“When I First Tried to Come Down to Earth”

When I first tried to come down to Earth,

there was an explosion.

Not fire—

but the collapse of a name too large for breath,

a detonation of self,

a falling so complete

that stars went silent in respect.

I shattered

into light and dust

and something older than either.

They say a soul should descend gently—

but I was all thunder.

I tore a seam in the veil

and poured through like stormwater

through a cracked sky.

I don’t remember the landing.

Only the weightlessness before it,

and then—

green.

For a thousand years

I was moss.

Soft, unassuming.

I clung to stone,

kissed bark,

listened to the slow stories of trees.

I grew in the quiet,

in the shade,

in the undisturbed places

where even grief was gentle.

That was my first healing.

Since then,

I’ve come back in many forms—

a girl with hollow bones,

a boy who wept for the moon,

an old woman with milkweed in her voice.

Once, I returned as smoke.

Once, as wind over a frozen lake.

Once, I forgot everything

and had to learn how to be

from the shape of my own shadow.

Each return carries

the echo of that first fall.

A humming beneath the skin,

a tremble in the teeth

before the words arrive.

I’ve spent lifetimes

trying to hold myself together—

a constellation sewn from splinters.

People call me

sensitive,

fragile,

too much.

They don’t understand

I am still reassembling

the sound my soul made

when it broke open.

I carry pieces of sky

in my marrow.

Some days, they ache.

Some days, they sing.

I have loved in every life—

sometimes gently,

sometimes like fire across wheat fields.

I have kissed strangers

who felt like old gods,

and left offerings for those

who never remembered my name.

Each time I love,

I lose a fragment

I never recover.

Each time I die,

I take something with me

I wasn’t supposed to keep.

I think Earth remembers me.

She hides bits of me

in the gullies,

the soft corners,

the green hush of forest floor.

Moss still reaches for me.

The stones still warm

when I press my hand to them.

I came here

not to learn,

but to remember.

And to tell you,

with whatever breath I’m given,

that the fall doesn’t end

when you land.

It echoes.

It makes a life

of everything it touches.