Year of the Quiet Furnace

I mark the year not by dates

but by what survived me.

.............

Winter arrived like a verdict—

clean, unquestionable.

It took names.

It lifted the weight from rooms,

left furniture where voices had been.

It taught me that silence

can strike hard enough to bruise.

.............

I loved with my whole throat once—

a love that mistook hunger for devotion,

that called manipulation a kind of gravity.

They spoke in mirrors,

tilted my reflection,

then asked why I no longer recognized myself.

That is how I learned:

even a blade, handed back gently,

remembers the hand.

.............

Spring did not save me.

It only revealed the damage.

Green things grew where rot had been,

and I resented them for it.

I was still counting bones

while the earth practiced forgiveness

without consulting me.

.............

Loss came in waves that knew my name.

Not dramatic—

methodical.

It dismantled me the way water dismantles stone:

patient, thorough,

without apology.

I carried grief like a second spine,

upright but aching,

learning to stand with new angles.

.............

Summer burned away my illusions.

What remained was truer.

I met people then—

not saviors, not saints—

but builders.

They did not ask for the broken parts as proof.

They sat beside the ruins

and handed me tools instead of questions.

They reminded me that collapse

is not a moral failure.

.............

Autumn taught me the mercy of release.

How even strong things must let go

or rot from holding on too long.

I shed versions of myself

that had been useful once,

that had kept me alive,

that no longer fit the weather.

.............

I am not healed.

I am assembling.

.............

Each day I return to the fire—

not to be destroyed,

but to be reshaped.

The year passed through me

like a long, unsparing season,

and I am no longer who entered it.

.............

Still—

I remain.

.............

Scarred, yes.

Wiser, unwillingly.

Standing among the ruins

with dirt under my nails

and a blueprint written in breath.

.............

If this year taught me anything,

it is this:

I am not what was done to me.

I am what I chose to build

after the smoke clears.