The Letters on the Shelf

One day, with hands trembling from so much forgetting, I opened the dusty shelf where the love letters no one else remembered lay asleep. They were mine. All mine. Not from other lips, not from other hands, but mine, written without knowing that in every word I was loving myself, weaving myself, holding myself up.

I loved, chased other people's suns, left my skin on the altars of others, and never saw that the person who loved me most was the one who breathed with me when there were no witnesses, who gathered my pieces without demanding that I take shape, who waited for me in the silences without judgment.

Today, I rescue those letters from their exile, read each line tenderly, and recognize myself, it was me. It was always me.

The flame that never went out, the presence that never abandoned me, the gaze that loved me even in the forgetting. And in this delight of existing, of inhabiting my own life, I embrace myself. I write myself anew. I love myself. I create myself.

And now I know! I will return my heart to itself, to its first home, to the temple where it was born intact, before the wounds, before the escapes, before the loves without a mirror.

I will fall in love with myself again. Not in a gesture of vanity, but in the profound act of one who has traveled to the abyss and returns, at last, with her hands full of herself.

I will look at myself with the eyes I once reserved for others, speak to myself with the sweetness I so often lavished and begged for, take my own hand in my solitudes, dance myself on clear days and hold myself up through the storms.

I will return my heart to its chest, where it should always have beaten whole. And there, in the reunion, I will know myself to be a miracle.