What Remains, I Love

I learned to whisper to myself when the world crumbled, when silence stretched its wings, wrapping me in a tender nothing that felt too much like being forgotten. I once feared the cracks, those jagged, sharp breaths that split me open like fault lines shaking beneath unsteady hands. I thought they would swallow me whole, those wounds that bled into the earth like rain, vanishing into soil too tired to bloom. But there is grace in brokenness, a quiet truth stitched into the seams of sorrow. Each splinter of me trembling in the dark was a vessel for light, unseen but waiting, like stars aching to pierce the night. I was the storm, the flood, the wreckage left in their wake. And then, the softening hush after the sky breaks apart. The silence that is not emptiness, but rest. I lay down in the quiet, where hope stitches its fragile thread, where forgiveness is not a weight but a breath catching in my chest, an unfamiliar lullaby that once felt too soft to hold. The road was long, strewn with stones that carved their names into my skin. I mistook my scars for weakness, forgot that healing is not the absence of pain, but the gentle art of carrying it differently. And so I learned, to love what remained, to cradle the broken and call it home. I have always been worthy. I just needed to remember, how to listen to the pulse of my own name, how to bend without breaking. Now, I rest in the quiet that has grown within me, a tenderness blooming slow, like the first light of dawn stretching over the horizon. And in this stillness, I am enough.