There was a time
I approached the world cautiously,
as though it were something
I had not yet been given permission to enter.
I was curious, always.
Drawn toward what I did not understand,
toward the wild and unfamiliar,
toward the things that stirred something
I could not name.
But curiosity lived beside distrust.
I knew too much of what could happen.
How quickly tenderness could become violence.
How something beautiful
could be taken without warning.
How an entire life could divide itself
into before and after.
I learned to measure the distance
between myself and what might hurt me.
And then, slowly,
something began to change.
Not in the world.
The world remained what it had always been.
Capable of extraordinary beauty
and unspeakable cruelty,
sometimes in the same breath.
The change was somewhere inside me.
Deeper than thought.
Beneath the places where memory lives,
where fear gathers,
where the body keeps its own account
of everything it has survived.
As though the smallest particles of me
had begun to rearrange themselves.
Not repairing what had been broken.
Not returning me to someone
I had been before.
Becoming something else entirely.
I think of the hawk
held between my hands.
The terrible beauty of it.
The wildness contained in bone and feather.
Talons capable of tearing flesh,
a beak made for piercing.
I knew what it could do to me.
I reached for it anyway.
Not because I believed
it would understand my kindness.
Not because I expected
to remain unharmed.
But because it was there,
alive and needing something of me,
and I was there, too.
Two creatures belonging
to the same uncertain world.
I have come to understand
that knowing what may happen
does not mean I must turn away.
Some things will go badly.
Some will leave wounds.
There will be losses
for which no understanding
can offer consolation.
I know this.
I know it in ways
I wish I did not.
And still,
I want the wind against my skin.
The cold water closing over my shoulders.
The unfamiliar streets of a distant city.
The brush of another person’s hand.
The sudden, unreasonable joy
of discovering something beautiful
where I had not thought to look.
I want to remain curious
about a world that owes me nothing.
I want to love what is fragile,
knowing it cannot always be kept.
And I want to stand inside my life,
not at its edges,
waiting for some assurance
that it will not hurt me.
Because somewhere along the way,
in a place too deep for language,
something fundamental changed.
I no longer mistake safety
for belonging.
I belong to this world
not because it has been gentle with me,
but because I am made of it.
Of the same earth and water,
the same restless matter,
the same astonishing arrangement
of things that come together
for a little while
and call themselves alive.
I am not separate from its beauty.
Nor am I separate from its cruelty.
I am here.
And I am no longer waiting
for the world to become safe
before I allow myself
to live within it.
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