I learned to count my breath instead of years,
to live by increments the body keeps—
a pulse, a pause, the courage to stay here
when silence hums too loudly to be sleep.
The world prefers a cleaner narrative:
the healed, the faithful, those who never break.
But I have lived in margins, tentative,
where language is the only thing that stays.
I do not offer triumph. I record
the act of standing when the door won’t close,
the cost of loving what cannot be cured,
the will to name what still refuses prose.
These lines are not escape, nor prayer, nor art—
they are the shape that holds an unruled heart.
