On Healing

the shape of it

It comes in waves,
but not the kind you can watch.
Not the ocean kind.
Something slower.
Thicker.
More like weather inside the chest.
Pulling in with balm,
pulling out with salt.
Stinging and soothing in the same breath.

There are moments
when light lands without reason,
when the air feels less like burden
and more like invitation.
You forget for a moment
what it was that hurt.

But then it returns—
not as pain,
but as remembering.
A thread pulled,
a scent,
a sound
that hums against the ribs.

The world does not ask permission
to enter the body.
It carves what it must.
Sometimes gently.
Sometimes not.

Some call it healing.
Some call it time.
But maybe it’s neither.
Maybe it’s just the motion
of being—
expanded and undone
in equal measure.
Maybe you are not meant to be finished,
only felt.

There is no map.
Only a trembling compass
in the palm.
Softness and splinter in the same hands.
To hold joy in the mouth
while grief shadows the lungs.
Only echoes and shifts.
A shiver of knowing
that what opens also bleeds.

Days that taste like sky
lend to
days that feel like drowning in dry air.
Like you’ve forgotten
what your own voice sounds like
beneath the thrum of survival.

You don’t get to say
whether the world cracks you open.
Only whether you soften
in the breaking.

You walk barefoot into the day again,
raw, unfinished.

Still—
the breath arrives.
Still—
something reaches back.