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.

I told the truth once—
but only in the language of bluebells.
And no one I love speaks that tongue.

They bloom in the shape of wounds,
soft and bell-shaped,
as if penance could ever be this lovely.

Each season, I return to the grove.
Barefoot.
Ash-throated.
Carrying the lie like a buried relic—
not evil, but sacred.
Not for deceit,
but for survival.

The flowers tilt toward me,
a thousand lowered heads.
Their perfume—guilt made sweet—
clings like the memory of hands
I would not let touch me true.

I have built entire cathedrals
from the parts of myself I refuse to show.
Cathedrals without doors.
And when they knock—oh, they knock—
I offer stained glass,
never the altar.

There is thunder beneath my skin.
But I laugh like a sunbeam.
Speak like a mirror.
And they love the surface I keep polished.

But bluebells grow in shadows.
They know me.
They bloom where I’ve split.

I dream of telling you—
but the words come out as smoke,
as soil,
as the ghost of a name
I’ve only ever whispered to the wind.

And so I leave it.
Every truth I couldn’t say
a root twisting deeper.
Every version of me you never met—
ringing softly in the grove,
calling me
a coward
in the kindest, sweetest voice.

Time carves out the stone—
Leaves return to soil as breath,
Then rise up again.

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.

There is a fire that consumes quietly,
its fingers tender as they trace the outlines
of things we were once too afraid to burn.
A heat, soft as loss,
devouring without asking —
like the stars that fall
in silent bursts,
vanishing without a sound
but leaving the night warm,
like the stillness after the storm.

I sit by the hearth,
the flames licking at the silence,
as if they know
that destruction wears the face
of something fragile —
the way a lover leaves,
softly, as though they were never there,
and yet, the room remains
so full of them
you wonder
if absence could fill a space
with something deeper than presence.

The fire speaks in ashes,
as if to say,
"I was once the sun,
and I, too, will set."
But still, I reach my hands toward it,
searching for the warmth
of things that vanish —
the way a poem disappears
on the page,
leaving graphite stains
in the shape of absence,
telling you everything
without a word.

The hearth hums with the quiet
of things undone —
a quietness like the seamless
works of Rilke,
where the evening spreads its wings
like a forgotten prayer
that no one remembers to say.

Here, too, in this soft destruction,
there is no voice
but the one that burns the edges
of every thought
until it is nothing but the flicker
of light you cannot hold.

I burn not because I wish to be
consumed,
but because I know
that some things must be lost
before they can be remembered,
like the way the heart still beats,
long after the body forgets
how to feel.

And the hearth,
a poet in its own right,
sings a hymn of things
we cannot keep —
the fire dancing
in the shape of what we leave behind,
warm,
and empty,
like a song that was never meant to end.

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.

I see him rise again —
draped in fire, wrapped in light,
and I, the quiet one,
can only reflect what he gives me,
can only follow,
never lead.

He burns without asking permission.
the clouds part for him like scripture,
the trees lean toward him in worship,
the world spins just to feel his warmth.
No one ever asks what it costs me
to chase someone who never turns around.

I am the Moon —
soft, silver, cold in comparison.
But still, I pull oceans to their knees.
Still, I move the blood in your veins,
still, I rise in every poem about longing
and make it hurt a little more.

He does not love me.
he probably never will.
but I dream of it anyway,
like a sinner kissing the gates of Heaven
knowing they won’t open.
Like thirsting in a drought
and calling the mirage divine.

He is the Sun —
So bright it hurts to look.
So far I can’t breathe when he’s near.
So beautiful I could scream.
And I do.
In silence, in tides,
in every broken wave that crashes
because I couldn’t hold it in.

I make storms when I’m angry.
I make art when I’m desperate.
I drag the night behind me
Like a velvet funeral shroud,
because loving him feels
a lot like dying slowly
and calling it romance.

Sometimes, he looks over his shoulder.
just barely.
Just enough for me to write epics
about things that never happened.
Just enough for me to mistake heat
for affection.

I am not jealous —
I am envy incarnate.
I am longing with teeth.
I am the boy who watches from a distance
and writes sonnets with shaking hands
While the world burns for someone else.

He doesn’t know what I’d give
to feel his warmth
without blistering.
To stop orbiting
and finally touch.
But I am the Moon.
He is the Sun.
And that is all we were ever allowed to be.

So I smile in silver.
And I shatter the sea.
And I say his name quietly
when the Earth is sleeping,
as if that will make it real.

As if that will make him mine.

I’ve never touched him—
not in dream, not in dusk.
But still, something in me
rises at the thought.

Not lust, not sin,
just that aching sweetness
of wanting to be near
and not hidden.

At dawn,
when the air still holds its breath,
I sit where the sun first finds the floor—
and I let it touch me.
As if that were allowed.
As if I were.

There is no thunder.
No voice naming me wrong.
Only this soft, indifferent miracle—
light arriving
as though nothing about me needs changing.

I’ve prayed like this:
with hands open,
never asking for permission
to feel what I feel,
but hoping
that being honest
might still count as praise.

I’ve heard silence
louder than sermons.
I’ve learned to read approval
in the way the sky does not flinch.

If love ever comes to me,
let it come like this:
slow, golden,
not ashamed of itself.

And if it doesn’t—
if I stay a witness only,
never a name in someone else’s mouth—
then let me still be full
of light.

Let me still be someone
the morning chooses to touch.

There are mornings I wake up
with the whole sea humming inside my chest
not drowning, not swimming — just
carrying it, like a secret too vast to confess.
The salt sits heavy behind my eyes.
I blink, and it rains.

There are nights I lie still and
feel nothing but wind in my bones.
Not silence, not peace ,
just absence stretched so thin, it whistles.
Like a conch left hollow by time,
still echoing a sound it barely remembers.

I am a shore that forgets its own shape.
The tide smooths me down, pulls away,
returns again with a different name.
It gives and takes and gives and takes
until I no longer know
if I am full or empty, or if those are just
two ways of describing the same ache.

I smile like a person who knows
they are not what they used to be —
and maybe never were.
Some days, I am the entire horizon,
wide and unreachable.
Others, I am a single grain of sand
stuck beneath someone else’s heel.

Even in stillness, something is shifting.
Even in silence, I am screaming inside.
And no one hears it but the waves,
who’ve heard it all before
and choose to return anyway.

I am learning that being full
does not always mean being whole.
That emptiness can feel like
a kind of sacred space —
not lack, but preparation.
Not brokenness, but room
for something yet unnamed.

So let the ocean come.
Let it swallow me or spare me.
Let it kiss my ankles and leave.
Let me hold both the flood and the drought
as if they are mine to cradle.

Because they are.

Because I am not just the shore.
I am the tide too.

Rain doesn't ask for permission.
It comes uninvited,
spilling down gutters,
filling in the spaces
you pretended were solid.

It has a way of making everything honest.
The sky opens its throat,
and suddenly,
you remember all the things
you swore you buried.

The house goes quiet.
Even your bones seem to listen.
You watch the window like it might say something
you forgot to hear.

Outside, the earth softens.
Pavement darkens like bruised skin.
And all the noise you carry
becomes background.

They say rain is cleansing,
but they never mention
how it drags everything to the surface first—
the mud, the oil,
the names you only speak
when the room is empty.

You sit there.
Let it fall.
Let it mean something.

Because maybe water knows more than we do.
About weight.
About return.
About how things always come back
softer.
But never the same.

I’m not asking for death
just the quiet
that feels like it.

Not the violence of endings,
but the soft, unbothered blur
of never needing to begin again.

I want to sleep
like a field in winter,
untouched,
frosted over with dreams
that don’t demand answers.
Let me be still
without guilt.
Let me be gone
without grief.

Isn’t it strange,
how the only time we’re truly loved
without needing to perform
is when we’re asleep?
Breathing soft.
Mouth parted like a secret.
Unaware of how deeply we’re being watched
by someone who won’t say it when we wake.

Sleep, to me, is the last mercy
in a world that never stops asking.

Pillow as altar.
Blanket as womb.
This bed has become
the only place that doesn’t ask me
to prove I deserve it.

I’ve made peace with my unread messages.
Let them pile.
Let the world turn.
What does it want from me
that I haven’t already given?

Sometimes, the thought of coffee
isn't enough.
Sometimes, I see the sunrise
and mourn it
like a funeral for the dark
that kept me safe.

I want to sleep through the next decade.
Let my hair grow wild
and my dreams run even wilder.
Let the rain name me
and the wind erase me.

Let people say,
She was tired.
Not as a metaphor,
not as a euphemism,
just the pure truth of it.
Tired in her marrow.
Tired in her memory.
Tired like the sea is tired of being asked to dance
for every storm.

I don’t want applause.
I don’t want rescue.
I just want
the velvet hush
of a world that finally lets me go
without asking why.

No heaven,
no hell.
Just the middle place
where silence blooms,
and the body doesn’t have to mean anything anymore.

And if anyone comes looking
tell them I left
to become a dream.
Not the kind you wake from
the kind you stay inside
forever.

How solemn is spring;
as azure tears kiss the blooms,
the rainbow drinks deep.

Thunder, not as a warning but as a laugh—
a full-throated, sky-splitting laugh
tumbling from the belly of the storm,
like the earth itself cracked a joke too big to hold.

It does not whisper; it declares.
It does not creep; it arrives with bare feet
and a crown of smoke,
startling the still air into movement,
startling the blood back into its wild rhythm.

The trees do not cower—they listen.
Their leaves twitch not in fear but reverence,
like congregants beneath a sermon
too ancient to be translated,
too holy to be ignored.

The river flinches, then remembers itself—
how to twist, how to speak in a thousand glimmers,
how to run with purpose toward anything vast.
Even the stones, quiet things that they are,
seem to hum beneath the impact.

And you—
You feel it in the chest first,
like a second heart waking up,
a pulse older than language,
older than name.

You want to follow it,
to chase the flash behind the eyes of the sky,
to stand where the clouds tear open with joy
and pour out all their hidden heat.

This is the rapture of life—
barefaced and unashamed,
shouting itself into being again and again,
in the only tongue the heavens trust.

I love you like the moss loves stone—
softly, and from below.
I do not ask to be noticed.
Only to grow where you’ve been.

You walk like weather,
and I brace for it—
sunlight when I’ve built a life of shade.
But still, I bloom in the places
your voice might have touched.

You are the river
I never learned to swim.
Always near, always moving—
never mine.

I memorize you in seasons:
your laughter in spring,
your distance in winter,
your kindness in summer,
and in autumn—
the way you vanish beautifully.

I speak to you
in the language of leaves,
shivering when you pass by,
but never loud enough
to make you turn.

If I could be anything,
I’d be the sky you don’t notice—
just to hold you
without you ever knowing.

Because love like this
isn’t about having.
It’s about standing still
while your moon
spins silver through someone else’s night.

And I stay the tidepool,
small and quiet and brimming,
waiting for your shadow
like it’s a kind of sunlight.

I am the willow bending, lost in winds
that do not whisper to me but to the world—
a rootless prayer, an echo in the dusk,
my leaves trembling, soft as the sound of sorrow’s kiss.

They ask for everything.
Their hands, like rivers, pull from me.
The sap, the marrow, the breath in my bones,
while I am but the hollow echo of a dream
that never took root in my own soil.
I owe them the stars, the moon, the sun’s dying glow,
yet the sky above, I do not claim as mine.

I give them what they seek —
a smile, a warmth, a promise kept in the ache of silence,
but within me, the storm stirs and swells
in a language that does not ask for a name.
For what am I but a leaf that falls,
drifting, never grounding in the earth
that would cradle me if I knew how to kneel?

They speak of love, of duty, of the weight of living —
but what of the weight of nothing?
The weight of giving until the marrow wears thin,
until I am no longer flesh,
but a song that no one sings,
a tear that never falls,
a shadow of something that once was,
but is now forgotten in the night.

The seasons pass and I remain,
an offering to those whose hearts I cannot touch.
A hollow tree standing tall in someone else’s forest,
my branches stretch toward the skies,
but I am not their sky to reach.
I am the earth —
but not my own earth.

And the forest knows me not,
for I am a whisper without voice,
a breath taken by someone else,
a thought lost in the wind.
and I owe them everything—
all that I was, all that I could have been —
and yet, nothing of me remains.
Not even the memory of the sun,
as it sinks beneath the weight of all that I’ve given.

I am only a flicker,
fading, never to be remembered.
And in the quiet dark of endless sky,
I give until the stars forget to shine.

Winter begins not with snow,
but with the silence before it—
that strange pause
when even the wind forgets its name,
and the sky holds its breath
like it’s waiting to see who you’ll become
when everything else is stripped away.

I step into the cold,
and it feels like stepping out of memory.
No past.
Just breath and bone,
cracking in the stillness.

Nothing lies in winter—
it simply covers.
A kind of mercy, maybe.
A kind of dare.

Under the frost,
things don’t disappear.
They hold their shape
quietly,
aching to be misunderstood.
Just like me.

This season doesn’t decorate.
It reveals.
The trees forget how to pretend.
The ground stops performing softness.
Even the light arrives with sharp edges.
I see myself more clearly
when everything else withdraws.

I have mistaken warmth for truth.
For love.
For permanence.
But there is a clarity in cold
that no fire has ever given me.

Some days I feel like a lake beneath ice—
still, but only on the surface.
Underneath: movement.
Old things.
Unspoken.
Refusing to freeze all the way through.

I carry myself through these white hours
without language,
only instinct.
Only the weight of breath in my chest,
reminding me
that survival is not the same as stillness.

And if identity lives anywhere—
it lives here.
In the bones of trees.
In the hush after snowfall.
In the refusal to bloom
just because someone else is tired of waiting.

I do not need to thaw
to be real.