Whole Again

Before

The thing about feeling incomplete is that you rarely notice it when you’re in the middle of it. You just call it life. The traffic, the empty fridge, the group texts you half-read and never respond to. It’s not a hole, exactly—it’s more like fog. Everything’s there, but nothing’s in focus.

For Lena, it started on a Tuesday that was indistinguishable from a Monday. The sky was iron. Her coffee tasted like burnt cardboard. She wore the same jeans she’d worn three days in a row. It was only when the elevator mirror caught her eyes—glassy, tired, distant—that she thought, *Is this it?*

But then she shook it off. She was an adult. These were adult feelings. Bills didn’t care if you were fulfilled. Rent didn’t pause because you wanted meaning. She adjusted her scarf and faced forward.

The Spark

Three weeks later, on a walk she didn’t want to take, in a park she usually avoided, Lena met an old woman feeding crows.

They were everywhere—perched on the bench, fluttering around her feet, waiting with eerie patience. The woman looked up and smiled.

“You’re late,” she said.

Lena blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You’ve been walking toward this moment for a while now,” the woman said, tossing a chunk of bread. “Most people arrive earlier. Or never.”

Lena almost laughed. “You waiting for someone else?”

“No. Just knew someone would come.”

And for reasons she couldn’t explain, Lena sat down.

They didn’t exchange names. The woman talked about the birds—their memory, their grudges, their strange loyalty. She said the crows remembered her. She visited every week, same bench, same bread.

Lena listened. Not out of politeness, but from something deeper. Curiosity, maybe. Hunger.

When the sky pinkened, the woman stood. “You’re going to feel lost soon,” she said. “Let yourself be. That’s how the path opens.”

Then she was gone.

Falling Apart

Lost came fast.

The next month, Lena quit her job. No plan. Just the certainty that she couldn’t sit in that office one more day pretending she cared about quarterly goals.

She cried on her bathroom floor two nights later, unsure whether it was grief, relief, or panic. Possibly all three.

Friends called. She didn’t pick up. She didn’t know what to say. “I’m unraveling” wasn’t socially acceptable small talk.

But inside the wreckage, something shifted. With each unraveling thread, she noticed what had been underneath all along: her old notebooks, still full of poems. The camera gathering dust in her closet. The songs she hummed absentmindedly while cooking. Her silence was no longer empty—it was full of echoing things she’d forgotten she loved.

The Long Middle

Days bled together. Mornings stretched into afternoons without clocks or deadlines. She volunteered at a community garden. She made a friend named Jo who never asked what she used to do, only who she wanted to be now.

They talked late into the evenings. About fear. About stories. About how identity isn’t a fixed thing but a mosaic made of broken tiles and found pieces.

“You’re allowed to change,” Jo told her. “That’s not failure. That’s growth.”

It wasn’t always pretty. Some days Lena hated herself. Others, she felt reborn. Some nights she dreamed of her old desk and woke up aching for structure. Other mornings, she painted for hours, forgetting to eat.

But slowly, she stopped asking, *What’s wrong with me?* and started asking, *What’s right?*

The Moment

One morning—she would later say it was a Tuesday, because of course it was—Lena walked to the same park. She didn’t expect to see the old woman again. She didn’t.

But she sat on the bench anyway, a thermos of tea in hand, and watched the crows circle above the trees. They cawed, sharp and defiant, like laughter that didn’t need permission.

Lena smiled.

She didn’t feel finished. She wasn’t fixed.

But she wasn’t broken, either.

She was complete—not because everything was perfect, but because she’d stopped waiting to be someone else. Her joy wasn’t loud, but it was real. A quiet wholeness.

She took a deep breath.

And in that stillness, she realized: the fog hadn’t lifted all at once. It had parted in patches, revealing pieces of herself she thought were lost. But they weren’t. They’d just been waiting, like crows on a bench, for her to notice.