Intimate Verses

The Quiet Freedoms

I. Body

Permission to Breathe

Today I gave myself permission to breathe all the way in.

Not the shallow breath of someone waiting for the next blow.

The full breath. The one that fills every corner.

It has been years since I breathed like this.

The Body Remembers

My shoulders remember hunching against disappointment.

My jaw remembers clenching against words I was not allowed to say.

My stomach remembers swallowing what I really felt so no one would be upset.

Now I am teaching my body to forget what it learned when forgetting was survival.

Held

There is a way of being held that has nothing to do with arms.

It is the way the earth holds the tree. The way the sky holds the bird. The way the breath holds the body.

I am learning to feel held like that. By what? By everything.

Tears

I used to apologize for crying.

Now I understand: these waters were stored too long. They need to flow.

Apologizing for tears is like apologizing for rain.

II. Voice

What I Swallowed

I swallowed so many words they built a city in my chest.

Now I am learning to speak them, one by one, letting the city empty onto the page into the air into the space where they always belonged.

The First No

The first no I ever said and meant—

I was thirty-four.

It came out shaking. It came out small. But it came out.

And the world did not end.

That was the day I learned: I have a voice. It has power. I am allowed to use it.

Singing

When I was small, someone told me I couldn't sing.

I believed them. For twenty years.

Now I sing anyway. Off-key. Full-hearted. Free.

The point was never to sing well. The point was never to stop.

The Unsaid

There is a graveyard of words I never said.

I visit sometimes. I mourn the conversations I was too afraid to have.

But I do not live there. I live in the sentences I am finally speaking now.