When the Past

I used to think memory was a door

you could close

if you leaned hard enough.

But some days,

it swings open on its own

no creak, no warning

and the light spills in

with the dust.

It isn’t always kind.

Sometimes it lays your old life

in front of you,

still warm,

as if it had never left.

Sometimes it shows you

only the outline—

just enough to ache for what’s missing.

I told myself I was done

tracing the edges of the wound.

But then—

I realized the wound

was tracing me.

It was redrawing my lines,

stretching me into someone

I hadn’t yet met.

I stopped bracing for the flood.

I let it fill me.

Not to drown,

but to float

on what I’d been avoiding.

There is a strange strength

in the way grief holds you

when no one else can

not to keep you from breaking,

but to show you

how breaking makes space.

And here I am,

standing in that space,

feeling the old echoes,

but also

the steady hum

of something beginning.

Postscript:

This free-verse Poem navigates the turning point between loss and renewal, where the weight of memory transforms from anchor to wind. It’s a meditation on grief’s strange gift—how it returns pieces of ourselves we thought were gone, teaching us to carry them forward.