gnawing at my optimism

gnawing at my optimism

estefaaano_writes 

-

deep in forgotten pages,

an age-old legend,

older than any house i have lived in, 

speaks of a wolf who keeps watch 

at the gate of every home 

that learns at last 

to hold its own warmth.

unaware that hope, 

once it has settled, 

must invent a hunger of its own,

to prove it is still owed, 

naming the ache, 

the cost of wanting 

to remain among the living, 

among the loud, the breathing,

the unfinished.

every good thing i have held 

has taught me its lesson twice, 

 in the holding, 

radiant, complete, 

and in the bracing, 

which is its own kind of prayer.

for years i believed this doubling was my flaw,

a wound no one else was built to carry,

until i learnt that all joy takes root 

on land that has flooded before, 

and the body does not forget, 

for the body is mostly water, 

a small ocean remembering 

every larger one it barely,

only barely, swam away from.

there is a door inside me that stays open 

through my kindest years, 

and i keep almost explaining why, 

and i have always stopped myself, 

for speaking was never what it wanted.

the door itself is what it means to say,

an open door is not a mouth for leaving, 

at times, it merely marks the moment

the house ceases to defend itself

against its own weather.

learning to draw breath 

not to withstand the storm,

but because breathing 

remains the quiet privilege

of those who endure.

some nights i dream of orchards, 

how trees that bear the most 

are the ones cut back hardest, 

and i ask the gnawing what it means to guard,

and it does not answer.

it only keeps digging, 

homely, ugly, unseen, 

doing the long slow work 

as roots have always done, 

so that some green and stubborn thing in me 

keeps climbing toward a light 

it has never once been promised.

☁︎