Once, I lived like a fern frond before unfurling-
Curled tightly against my own spine.
My prayers barely breaching the threshold of my lips,
Waiting for the cold to finish speaking first.
I learned the manner of prey-
How to soften my steps.
How to dull my pulse.
How to thank the teeth for stopping short.
But the wound stayed.
So I fed it the attention it craved.
I sat with it long enough that it learned my name
And the shame loosened its grip-
Confused by my stay.
It taught me things I was never meant to learn gently.
Like how pain circles like a wolf, until it is seen.
That silence can feel like safety, and still be slow starvation.
Only when I stopped cowering,
Did the wound shift in posture.
Sitting back on its haunches, lowering its hackles-
It wailed and howled, collapsing into a pained whimper.
I leaned close to this weakened monster-
My breath a tide washing over its jagged edges.
Its small cries carve caverns in my core,
And I trace them with my fingertips-
Mapping the origin of this shared ache.
I offered it the hush of patience.
The unseen stability of presence.
The kind of embrace that does not flinch away in fear.
It shivered in vulnerability-
A wild thing learning to cradle without crushing.
I braid flowers into its hair,
Plucking the thorns and tucking the shadows,
Until a glimmer of hope is exposed.
I speak the language of root and rain,
"You are allowed to be this fragile."
I tell it again, and again.
Feeling the impact of each word as they land,
Until the words stop sounding like a question.
It blinks at me- not in disbelief, but recognition.
Its ribs stop caging its heart.
Its breath finds a softer flow.
I do not ask it to be harmless-
I ask it to rest.
We sit there together, time at a standstill,
Completely ensnared in each others unravelling,
As if this tenderness might rewrite the rules of survival.
Its eyes change first.
The glassy panic gives way to curiosity.
It begins to notice the pause in-between moments.
The way light beams break through the clouds.
I stop explaining myself to the wind.
Stop bleeding for proof of devotion.
Stop offering my softness to things that only know how to consume.
The creature learns restraint.
I learn authority.
Not dominance-
Sovereignty.
I learn then- what I mistook for self-disdain,
Was a glass ceiling in need of shattering.
The Leviathan watching over my temple entrance-
Waiting for chin scratches and belly rubs.
It does not vanish.
It does not transform into something tame.
It becomes mine.
A guardian who knows my scent.
A fire that no longer burns indiscriminately.
A ferocity that kneels only because it trusts me.
And in tending it,
I feel my own spine straighten.
The fern remembers the sun.
The spiral loosens.
I do not emerge as something new.
I arrive as something fully intact.
The ground no longer asks me to prove myself.
The scales of justice recognize my weight.
What stands beside me does not judge-
It witnesses.
There is no ceremony.
No audience.
Just the unmistakable shift
Of my re-calibration around a truth that will not sway.
I move forward with something ancient at my back
And something tender in my keeping.
Nothing chases me now.
Nothing waits for me to fail.
I walk on, not untouched-
But unafraid
Of what knows my name
And chose to stay.