From Ashes to Rivers

There was a time

when silence was my only companion,

when the walls of memory

pressed so close

I could not breathe

without tasting their dust.

The body remembers—

the sharp cracks of breaking trust,

the weight of nights that stretched

like endless corridors,

the ache of a voice

never lifted,

never believed.

I lived as a fractured mirror,

reflecting back the world

in jagged fragments—

a smile here, a mask there,

but behind it

a storm was clawing,

a tide unspoken.

For years I called it survival,

to bury wounds beneath busy hands,

to stitch myself into silence,

to wear invisibility

like a second skin.

But survival

is not the same as living.

One day,

without warning,

the cracks began to leak.

Not in floods,

but in whispers—

a tear in the grocery store aisle,

a tremor when I touched

the corner of a photograph,

a voice within me saying:

It is time.

And so I turned, trembling,

to face the shadow

I had outrun for too long.

At first it was unbearable—

the memories like fire,

the shame like ice.

Every step closer

was a wound reopening,

every breath

a reminder of what I thought

I could not survive.

But inside the pain

I found something unexpected:

not just the voice of loss,

but the voice of longing.

Longing for freedom,

longing for truth,

longing for a life

beyond the cage of fear.

So I let myself grieve.

I let the tears come,

let them carve rivers

through the deserts of my skin.

I screamed into pillows,

I wrote letters I never sent,

I broke the silence

that had been breaking me.

And in that breaking

there was light.

Healing did not arrive

as a miracle in the night.

It came slowly,

like dawn bleeding across a horizon,

a glow that at first

was barely seen.

It came with therapy,

with the courage to speak aloud

what had been forbidden.

It came with friends

who held my shaking hands,

with strangers’ words

that echoed my own secret pain,

reminding me

I was not alone.

Piece by piece,

I stitched myself not back

to who I was before—

that person was gone—

but forward,

into someone new.

My scars became maps,

not of shame

but of survival.

Every line etched upon my spirit

proof that I had endured.

And endurance turned to strength,

and strength to compassion,

and compassion to love.

Now when I speak of the past,

I do not whisper.

I lift my voice

like a lantern in the dark,

for I know there are others

still searching for a way through.

I tell them:

You are not broken—

you are becoming.

You are not ruined—

you are rewriting.

What you carry

is not weakness—

it is the seed of your healing.

For trauma is not the end.

It is a doorway,

a brutal and unasked-for doorway,

but one that can still lead

to transformation.

On the other side of pain

is a self remade—

softer, yes,

but also stronger,

able to stand,

able to bend,

able to open arms

to the world again.

And in that opening

there is joy.

Not the fragile joy

of pretending,

but the fierce joy

of truth.

I have turned my scars

into rivers,

and those rivers into songs.

I have learned

that healing is not forgetting,

but remembering differently,

holding the memory in my hands

and saying:

You no longer own me.

From the ashes

I have built a garden,

and in that garden I walk,

barefoot, free,

the sun warm upon my skin.

Trauma carved me—

yes.

But healing grew me,

and here I stand:

not what was broken,

but what was born.