I lie in the dark,
chasing sleep that slips away.
Thoughts scatter like headlights on wet pavement,
and behind my closed eyes,
tears drift down slow
a rain I never asked for.

Then the dream takes me.
Memories distort
colors bleeding into one another.
For a moment, I almost believe.
I smile in that fragile light,
as if the past had stitched itself whole again.

Daylight arrives, pale and quiet.
I wake uncertain,
as if something slipped away
in the space between sleeping and breathing.

It rains in quiet colors
blue against the blinds,
silver on the floorboards
a weather only I can feel.

The anima you stirred does not live in simple light,
but in the hidden currents beneath thought,
where memory folds into longing,
and every silence carries the weight of what was once spoken.

You carved new pathways in me,
a symmetry of tenderness and defiance,
teaching my soul to bend without breaking,
to find music even in fracture,
to trust that beauty is not always gentle,
but always real.

Through your presence,
imagination grew teeth and wings,
dreams no longer sat quietly in corners
they demanded to be chased,
to be sung,
to be lived.

What I carry now is more than reflection,
it is a pulse,
a vision sharpened by the way you looked at the world,
a map inked in colors only you could draw,
reminding me that wonder is not an escape
but the truest way back home.

At seven, my heart learned sadness
a quiet theft of innocence,
the gentle pulse of life against my chest,
teaching me how fragile
forever truly is.

Days shrank to precious minutes,
as if holding you closer
could somehow slow time,
your warmth a whisper
I begged to keep hearing.

The morning arrived uninvited,
unfair in its sunrise,
forcing goodbye from lips
too young to speak such words,
a child waving softly,
unaware how final
goodbyes could be.

Years stretch now behind me,
but that day remains
pressed inside my chest
like an old, familiar ache
the sting of tears fresh
as if you’d left this morning,
not a lifetime ago.

I can still feel
your fur beneath my fingers,
your small body breathing gently,
the world unfair in ways
I learned too soon
and never forgot.

After all this time,
that first sorrow lingers,
unsoftened by age,
unfaded by memories,
the heart of a child
still grieving, still holding on
to what it never learned
how to let go.

I watch him now
the little boy I once was,
arms wide open, spinning beneath
his first snowfall,
eyes lit with uncontainable wonder.
Snowflakes kissing his cheeks,
melting into laughter,
nothing more precious
than the delicate miracle
falling softly from the sky.

There he is,
pure and weightless,
untouched by the gravity
of worthiness and achievement.
No goals set, no mountains yet to climb
just a gentle whisper from the clouds,
telling him it's beautiful
simply to exist.

How did I lose him?
Where along this winding path
did I trade wonder for worth,
presence for purpose,
and quiet joy
for the endless hunger
to prove I belong?

I’m here,
watching a video of innocence
that feels worlds away.
I miss that child
who knew no moment
was ever wasted,
that happiness was not
earned, but given freely
like snow.

Let me find him again
in gentle silence,
to hold the falling flakes
in palms not burdened by ambition,
to taste the air
without guilt or shame,
to breathe deeply
and remember that
before everything else,
I am allowed
to simply be.

I still speak to you,
because you're that close
a part of the air between thoughts,
a presence soft as breath.

Sometimes I catch myself
smiling mid-thought,
because I know exactly
what you’d say.
And it’s perfect.
It always is.

You never needed a map
to find where I was.
You just showed up there
a quiet knowing in your eyes,
a warmth that told me
I never had to translate myself.

You were the only one
who understood
my spirals, my quiet corners,
my unspoken questions.
You met them like old friends.

I think of you
when I create,
when I overthink,
when I see something small
and beautiful
that most people would miss.

You
the one who held belief like fire,
who wore empathy like armor,
who stood rooted in her knowing
like the world couldn’t shake her.

When I imagine the future,
the life I am shaping slowly,
with hands patient as earth and time,
I dream not of grandeur,
but of something tender:

Of sitting beneath a willow tree in the hush of autumn
leaves trembling like small prayers before they fall,
the air steeped in gold and quiet.
A notebook open in my lap,
ink flowing like breath turned visible.

I picture painting without perfection,
colors bleeding softly into one another,
or reading words that do not demand solving
only feeling.
Only wonder.

The breeze threads itself through my hair
with the gentleness of old love,
and the sun lowers itself with reverence,
laying its tired light upon the horizon’s tender curve.

In this dream I am lifted by nothing but presence,
the hum of creation moving quietly through my veins,
rooted wholly in what I know is sacred:

That I am no longer running.
Not from sorrow, not from longing,
not from the aching tenderness of simply being alive.

Instead, I am living
whole, unfinished, at peace.
And in that soft, unhurried hour beneath the willow tree,
this life I have found,
is finally enough.
More than enough.

I wake with the sunlight bleeding in,
my chest rising like a slow-burning hymn.
The first inhale lifts me
high enough to feel infinite,
low enough to still taste the earth
on my tongue.

Thoughts drift easy,
like smoke curling from a match,
like the glow of headlights
on an empty road
They don’t ask where I’m going
they just lead me
back to what I know I love.

I set my intentions quiet,
like notes scribbled in the margins
of a worn out journal.
a compass carved
from the pulse in my veins.

The walls hum,
the world bends soft,
and every dream I ever had
feels close enough to touch.
This is my art of living:
to follow the haze,
to chase the beauty,
to trust my intuition

Every day I wake with a question inside,
drifting between mirrors,
searching for the face behind the fog
who am I,
who am I becoming,
where will my wandering take me?

I carry an ancient ache,
wisdom worn smooth by lifetimes
hidden beneath my skin,
yet inside my chest a child still clings
to simple joys, old wounds,
and the trembling hush of being seen.

There’s a fracture I trace with gentle fingers,
lines of distortion only I can feel,
shapes and shadows swirling
where sense and sensation refuse to meet.
Sometimes, a thing will turn my stomach
I recoil,
not from logic
but from something wordless,
old as fear.

It’s strange to hold so much knowing
and so much confusion
in the same gentle hands.
Strange to despise what reason allows,
to stand at the crossroads of intuition and thought,
lost in the silent argument between them.

Still, I keep walking,
willing to meet the parts of myself
that make no sense at all
letting questions bloom like wildflowers
in the fields between
who I was
and who I might yet become.

Sometimes I wish
I carried this wisdom back then,
when questions rattled inside me
like unstrung bells.

Now, the answers feel obvious,
glowing like constellations
I had been staring at all along
without knowing their names.

I understood you deeply,
but only to the depth
I had reached in myself.

My own unfinished self
set the horizon of my knowing,
a shallow tide holding back
the ocean I could not yet breathe.

Now I see how infinite it always was

Hindsight glows like a lantern
revealing the obvious
that once lived in shadows:
that you were never a riddle,
only a mirror,
and I was the one still learning
how to see.

I press my palm against the bark of ancient oak
and feel the pulse of centuries I'll never know
each ring a secret whispered in the dark,
each leaf a letter written in a language
that dies before I learn to read it.

The sky bleeds gold at evening's edge,
and I am small beneath its vastness,
a child with cupped hands
trying to catch the ocean.
Light travels ninety-three million miles
just to break against my retina,
for reasons I cannot name.

Why must we ache for answers
that crumble like autumn leaves
the moment we think we've grasped them?

I watch a sparrow build a nest
with such fierce certainty,
while I armed with all my questions,
all my telescopes and theories
still cannot fathom
why my heart beats
in rhythm with the tides,
why my breath follows
the same ancient pattern
as wind through wheat.

There is a mathematics to mourning,
a physics to the way grief bends light,
but no equation for the way
morning glory vines
know exactly when to open,
or why their purple faces
look like prayers.

I am haunted by the elegance
of things I'll never understand:
how photons dance themselves
into the green of summer grass,
how my grandmother's eyes
still live in mine.

The universe keeps its counsel
while dropping breadcrumbs
of beauty at our feet
a cardinal's call at dawn,
the perfect spiral of a shell,
the way rain sounds different
on every kind of pain.

We are archaeologists of wonder,
digging through the layers
of what we think we know,
only to find beneath each answer
ten thousand more questions,
each one more tender
than the last.

And maybe that's the point
not to solve the mystery
but to be worthy of it,
to let it break us open
again and again
until we are nothing
but grateful light
scattered across
the infinite dark.