Only the broken learn the language of ruins—

how light arrives in splinters,
how silence can weigh more than stone.

They know the architecture of collapse:
the slow surrender of walls,
the ceiling bowing under weather
no one else could see.

And still, in the rubble,
something stubborn remains.

A hand brushing dust from its own skin.
A match struck against the dark.
A pulse refusing to negotiate
with the night.

The whole may be polished,
untouched, admired from a distance—
but the broken are familiar
with becoming.

They have met themselves
at the sharpest edges
and stayed.

Not because it was noble,
not because it was beautiful,
but because morning kept arriving
like an unanswered question.

And somewhere between fracture and dawn,
they learned this:

a thing can come apart
without disappearing.

What the River Teaches

I carried you

like a river carries fallen leaves—
turning you over in quiet water,
refusing to believe
that the current was meant to move.

I mistook stillness for loyalty.
I built dams from memory,
stacked stone upon trembling stone
to keep the past from drifting away.

But rivers were not born
to be prisons.

They were born
to travel.

And somewhere between
the breaking of the dam
and the trembling of the shore,
I learned something gentle and fierce:

letting go
is not betrayal.

It is the river
choosing the sea
over the grave of a leaf.

You were once
a season in my sky—
a summer storm
that painted lightning across my bones.

But storms pass,
not because the sky is faithless,
but because the sky
is vast enough
to keep becoming.

So I loosen my hands
from what the water has already claimed.
Not in anger.
Not in forgetting.

But in courage.

Because my heart
is not a museum of endings.

It is a horizon.

And somewhere beyond this ache,
the sun is rising again—
waiting for someone brave enough
to walk toward the light
with empty hands
and an unbroken soul.

Still

 

Watching Father of the Bride,

and without warning
you arrive again.

Not loudly—
just a tightening in my chest,
a pause where laughter should be.

I wish you were here, Papa,
to roll your eyes at the sentiment,
to sit quietly and stay anyway.

The screen fills with fathers and daughters,
with letting go, with love,
and suddenly I am holding your absence
like something fragile.

I miss you—
not in the past tense,
but right now,
as if love never learned
how to leave.

~IN-Finitum~

I hear the exhaustion,
but I cannot agree that leaving is the only truth it allows.

Yes, love stretched without care can erode the self—
but that is not the nature of love itself.
True love does not ask for boundaries
because it does not trespass.
It does not advance by force
or require the self to shrink to stay.

You say returning to pain is rehearsal, not healing,
and often that is true.
But not all repetition is self-betrayal;
sometimes, it is the slow work of learning
whether love can grow beyond its old limits.

Softness did not fail you.
Speaking carefully was not the mistake.
What wore you down was loving without being met,
mistaking endurance for devotion,
and silence for peace.

When love is true, it knows no boundaries—
not of time, distance, or societal norms.
It is a force that connects two souls,
no matter how far apart they may be.
True love speaks in silence,
stays connected even in separation,
and flows beyond the grasp of logic or reason.

Distance can protect—
but it can also teach the heart
to confuse absence with resolution.
Not every cage opens by walking away;
some open because love finally remembers
that it was never meant to confine.

Rest is not giving up—
but neither is staying,
if staying is done without self-erasure.
For where love is real,
the self is not something that must be defended—
it is something that is recognized.

You leave this here as the last thing you can carry.
I answer not to deny your truth,
but to offer another:

If love requires constant boundaries to survive,
it may not yet be love—
only longing learning its limits.
And if love is true,
it will not end you to keep itself alive.

Too Late...

 

Will you mourn me when I am gone,

or will I disappear
like breath on cold glass—
there, and then not?

Will your tears envy the rain,
each drop daring to fall
when you never did,
each storm confessing
what you kept locked behind your ribs?

Will you hear my anguish at last
when thunder speaks for me,
when the sky breaks open
with the weight of all
I learned to carry quietly?

Will you see me then—
not as something to endure,
not as a feeling to survive,
but as I was:
soft, and breaking,
and still reaching for you?

And if love finally finds my name
once I am only memory,
will it be gentle—
or just too late?

At Breaking Point

 Don’t call me strong.

That word feels like a notification I forgot to silence—
constant, buzzing, unwanted,
another thing I’m expected to hold together.

I’ve been “resilient” so long
it’s starting to feel like a glitch,
like I’m running on low battery
but everyone assumes I’m still at 100%.

I don’t want applause
for surviving what I never signed up for.
I want someone to notice
the way I go quiet in the middle of a sentence,
how I swallow the parts of me
that feel too heavy to hand over.

See me as breakable—
not in a way that makes me a burden,
but in the way fragile things are treasured,
placed gently in cupped hands,
carried slow.

Handle me like I’m moments from unraveling,
because some nights I am.
And all I want is for someone
to touch the softest parts of me
without expecting them
to be bulletproof.

When the Rain Listens

 rain sketches soft lines

across the glass —
each drop a small beginning,
a thought without a voice.

the world moves slower
when it rains.
cars blur into whispers,
colors melt into one another,
and time forgets its name.

I walk without reason,
umbrella closed,
letting the sky rest on my shoulders.
it feels like forgiveness —
gentle, unspoken,
real.

people rush past
in small storms of their own,
each carrying a silence
too heavy to share.
but mine is light —
it hums like a secret
that doesn’t need telling.

the pavement mirrors everything:
the streetlights,
the pulse of puddles,
the me I meet only in rain.

alone doesn’t ache tonight.
it breathes.
it expands,
fills the cracks between raindrops
and waits with me
in the stillness after sound.

and when the rain stops—
I don’t.
I stay,
listening
to the echo
of being enough.