After the Breaking

In the quiet after collapse, the smallest green dares the first crack

I didn’t know

a life could make that sound

when it comes apart—

not the clean chime of a glass

meeting tile,

but a low, animal tearing

you feel in bone

before ear.

One morning

I woke on the far shore

of my own wreckage.

Coffee gone cold on the nightstand,

a text left on read

for twelve hours and a decade.

The mirror held my face

like a question no one

had signed up to answer.

They don’t tell you

rock bottom is cluttered—

old versions of you

scattered like rusted tools,

promises curled at the edges,

a playlist you once made

for the person who left

and the person you were

when they didn’t.

There was no sermon,

no trumpet of angels,

only the clock insisting forward

and the stubborn fact

that my lungs

kept doing their quiet,

unimpressed work.

So I started small,

because anything else

felt like lying.

First, I washed the dishes

that watched me break.

The sponge turned the plates

from history into mineral—

circles of porcelain,

just themselves again.

I stood ankle-deep

in soapy water and grief,

and both were warmer

than I deserved,

or thought I did.

Then I opened windows,

even though it was January

and the sky held its breath

like it was afraid to speak.

The cold slipped in

without asking permission,

a clean knife of air

through the stale room

where I’d practiced

every version of despair.

For a moment,

my sadness had to share space

with the smell of rain

coming from a street

I hadn’t walked in months.

It startled me,

how the world continued

its unbothered choreography—

buses exhaling at corners,

a neighbor laughing

on speakerphone,

some teenager rehearsing

the same heartache

in different clothing.

Healing did not arrive

as a lightning strike,

but as a draft under the door.

I began to collect

the smallest survivals:

The way my hands,

even shaking,

still knew how to tie my shoes.

The way my body

reached for water

without asking me first.

How my heart,

unconsulted,

kept ferrying red

through every corridor of me,

like it had already forgiven

what my mind

was still litigating.

I stopped asking

“Who am I without them?”

and started asking

“Who was I before

I learned to disappear?”

Bits returned

like stray cats—

the one who loved

midnight walks,

the one who sang

too loud in the kitchen,

the one who wrote poems

on receipts and lost them

on purpose.

Grief turned from a tidal wave

into weather:

still dangerous,

but with patterns.

On some days

I drowned in minutes,

every object

a landmine of memory—

their mug on the top shelf,

the shirt I couldn’t wear

because it remembered

their hands.

On other days

I forgot them

for whole hours.

Those hours scared me more

than the hurricanes,

because they whispered

the blasphemy

that I might survive.

In therapy,

I spoke in metaphors

because the real words

refused their names.

We mapped the fault lines

of my childhood—

where “sorry” was currency,

where silence

was mistaken for peace,

where I learned to be needed

instead of known.

“Growth,” my therapist said,

“is not becoming new.

It’s finally being allowed

to be what you were

before you were edited.”

So I sat with that—

how a tree does not apologize

for the ring where lightning

once found it.

It does not call itself broken

for the scar that crawls

down its length

like handwriting.

It grows

around the absence,

makes architecture

out of damage,

invites birds to nest

in the crook

of what almost ended it.

I started to think

maybe I could be that unashamed.

I wrote a list titled

“Things That Did Not Leave.”

The sun,

ridiculously punctual.

The moon,

showing up in phases

but always returning.

The friend who texted

“Just ate a sandwich

and thought of you,”

for no reason

other than they did.

The barista

who spelled my name wrong

in a new way every week,

as if trying on

possible futures.

The plant on my sill

that kept turning its face

to the light

even when I forgot

to give it water.

My own laughter,

rusty at first,

like a door

unused for years,

then easier,

swinging open

at the smallest joke,

at a dog in a window,

at my own clumsy resilience.

Healing is not glamorous.

There are no soft filters

for the mornings

you wake up wishing

you hadn’t,

no slow-motion montage

for the nights

you relearn how to sleep

on only one side of the bed.

It is mostly paperwork

and repetition—

calling the doctor,

calling back the friend,

calling your own name

until you remember

how to answer.

It is saying no

for the first time

to the person who expects

your spine to bend

like it did before.

It is the guilt that blooms

like a bruise after that no,

and the quiet pride

that follows later,

walking with a limp

but walking.

And growth—

growth is not a straight line

out of darkness.

It’s a spiral staircase

in a house that shifts

when the wind does.

You think you’ve arrived,

then a smell, a song,

a street corner at dusk

drops you three floors down

without warning.

The work is in remembering

there is also

a way back up.

Somewhere along the circling,

I stopped worshiping

the version of me

who never broke.

I started trusting instead

the one who did,

who learned the shape

of the floor,

who knows now

how to hold someone else

when their world

comes down in shards.

Because that’s the quiet miracle:

every fracture taught me

where I end

and where I refuse to anymore.

I am not “fixed.”

I am not “over it.”

Those were never the goal.

I am a mosaic

of all my endings,

light finding new routes

through the missing pieces,

beauty made visible

through fracture lines

I once tried

to hide.

If you come to me

still bleeding from your own

unraveling,

I will not tell you

it happened for a reason.

I will sit with you

in the glass and ruin.

I will hand you

the broom and bandages,

the phone and the water,

and say:

This is unbearable.

And you are still here.

And the world, rudely,

will keep spinning.

When you are ready,

we will open a window.

We will let the cold in.

We will listen

to the ordinary sounds

of a world that does not know

you have ended,

and we will practice

the impossible art

of beginning anyway.

One day,

you will notice

how much you’ve grown

only because you return

to an old pain

and it no longer

has the right

to name you.

You will touch your scars

and feel not shame

but chronology—

a record of all the nights

you thought were final,

and weren’t.

You will laugh,

too loud in your kitchen,

at something small and stupid,

and realize with a start

that you are glad

to be here

for this.

That is after the breaking:

not a triumph,

not a lesson,

just a life

you step back into—

limping,

luminous,

hands still shaking,

carrying both the ruin

and the seeds

of everything

that might yet grow

in its wake.