A Dusted, Dark Ballet

It begins the way my life often does..

Quiet at first,

a murmur beneath the ribs,

a pressure so subtle

that no one else notices.

The air thickens,

like the pause before words unsaid,

like the weight of memories

too jagged to speak aloud.

The sky lowers,

its color bruised and sullen,

and I feel the pull in my chest,

the same way old wounds pull

when rain is near.

I’ve known this gathering of

grief, rage, longing..

It does not come gently.

It coils,

like every sharp word ever swallowed,

every silence I’ve been forced to endure,

spinning into something too heavy to hold.

Wind begins its chorus,

not a melody but a demand.

It circles me

the way circumstances always have a

tightening,

squeezing breath,

making everything I once trusted

feel flimsy, breakable.

I’ve been this farmhouse of a girl,

walls rattling,

windows screaming in their frames,

knowing the ground beneath me

could lift and hurl me without warning.

And still,

there’s beauty in the violence.

The way dust rises to dance,

how debris.. 

that of a shattered past,

old fragments of myself

twists into a dark ballet.

It is chaos sculpted into symmetry,

a spiraling cathedral of power

that cannot be denied.

I see myself in that:

broken glass catching what little light exists,

my jagged edges

turning ruin into something that shines.

Inside its core there is silence,

a hollow heart where breath holds steady.

I have known that silence..

after screams, after fists,

after the collapse of trust.

The eye of it cradles me,

reminds me that even within ruin

there is stillness,

a place where survival waits,

strong and unmoved.

When the storm loosens its grip,

when the fury finally thins into rain,

the world is torn open

yet the air feels clearer,

sharper,

as though truth itself has rinsed the sky.

I step from the wreckage,

not untouched,

but unhidden.

My scars are the bent trees,

my strength the fields that green again,

my patience the silence

after thunder has finally worn itself out.

This is the strange beauty:

how destruction reshapes,

how ruin clears space,

how even in the spiral of violence

there lies a strange, undeniable art.

I have lived this..

Not once, but in countless ways..

And each time I emerge,

I am the stunned quiet after the rain,

the survivor who knows that

the sky writes its fiercest songs in me..

and still...

I stand.