will wrench them from the marrow of my ache, string them like lanterns along this new path chosen for me. And I will walk it. Barefoot, bruised, betrayed. Baptized in the ink of my own rewriting.

Because even a ruin can be something worth beholding.

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