The Restless Poet

Now I understand why my soul chose this path.

For a long time I thought I was being punished, not for anything I had done, but for something I was, as if my softness itself was a trespass, or being born tender and open and porous as light was the offense that invited the storm.

My soul was never being punished for its nature. It chose to be brave and select a path of pain, the one that would hurt more.

Before my first breath, it stood at the threshold and beheld this life. It saw the time my body would become unfamiliar to me, the night where consent would be a language no one spoke, the years where love would wear the mask of cruelty, the hush of small souls leaving my womb before my arms could become their home.

It saw every shadow. And still, it stepped forward. A courageous act.

Not out of martyrdom, not because suffering makes us sacred, but because it knew it hungered to feel a love that most will never know, a love that stays when there is no reason left to stay, that remains when everything else has been stripped away. An all-consuming love that buries itself in the bones.

For what is love if we only meet it in the meadow? My soul wanted to know love where the light does not reach, to ask if it was only a song for fair weather, or if it knew how to keep its promise in the descent — to enter the place where a child learned to become invisible and call her back into being seen, to enter a body that had become a battleground and make it a home again, a heart that had learned to equate devotion with danger and teach it to trust its own beating, a womb that had become an altar of goodbyes and whisper that nothing truly loved is ever lost.

It descended.

And at the end of all that falling, where there was no doctrine, no light but my own, I found what I had come for. Love had not sent me down to test me. Love came with me. It did not rush to rescue. It sat with me in the dark and breathed with me until my own breath returned. It kept the small ember of me lit when everything was trying to turn me to stone.

I am not what was done to me. I was never being punished for being what I am.

What I am is the miracle — that after everything meant to harden me, I am still tender, I am still capable of being moved by mercy.

My soul was brave enough to choose the road that would cost me everything so I would have a chance to remember who I really am.

And love was brave enough to wait for me at the bottom of it.