Compass of Thorns

Pain used to make me flinch,

shrink into the deepest corners of myself

where light couldn’t reach.

But I’ve learned to follow it like a compass

not because I crave the ache,

but because it knows something I don’t.

It points, without mercy,

to the wounds still open and bleeding,

to the places I thought I'd buried

beneath productivity, politeness,

and pretending to be fine.

I chase my pain

like a sailor following the North Star

through the echoes of childhood memories,

through beliefs stitched with insecurity,

through broken mirrors reflecting only shards of self,

through systems designed to erase me.

In the quiet of my mental garden,

I let my pain bloom into questions.

Who placed this thorn here?

What fiction did I swallow as fact

that now pierces me from the inside out?

Pain does not lie.

It leads—sometimes to roses,

sometimes to truth

with thorns still attached.

And so I follow, not as a victim,

but as the one willing to unearth

every mystery buried inside me.