What room is there to thrive,
when you’re stuck trying to survive?

The years have taken their toll,
left me searching to feel whole.
I’ve lived enough of this life,
grown too familiar with it’s strife.

How do I build a life for me,
when I never got to see
what living could truly be?

Like a child, I stand unsure,
so much left still to explore.
All those versions of me
I never got to be—
untouched, untried, unseen,
alternatives that have never been.

If time were ever kind,
it would let me rewind.

No room to wonder, no time to try—
only the weight of getting by.
Survival took the years away,
left the dreaming for another day.

Wisened by battles I shouldn’t have known,
yet still a child where dreams are grown.
Old in the weight I carry inside,
young in the places I’ve yet to find.

Old in sorrow, young in my dreams—
Still reaching through the in-between.

I wonder, my gaze fixed to the sky,
Within the vastness —
There surely exists a place I can fly,
Freed from the strain of the tethers that pull me within,
No need to draw a map just to begin.

A place where I don’t have to don my armour,
The child within, not scanning for all that could harm her.
Where I am whole, not fractured or torn,
Free to exist as I was born.

So I make a wish upon a star,
That I do not have to travel far,
To a place that just makes sense,
Where peace no longer feels so tense.

No longer reliant wholly on solitude,
To access the parts that form the multitude.
Where the archives don’t need to be analysed,
Just left in peace, their truth recognised.
No need to strive or prove, just to be,
Fully myself, simply free.

So I make a wish upon that star,
That I do not have to travel far,
To reach a place I can simply be,
A place where I am truly free.