Poem: Healing Path

Night did not fall all at once—
it seeped in,
like ink through paper,
slow and certain,
until even memory wore shadows.

I walked without a map of meaning,
every prayer returning unopened,
every answer dissolving
before it could take shape.
The world, once loud with purpose,
grew distant—
as if I had been gently
uninvited from it.

There, in the hollow between breaths,
I met the quiet I had feared:
not empty,
but vast—
a sky without stars
waiting for sight to change.

I tried to outrun it at first,
this unmaking—
patched together old beliefs,
lit small fires of distraction,
called them warmth.
But the dark is patient.
It asks not for resistance,
only honesty.

So I stayed.

I let it take the names I wore,
the certainties I clung to,
the borrowed light I mistook for my own.
Piece by fragile piece,
I came undone—
and found, beneath the ruin,
not nothing…
but space.

Space to listen.
Space to see
how tightly I had held
what was never mine to keep.

And somewhere in that surrender,
a flicker—
not bright, not loud,
but unmistakably mine—
began to breathe.

No sunrise split the sky,
no sudden redemption sang—
just a quiet knowing:
the dark was not the end,
but a womb.

And I—
not lost,
not broken—
but being remade
in a language
I had to forget myself
to understand.