Today begins the Tenebrae
The extinguishing of candles
The gradual diminishing of light
Then a loud noise in the darkness
It's not practiced much these days
You need the requisite clergy
And the will to witness after midnight
the desire for which deserts me
It seems older than Christ
Redolent of the Egyptians
Like Sekhmet in her Karnak chapel
Unlit
Against time
Resistant.

Not all release arrives with luxury.
Not every burden sheds in lightning.
Some things leave in smaller ways.
Like a coat slipping from shoulders
in a room filled with late sun,
like breath loosed at the end of a sentence
you didn’t know you’d held too long.

The heaviest things are often invisible:
guilt calcified in the chest,
the gnarled ache of pride in the throat,
the infinite tightness of a name
you refuse to call back
because shame is louder than longing.

But in time, even steel remembers
it was once fire,
once molten and changeable.
Even silence, when held kindly,
begins to soften at the edges.

It starts with stillness.
The kind you find not in absence,
but in presence so full it quiets.
A stillness that is a knowing, not a lack.
A presence, warm and exact.
The weightless hush of afternoon
through linen curtains.
The settling of dust in golden shafts.
The sound of another’s breath
when they trust you enough to fall asleep.

It begins, too, with courage
not the kind that charges into battle,
but the subtler kind:
the bravery of turning inward.
The spine that straightens,
not in anger,
but in readiness to be gentle.

And then the apology:
not performative,
not obligatory,
but real.
A syllable that tastes like humility,
like rainwater after drought,
like bread offered
to the very hunger you caused.

I am sorry.
How much lives in those three small words?
Whole forests felled by anger
begin to grow again
when spoken with truth.
You will not hear fanfare.
But somewhere —
in the nervous system,
in the soft circuitry of trust —
a gate creaks open.

There is a magic
to the uncoiling of resentment.
To how grief releases its grip
when met with a hand
not clenched but outstretched.
How a grudge,
held long enough,
becomes its own cage
and the key was always
a soft thing:
an offering,
a gaze,
an “I see it now.”

This is the sacred labor:
To name the harm.
To own the wound you left
and do so without defense.
To say
I did not mean to bruise you,
but I did,
and I will carry that knowledge
without asking you to comfort me for it.

You will be surprised
how quiet the world becomes
after an apology truly given.
It is the hush after snowfall,
the way the wind slows
when there is nothing left to chase.
It is the return of the birds
to a field long burned.

And from this hush,
peace is born —
not like a trumpet-blast,
not like a victory,
but like an exhale.
Like clean sheets after sickness.
Like water poured gently over roots
that forgot how to drink.

Forgiveness is not forgetting.
It is not letting someone off a hook
they keep hanging themselves on.
It is choosing, instead,
to unhook yourself
from the chain
that keeps dragging you back
to what already happened.

There is rest
on the other side of apology.
True rest.
The kind that seeps into muscle.
The kind where your name
does not feel like a bruise
in someone else’s mouth.
Where your presence
no longer makes the room stutter.

To rest is enough.
To be forgiven is enough.
But to ask for forgiveness
to kneel inwardly and say,
I know better now,
and I will do better —
that is everything clothed in mortal skin.

And it is enough.

More than enough.

Because when the burden slips —
when pride is set down
like an old, dull weapon —
you do not lose anything.
You gain the world again.

A world where you can
walk barefoot across mornings
without the crack of regret beneath each step.
A world where two people
once jagged with blame
now sit, knees touching,
passing peaches between them,
letting juice run down their chins,
not needing to say
what was once unbearable —
because it has already been said.

And heard.
And forgiven.

And from that moment on,
there is no war.
There is only a garden.
And the sound of wind
through olive trees.

wish I could float above the water.
instead I feel pressured. I feel like I'm being
pushed (forced) under the sea.

You bloom toward her like sun,
And I, the shade beneath your leaves,
Grow quietly in the dirt —
Loving the light that was never for me.

The light breaks like tired glass
soft, strained, unsure of itself.
It falls across the orchard in gold
and bruises, where apples rot gently
at the foot of trees that no longer bother
to reach for the sun.

The equinox comes
like someone you once loved
standing in your doorway,
saying nothing.

For a moment
the world holds its breath.
Light and dark,
neck and neck.

And then the balance tips.
Always, it tips.

I walk through fields gone hollow with wind.
The air tastes of iron, and endings.
Leaves give up without a fight now —
not a blaze, not a fury,
just a quiet letting go,
and I envy them.

There is a kind of mercy
in falling.
There is a kind of grace
in becoming less.

Still, I am full of ache.
My chest is a hearth
where no one's embraced in years.
The fire cold,
the ice forming.

I call out to the sky,
but even the crows have left —
even the dusk seems uninterested
in staying.

They say the veil is thinnest now.
That what’s gone
leans close to what’s still here.
So I sit in the dirt
and hope some version of myself
might return with the fog.
The one who knew how to feel full.
The one who believed in light
even as it fled.

But the sun slips down like a secret,
and the night arrives hungry.
The stars blink like distant answers
to questions I no longer ask.

And I think
maybe this is it.
Maybe I am meant to lie fallow,
a field in waiting.

Not dead.
Not alive.
Just brimming with the quiet
of what might one day grow again.