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.