Breath over Ceremony

I lived on one feral breath..

the kind you steal

when the fire has already eaten the ceiling

and your lungs don’t trust oxygen anymore.

Not hope.

Instinct.

That breath chose me back

when everything else had already left.

I did not grow because it was inspiring.

I grew because grief is a predator,

and staying still

teaches it where you sleep.

My grief didn’t arrive dressed in funerals.

It came as heat:

third-degree, nerve-silent,

the kind that cooks memory into scar

before you realize you’ve been touched.

There were places in me

even I couldn’t reach

without losing skin.

So I fed the fire

instead of pretending it wasn’t there.

I learned its patterns.

I circled it.

I used the burn to seal what kept bleeding

instead of reopening it

for other people’s comfort.

I still grieve.

That’s the part people don’t understand..

they think survival means escape.

But I move in circles now,

not cages.

My grief no longer drags me under;

it sharpens my footing.

I walk the same ground

without sinking into it.

The past still breathes,

it just doesn’t hunt me.

And for those who think grief

only belongs to coffins and dates on stone;

you are dangerously misinformed.

Grief is also the loss of shelter.

The loss of innocence before its time.

The loss of selves that never got the courtesy

of becoming whole.

Grief is learning new terrain

after the old one turns lethal.

It’s realizing you can rewire motion

inside memory..

that the same stories can carry light

if you stop letting them drown you.

There is joy here,

but it has teeth.

There is peace,

but it knows how to fight.

There is contentment

that didn’t come from pretending

the dark wasn’t real..

it came from surviving it

without surrendering my body to it.

I didn’t outrun grief.

I outgrew its authority.

One breath.

Still scorched.

Still wild.

Still standing where others

would have already burned.