Long before I knew how to speak clearly, I learned how to notice what wasn’t being said. I was a quiet child. Not shy, but preoccupied. My thoughts moved faster than I could explain them. I spent hours reading the dictionary, flipping through pages the way other children flipped through picture books. Words fascinated me. Their structure made sense when nothing else did. I liked the way they organized experience, the way meaning could be housed in syllables. My mind filled itself with facts, theories, patterns, ambiguities. Language didn’t give me direction. It gave me a place to stay while everything else kept moving.
I’ve never adapted well to change. I function best in what’s familiar. Routine. The predictability of repetition. I find comfort in knowing what comes next, not because I need control, but because I need time to understand things as they are. Sudden shifts feel like betrayal. Not always personal, but disorienting. Even now, I still resist what moves too fast. I don’t crave excitement. I crave steadiness. I want to know where I am before I’m asked to move again. I’ve spent too much of my life reacting to other people’s urgency. I find more safety in rhythm than in possibility. Now I follow the quiet, not what feels convincing.
Opals have always been my favorite. They form without a crystalline geometry, unlike most gemstones. Just water, silica, and pressure. No internal map. No fixed center. Still, they catch light better than almost anything else. I think about that sometimes. The way something irregular can still be luminous. The way beauty doesn’t always come from symmetry, but from how something carries what it’s been through. Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to learn. That structure isn’t the only way to hold meaning. That you don’t have to be composed to be whole. That you can still catch light, even if you were never meant to. Especially then.
There are moments when I look around and it feels beautiful, and for a second nothing hurts. Maybe I’ve learned to love again. I’ve recovered pieces of myself, but not the original shape. Some relationships I’ve patched together, others I’ve walked away from. I’ve opened my heart, clumsy and unsure. I’ve laughed when I didn’t expect to. Solitude has become a kind of home, one I’m not sure I want to leave. I look at the life I’ve built and know it’s stronger than the one I had before. But even strength carries its shadows. Loss never leaves. I’ve only taught myself to move while it clings to me. And maybe that’s why I’ve stopped trying to put it all back together. Not everything broken needs to be rebuilt. Some things carry their meaning in what’s not there. The silence, the hollow space, the unanswered is the story too. Completion was never the point. Understanding was. And sometimes the clearest things are the ones we never say out loud.
I’ve stopped reaching for explanations that don’t exist. Some things refuse to resolve, and maybe they never should. What’s left is the weight of the unanswered, circling back in still moments, reminding me that absence has its own kind of permanence. I live inside the questions, and sometimes it feels like they live inside me too. I’ve done the work no one sees. I didn’t stay in the ruins. I kept walking through it, even when every step felt like breaking. I notice the small things now. I think I used to look past them. The sky when it falls into that strange blue I know but can’t quite name. Opaline, Capri, Celeste, each close but wrong. Physics calls blue a wavelength between 450 and 495 nanometers. Within that narrow band there are billions of gradations. The eye can register millions, thousands of them blue. Still, the one I mean isn’t there.
I think about the oddest things now. That crows can remember a human face for years. How the smell of rain has a name, petrichor. How a single teaspoon of honey holds the work of twelve bees. I write these things down as if they matter. Maybe they do. Time itself bends differently depending on speed. Numbers go on forever but most of them have no use. The universe is still expanding, though no one knows into what. I keep these facts like evidence, though of what I can’t say. Maybe of myself. Maybe of the days I’ve survived without proof. I’m trying my best. This is hard. I want to go back. I want to move forward. I don’t want to fix it all myself. It’s too much to carry. I don’t always believe I can do it. Some days I don’t want to. I don’t know how to stop counting the years they didn’t get. I want someone to tell me it matters that I’m still here. I’m tired of people mistaking strength for choice. I don’t want to be grateful all the time. Grief didn’t make me better, it made me different. Sometimes I envy the people who don’t know this weight. I wonder who I would have been without it. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel light again. I’m afraid of what silence will bring when it’s too quiet. I wish healing didn’t feel like survival dressed up as progress. I want to rest without fearing what will meet me in sleep. I don’t want to keep retelling the story. I don’t want the story to be all that’s left. I want to forget for just one day. I want to remember without coming apart. I don’t know if that’s possible.