After The Ruin, A Door

At first, there was only silence.

The kind that settles in after something shatters

not with a bang, but with a slow, grinding kind of ache.

Life changed in a way I didn’t see coming,

It took things.

People.

Plans.

Versions of myself I thought would always be real.

For a while, I forgot how to move.

Every day felt like a rerun of grief dressed in new clothes.

Even joy felt suspicious,

like something borrowed, something breakable.

I sat inside the stillness, fists clenched, heart wrapped in caution tape.

Because when life breaks you once, you learn to flinch at the sound of anything beginning.

But then quietly, and without permission something stirred.

A question.

What if this isn’t the end? What if this ruin is a door?

So I stepped out, just a little.

Just enough to feel the air touch a part of me that I thought had disappeared.

I began to notice small things like

how light pools on the floor differently in the morning.

How even broken soil can bloom again if it’s willing.

I started saying yes to things I didn’t fully understand.

Not because I had answers, but because staying still started to feel more dangerous than trying.

And in that trying, I found pieces of myself I’d never met before.

Bolder.

Quieter.

Curious.

Capable of being wrong and still worthy.

I am not who I was

and I’m no longer waiting to be her again.

There is newness in me now.

Something wilder.

Something softer.

Something unafraid of becoming.

Hope didn’t return like a sunrise,

it returned like a match.

One I had to strike myself.

And now with hands still shaky, but open I am walking towards a world that isn’t finished yet.

And maybe neither am I.