Everything I don’t say tossed out on the road behind me, taking root, growing into brambles too thick to go back through. I’m not in the business of building walls, I’m building futures and faith and I know I need both hands, but

But I feel the weight of yours on my shoulders as I move forward. A heat and pressure that feels like home, like comfort and safety and I’ve been telling myself I’m being sick, imagining it. It’s a lie, poisoned meat at the bottom of that well. Been telling myself I can’t let it be anything else, but I can’t shake it off, either. Not with all the understanding in the world.

Even if I fucking could. Every day I’m still making that choice. I wake up and know there’s nothing else that fits the same way. That’s alright. My house is done, strong and solid. Everything I needed to be all along, but I made that specific decision based on intuition. On a kind of knowing I wasn’t even sure I could trust anymore, not then, but the woman buried under the mountain knew.

I can tell myself it’s a lie every night, and I know I’ll make the same choice every day. I’ll keep moving forward, same way I always have, with better tools and a clearer head. I have too much to do to wait, to pretend like that’s an acceptable or rational decision. I do know better. I know how much sickness and hurt and anger is back there. I know how ugly it was. I’m wary of building false idols and sanding down the past, the context of the end.

I won’t use any of this to deny myself love and experience. But neither am I going to deny the truth that’s been staring at me from under the scorched dirt. This is a garden I’ll always tend— Nothing else could grow here, and all the rationalizing and acceptance, the accelerated self-discovery, the ability to pivot and address and process, haven’t changed anything. I just see it more clearly.

No one else is responsible for what I feel and do, I recognized that it was wrong but I couldn’t fix it when I was inside it. The insecurities and projection, denial and attachment and expectation. No detachment was ever enough to burn it away if I stayed. And I stayed. Stayed and punched holes in it, did and took damage I hadn’t needed to. Scars don’t have to be wounds stitched shut with regret, each suture a signpost guiding me away from things I can never let myself be.

I’ve walked this path so much here it’s worn down to dirt my soul no longer has to cling to. This is a fact of my existence now, a permanent fixture of the landscape I call home. I don’t know what the other side looks like, it’ll never be my business. But I know the hope that your light is burning, vital and unstoppable, buoying you up to the grace you always keep for your loves, that you’re bestowing it upon yourself, that’s the only hope that hasn’t felt like sickness poisoning the well. That hope feels like love. Acceptance.

The cord is cut, woven into the story the way it should’ve been way back when. There are no candles burning to siphon your heat. Just a garden growing in a space no one else can fill. The only thing that never changes is the choice I make every day to water it.