When the Ground Disappeared

Again

It started like any other day,

With sunlight weaving through my window,

Shoes tied tight,

Dreams packed beneath my coat.

The world outside was wide and kind,

And I,

I had legs that danced with time.

I stepped into the arms of morning,

A heart full of unspoken songs,

Not knowing fate had drawn a blade,

And I would not walk for long.

A sound — too loud to understand —

Split the air like a violent scream,

The ground buckled, the sky cracked,

And time…

shattered like glass in a dream.

I remember dust — thick as fear,

The smell of blood, not quite mine yet.

My hands searched downward, trembling,

And found a silence I’d never forget.

My legs,

my faithful legs,

the ones that ran through fields and rain —

were gone,

as if the earth had swallowed them

to spare me pain.

But pain came.

Not in the way of broken bone,

But in the quiet of the hospital lights,

Where blankets covered empty space,

And futures no longer fit quite right.

A nurse came in with hopeful eyes,

And words stitched from mercy and lie,

“You’re alive,” she whispered,

as if that alone

could teach me how to fly.

Alive.

But not whole.

Not yet.

The world around me blurred with pity,

With flowers wilting in clean white rooms.

They said I was brave — I smiled.

But inside, I bloomed

with grief.

Grief is strange.

It doesn’t shout — it settles,

Like dust in lungs,

Like thunder after lightning’s gone.

I mourned my steps, my rhythm,

The feeling of grass underfoot at dawn.

What do you call yourself

when the part of you that carried you

no longer exists?

What do you become

when even mirrors resist

to show the truth

you’re too afraid to see?

But time — that quiet sculptor —

chiseled at the edges of my pain.

With every day, a sliver melted,

And the fire returned

again.

The first time I sat up alone,

The first time I looked down

and didn’t break —

The day I felt the breeze on my face

and smiled for my own sake.

I touched my wheels like limbs reborn,

Not substitutes,

but new beginnings,

And I whispered to the wind,

“I’m still here.

I’m still winning.”

I am not my legs.

I am not what I have lost.

I am the rising after ruin,

The storm that paid the cost.

There are things that feet can’t take you to —

Like grace,

Like grit,

Like truth renewed.

I have fallen,

but not failed.

Broken,

but not buried.

Legless,

but not less.

I am made of steel and softness now,

Of courage drawn from bone-deep sorrow,

Of nights I thought would never end,

But still I woke to see tomorrow.

I see others now —

The hurt, the hidden,

The quietly brave,

The loudly scared.

And I tell them,

“I know what it means

to lose,

and still be spared.”

The ground is far below me now,

But the sky?

It’s just as near.

And every breath I take

is a vow:

I am here.

I am here.

Let the world write me as tragedy,

Let them see the chair and not the flame,

But I have risen from the ashes,

And I no longer play that game.

I have chapters still unwritten,

Pages waiting to be bled.

So I’ll write my name

with thunder now —

Not with footsteps,

but with thread.

The thread of pain,

Of peace,

Of fight,

Of finding who I am at night.

No longer just someone who walks —

but someone who moves

the stars inside

despite.