You must’ve written as if your words would circle only your own people, as if your sentences belonged to the time you lived in.
How could you have known that one day they would travel through wars, through oceans, slip past flags and accents, through tongues you never heard…and find me?
You did not picture this face, this body bent over your pages, my palms moving through the paper like someone trying to steady a tremor.
You wrote for your grief, your questions, your small, stubborn hope.
You could not know that I would lean into your words for balance, that your grief would mirror mine, that your hope would stitch a seam across my breaking.
And yet, those very lines became a language I could survive inside and a window I could look through.
When the season stayed hard as frost, your pages were the first thaw. When I cracked like dry soil, your words poured enough rain.
You will never see who I became because of you. But here I am. Another life your words reached without knowing; a continuation of your sentence.
She is fire in silence, a storm in porcelain; she shields those she loves, though her guard lets wolves in. She carries their burdens, she bleeds when they fall, she gathers her sorrows and cradles them all.
She trusts the mirages that shimmer, then fade; she misses the kind faces that never betrayed. Her lantern burns steady, yet she covers its glow, afraid of the judgment the world might bestow.
The world carved her doubts like a chisel through stone, taught her to question the glow that’s her own. So she wears a mask stitched with ribbons of fear, while the ones who see clearly stand quiet, yet near.
She hunts for her joy in the glitter of things, forgetting the fountain her own spirit brings. She dreams of a love that will never decay, though people are seasons—they wither, they stay.
She means well, though often her meaning is crossed; she loves far too blindly; she measures what she’s lost. Her heart is not wicked, not hollow, not flawed, just tired of the battles with life and with God.
If only she’d pause, let her own cup be filled, she’d learn she is worthy, unbroken, still willed. The world may be cruel, yet she will remain, a flame that keeps burning through sorrow and rain.
The train is the one in a hurry tonight, the houses stay rooted, politely upright. Each window is a frame of a halted little play, a kitchen, a curtain, a child with her clay.
They say it’s the world that rushes on by, but the world never moves, it just watches the sky. It’s us with our luggage of deadlines and schemes, who blur into strangers, who vanish in dreams.
I envy the roofs that don’t learn to depart, their bricks guard the stories I trade from my heart. Their clocks tick in rhythms I’ll never obey, while my hours get swallowed by miles of delay.
Yet part of me smiles at the trick of it all, to envy a lamplight, a silhouette, a wall. Perhaps we are meant to be briefly unmoored, so the stillness of others feels doubly assured.
For what is a journey but proof we exist, a shadow in motion, a name on a list? And maybe the home I keep chasing in view, is less in the houses, and more in me too.
There once was a crowd chanting “Same!” where safety had smothered the flame; The braver reply was a small, honest “why,” And not trading yourself for acclaim.
I left the book open last night, the lamp gave up before I could write. The page still waits there, with my pen in the air; some stories refuse to ignite.
Accidental Epiphanies 