in full bloom
i did not arrive here loudly. no cymbals. no witnesses. just a quiet unfurling beneath my own ribs, where something tender kept whispering, grow anyway.
i have been seed and soil, rainstorm and drought, root splitting stone in the dark without applause.
there were seasons i mistook for endings— rooms where love dried up on the walls, friendships that shed like winter bark, dreams that felt too heavy for my hands to carry.
but still— something golden kept humming in my chest, like honey warming in the sun, like a pulse that remembered the way forward before my mind could agree.
i learned that grief is not the opposite of blooming, it is the compost. the breaking down. the sacred rot that feeds the next becoming.
i learned that longing is a kind of light, stretching you toward what you cannot yet see.
i learned that loss clears space for petals you did not know you were meant to grow.
and slowly— i stopped trying to be who i was before the storm.
i let myself be reshaped by the weather.
i let my softness survive.
i let my voice rise from the marrow of me, red and warm and unafraid of trembling.
because this is not a story about arrival. this is the beautiful art of be(e)coming.
of trusting the ache. of honoring the molting. of letting the old skin fall without apology.
of knowing that forward is not a place— it is a practice.
and now when i stand in the mirror, i do not look for who i used to be.
i look for the bloom.
for the woman made of eclipse and honey, of new moon quiet and dreamworks fire, of petrified roses that still remember how to open.
i look for the one who stayed ready even when she did not know what she was preparing for.
i look for the one who learned that another world is not somewhere else—
it is the one you grow inside yourself when you decide to live.
i am no longer waiting for the sun to choose me.
i have become the garden.
and every step i take now is pollen on the wind— proof that i was never meant to stay a seed.
