That Time When We Chose Flight over Fight

That Time When We Chose Flight over Fight 

estefaaano_writes 

-

We left in hollow hours,

when street lamps flickered like dying stars

and the city came slow and deep.

Your fingernails left crescents in my palm,

small monuments to our terror.

Some nights I still taste the metal of that moment,

keys dropped on hardwood, 

The soft click of a door closing for the last time,

the weight of everything we couldn't carry

settling like ash on our shoulders.

They say courage wears armor,

bears teeth against the coming storm,

plants feet firm in familiar soil.

But what of the courage it takes

to admit the ground beneath you

has become quicksand?

I remember how you looked at me,

With your wide puppy eyes,

I see peace in your soul.

I see clarity in your eyes,

when you said, 

"Sometimes the bravest thing 

is to admit we're not brave enough."

Wise words of surrender in brown-eyed stares,

wisdom in the tremor of your voice.

We chose the vertigo of possibility

over the steady hemorrhage of staying,

chose to be haunted by wishful thinking,

rather than ghosts of who we used to be.

In the rearview mirror, 

our old lives burned,

Like paper lanterns,

beautiful, even in destruction.

There's a certain madness in it,

trading solid walls for open sky,

Known demons for unnamed fears.

But isn't that the essence of evolution?

the first fish that crawled from sea to shore,

the first bird that trusted air more than earth,

the first star that dared to collapse

and birth something new from its own death.

Now, years deep into our existence,

I now understand,

flight isn't always surrender.

Sometimes it's resurrection,

a phoenix-act of becoming.

We didn't run from the fight,

we ran toward ourselves,

toward the people we could only become

by leaving everything we were.

They'll write stories about battles won,

about standing ground and pushing back,

but who will sing of the midnight pioneers?

Those who looked into the face of SHOULD

and chose COULD instead,

who found revolution in retreat,

victory in the pauses between pulses,

dawn in the darkness of starting over.

This is for the ones who chose to fly,

not because they're weak,

but because they're wild enough to believe

in the possibility of elsewhere.

For those who know that sometimes

the most violent act of love

is to turn your back on what burns you,

and trust the wind to know the way.