“In a dream, my fingertips pulse. I’ll be patient in my blooming. In a dream, I let time pass through open hands.”

I descend into an unopened sky, the ocean floor, the final embrace of a graveyard. Find your fill of me before my blue pales like a sour moon.

I still know the fabric of where I begin and end.

I allow myself to be a weathervane; receive every feeling that greets the shore of me.

I’m writing about moving again, and when I write about moving, I really mean beginning. I’m beginning again.

Take me back to the evergreen trees; to the sunlight through the leaves, the bending ferns and fronds. The pitter of the rain, the smooth rocks sleeping under moss. Take me back to the life I know before this body.

I want to wade into the water on the sidewalk, crawl out of this feeling without giving it a name. Take a lighter to love’s sticky edges so its sadness isn’t caught in my throat.

We’ve never seen what a happy life could look like if we chose to spend it by ourselves – sharing our beautiful lives with friends, family members, the occasional crush, and lounging out in that quiet space alone as if an idyllic sunned beach.

Hold me here, where I feel less like a stranger to my own laughter. Where it’s easier to believe things happen for a reason or maybe, at least, out of a thousand winding roads my life might take, I will still find one that fits me.

In a dream, I’m holding you close and when I wake, I do. How lucky, to want and have.

People have been washed away by less. I’ll take every step gently. So often, you can’t tell the rush of a riptide until you’re already at sea.

I sit on the bare floor, leave my palms unturned, and watch relief pool into one hand, and uncertainty in the next. I will try not to lean more one way or another, but let them hold each other as company.

We’re in spring and I have learned how to be gentle and sharp; strong bark on budding trees. Hold out your hands. I’ll leave a pink kiss and a pocket knife.

I’m remembering again, how loneliness has always made me brave.

I will still live like a ghost in the mornings; walking, listening, pouring coffee to finish sometime by the afternoon, when I’ve had enough of watching the world and do all I can to live in it.

The world will be loud again. I’ll notice the loneliness less.

For now, I’ll bring what I can to my own four walls. I recognize the purpose, the promise of this: a church is made by its space, by its practices.

It takes a great deal of courage to emerge from the dirt and the hurt and grow and bloom into petals of kindness and love.

From each scar today bloom the flowers of a kinder tomorrow.

Every flower blooms at their own pace, dear. Watch your own growth, not others’ one.

You, like nature again, will bloom again and change beautifully.

Bloom with your colors and fluttering wings of hope and smiles.

what is my poetry if not all of my sorrows blooming?

Your departure was like trusting the process of seasons. I never knew i’d bloom again after a terrible fall.

When we die plant us close so life grows from our love still. Even in death my chest will bloom for you.