She didn't rise like a phoenix.
She crawled.
On hands that trembled,
through glass she once shattered herself.
There was no fire.
No applause.
Only the sound of her own breath --
ragged, but real.

Healing didn't come with sunlight.
It came in fragments --
in mornings she didn't hate,
in nights where the silence didn't scream,
in moments where she chose not to disappear.

She still carried the past
like an old bruise,
bit it stopped dictating
who she had to be.

She found beauty in the smallest of things --
the warmth of her child's sleepy sigh,
the taste of coffee made just how she liked it,
a song that made her feel something
without dragging her under.

She let herself cry.
She let herself rest.
She forgave herself for everything
she did to survive
when survival was the only thing she knew.

There were days she still looked
into mirrors with haunted eyes,
but now she met them with gentleness,
She no longer saw a girl left behind --
she saw a woman
who stayed,
even when no one else did.

The voices that once told her
she was unworthy,
unwanted,
unlovable --
they still whispered
But she didn't listen anymore.

She had become her own shelter.
Her own home.
Her own proof
that even the forgotten
can remember who they are.

Because buried beneath the wreckage
was not just a flicker --
but a fire.
Small. Quiet.
But steady.
And wholly, completely hers.

She wasn't healed.
But she was healing.

She wasn't whole.
But she was rising.
She found her fire --
not in anyone else's arms,
but in the steady, trembling beat
of her own heart.

© Dark Water Diaries

She was born between slammed doors and shattered vows,
a child no one fought for.
Her name was scribbled in ink
on court papers and custody exchanges --
not whispered in lullabies,
not sung to sleep.

Her mother vanished behind bitterness,
her father dissolved into silence.
No one stayed.
No one came back.

She became someone else’s responsibility,
folded into the quiet corners
of her grandparents’ rigid home.
They kept her clothed, kept her fed,
but love …
love was an echo she could never reach.

She learned to disappear without dying --
a ghost with warm skin,
drifting through classrooms, holidays,
birthdays no one remembered.

At sixteen, she confused need for love
and shackled herself to a boy
who only wanted to feel powerful.
She bled into motherhood
before she learned her own name.
Her youth slipped into cribs and quiet sobs.
No one asked if she was okay.

So she ran.
Into fire.
Into chaos.
Into strangers’ arms and bottles and moments
that pretended to care.
She sought warmth like a starving dog,
chasing sparks that burned her fingers clean off.

Every reflection was someone else --
someone she hated,
someone she blamed,
someone she pitied.

They called her damaged.
They called her lost.
No one asked why.
No one stayed long enough
to teach her how to stay for herself.

But --
One night,
years later,
with mascara dried like ink trails
and silence humming in her throat,
she stood in a bathroom mirror
and did not look away.

For the first time,
she didn’t flinch.
She didn’t lie.
She saw the girl --
abandoned, bruised,
bone-tired from surviving herself.
But still breathing.
Still here.

The world hadn’t wanted her.
But it hadn’t killed her either.
And buried beneath every rejection,
every bruise disguised as a lesson,
was a flicker --
small and trembling,
but hers.
The light she spent a lifetime chasing
was never in their hands.
It lived in her ribs,
waiting.
Burning low, but burning true.

She was the match.
She always was.
But no one taught her
how to strike.

© Dark Water Diaries

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too.
They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."
... Stephen King

She couldn't recall where she was on a night blessed by rain so pure that it caused the wilted flowers to
rise on their toes in excitement, and her to wither into depression. The night was a lightning-show of
blue-white flash from a thousand cloud cameras. And the gravel beneath her feet was simply the
degraded souls that she had slaughtered on nights before, torn from her spine like vertebrae and left to tot until they mirrored the hollow she carried inside.

::the rain could never wash away::
::the smell of her skin-cense::

And, today was no different. So, she drowned herself in black rose petals and broken glass, just so she
could suffer in beautiful elegance. The freckles on her shoulders were the pinprick memories she
insisted on forgetting, the forever-after tally-mark scars documenting how often she was horrid.

::millions::

of gold flecks in her eyes, because secretly, she's always been a bit of a gold-digger and it's just her
soul's way of showing her true colors; gold-diggers and mysterious blue marbles that quiver in the light
of the rising sun with her pupils dilating into ink-black agony. And the sound of her heart vibrating in
her ears with that horrible, hiccupping rhythm she had grown to hate causes her to shake in an anxious anticipation.

::and it means nothing::
::it couldn't possibly::

She lives in her memories, torn at the edges of the filmstrip clubs and ***** little secrets that she forces
between her lips. A kiss. She’s such a . . .

::faded thought::

Lost in translation. She’s (a) patient with her medication calling home in the middle of the night to say
she missed you. But, never as much as you missed her mind.

::and she's quite queer::

Dangling Star of Davids and Pentagrams from her collarbone
A set of rosary beads clenched in her pocket
Trying to cast out the demons
Trying to cast new actors for this endless play
A play she couldn’t stop rehearsing

::act(ing) natural::

Because it's much easier to smile
Than to explain those dreaded tears
Falling off her face (of the earth)

::she falls (fails)::

And withers once more, a tumbleweed who is far too fragile
who could resist
trying to break her
I never could.

©️ Dark Water Diaries