I remember laying on the cold earth as a child,
watching a sky heavy with secrets,
when the first snow flurry brushed my cheek
a hush so soft I could have drifted away,
wrapped warm in my jacket,
the world outside fading
until only comfort remained.

At my grandparents’ house,
sunlight spilled across the kitchen floor in the morning,
and my grandmother’s sandwiches arrived like small miracles,
each bite a kind of promise
that the world was gentle here.
Every hug with them was an anchor,
every moment of excitement a burst of belonging
my heart at ease, my nervous system quietly humming
in the certainty of love.

But it was France,
in a tucked-away little room on the first floor of a strange house,
where I discovered what peace could feel like
for my body and soul.
There, the bed waited beneath white curtains,
the windows open to a gentle wind
that made the curtains dance,
soft as dreams.
I lay down, weightless,
a soft blanket pulled to my chin,
and drifted into the kind of nap
where anything felt possible
the world stilled, my mind a blank canvas,
filled only by the magic of being safe.

Now I understand
Peace is more than memory,
it’s the calm that fills my chest when the world is gentle,
the ease that settles in my bones,
the safety that softens every breath.
It’s a nervous system at rest,
a body unburdened,
a quiet mind that finally trusts where it is.

Wherever I find this stillness
in winter’s hush,
in sunlit kitchens,
in the sway of white curtains,
I know I am home.
Peace lives inside me now,
teaching me that calm and safety are not places,
but a way my whole self can feel
when I let the world be soft
and trust that I am safe.

All night, the brushes bristle
with unsteady prayers,
oil and terror in every sweep,
each canvas a battlefield
between memory and madness,
between longing and loss.

He paints in fever,
his trembling hand chasing ghosts
across gessoed plains,
trying to mend the world
with color and chaos
a smudge for each regret,
a highlight for every hope
he’s drowned in turpentine.

The house groans and blurs
behind him,
rooms melting into each other
like faces on the page,
shapes that won’t hold still,
voices splintering in the walls
they whisper, paint,
paint,
paint,
until there is nothing left
but cracked varnish
and the echo of “almost.”

He paints what he lost:
her laughter in morning light,
the gentle reach of hands
he can’t recall in detail
only the ache,
the hollow,
the unfinished lines
he keeps returning to.

Perfection dangles, just out of reach,
each stroke carving him hollow
as his world frays at the edges
canvas peeling back
to reveal the wound
he cannot heal.

He whispers to the silence,
to the shadows gathering thick as oil
Finish it for me.
His plea stains the air,
weightless as dust,
hoping someone
even in the next room,
or the next life
will take the brush
and find the shape
of what he could not complete.

In the end,
he paints and paints,
chasing the ghost of a masterpiece,
painting himself out of the world,
leaving behind
one trembling signature,
unfinished
waiting
for a gentler hand
to finish it for him.

I sit at the summit where silence begins,
on the edge of a whisper the forest sends in
the hush of green breath cradling my frame,
as if the Earth knows me by name.

Above, the sky yawns wide with grace,
a cathedral of blue where I lose my face
no more the boy who hides his ache,
just a soul the breeze dares not break.

Below me, roots entwine like arms
gentle with my weight, immune to harm.
They don’t ask why I can’t stay still,
why rest feels like a swallow of pills.

Because motion motion is mercy to me.
In steps and sprints, I am finally free.
Each forward breath, a sacred escape
from thoughts that linger in shadows’ shape.

But in the stillness, in this quiet wood,
grief presses its face to my pulse and blood.
Memories ungrieved, like ghosts unmet,
pull up chairs in my chest and do not forget.

Stillness does not ask if I am ready
it enters like dusk, quiet and steady.
It holds me hostage in fields of thought,
where every loss I’ve buried is caught.

Through silver mist, my paddle dips,
A gentle glide where silence slips,
My canoe whispers secrets to the lake
Chasing echoes your ghostly wake.

Veiled in fog, my path unclear,
Yet drawn forward, I feel you near.
Each Paddle a question softly cast,
Through waters calm, beyond the past.

Your presence, magic woven thin,
Guides my heart, this trance I'm in.
The pond breathes slow beneath my hand,
Pulling gently toward unknown land.

I chase the shadow of your glow,
Where lilies dream and whispers flow.
Through misty worlds my soul aligns
In fog, your memory intertwines.

No rush, just peace, a calm embrace,
I paddle toward your gentle trace.
The mystery holds no fear for me,
For in this fog, you're all I see.

Beneath the hush, I'm safely led,
By ghostly trails your spirit’s shed.

I stand at the edge of memory's clearing,
watching my childhood home consumed
by flame, by the cruel erosion of time,
each beam of laughter crackling,
each wall of safety collapsing inward
like a prayer spoken backwards.

The wildfire sweeps through everything:
Saturday mornings thick with pancake steam,
the way sunlight used to pool
in the corner where I built my kingdoms
from cardboard boxes and infinite dreams.

I am paralyzed, a child again,
hands pressed against invisible glass,
screaming at the inferno
that devours the sanctuary I called home.

Smoke fills my lungs with the bitter taste
of all I cannot save:
the creaking floorboard that announced my midnight wanderings,
the kitchen table scarred with homework tears
and birthday cake celebrations.

But listen
in the crackling of loss,
in the hiss of vanishing,
something else stirs.

From the white-hot core of grief,
wings unfurl like broken prayers
learning to fly again.
I am the ember that refused to die,
the stubborn spark,
to the hungry flames of forgetting.

What rises from these ashes
is not the home I lost
it is me, transformed,
carrying the warmth of every moment
that mattered enough to burn eternal,
my heart a furnace where love
learned to make itself immortal.

The phoenix knows this truth:
some things must be consumed
before they can become holy,
before they can learn to soar
on wings made of everything
we thought we'd lost forever.

I am both the fire and the rising,
both the child who watched it burn
and the child who learned to fly.

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.

All my dreams feel real.
So vivid, so precise,
I cannot tell
whether I am waking,
or wandering through some secret doorway.

Everything is perfect,
one to one,
every color the exact hue it should be,
every shadow falling just as it does
in the world I call my own.

It’s like Inception,
where I can’t tell what’s real
and you’re still here,
and everything is perfect.
I hold onto it because I want to believe
this is the world we belong to.

Sometimes,
even within the dream,
I ask myself aloud:
Is this real?
Am I dreaming?
And some soft voice,
sometimes mine, sometimes not,
answers quietly:
Does it matter?

Because in those moments,
the sky holds its breath for me.
The ground feels no different beneath my feet.
The faces I meet
smile as if they’ve known me always.

But toward the end,
when the dream begins to unravel,
the walls grow thin,
and I feel it slipping
all of it
you, the light, the warmth.
I lose everything.
And somehow it hurts even more
when I wake up

I wake
carrying fragments
a street I’ve never walked,
a scent that fades too fast,
the echo of my own voice
saying things I didn’t know I needed to hear.

What is real, after all,
but the places our hearts linger,
and the worlds we can’t quite leave behind
when morning comes.