This right of spring

^{I’ve spent much of this year learning that change is not always a synonym for loss and that surrender is not always the same thing as defeat.}

^{Lately, I’ve found myself standing at the edge of many things: old versions of myself, old expectations, old relationships, old ways of understanding people. Some of them are ending because they’ve reached the edge of what they were meant to be. Others have brought me closer to people, and to myself, than I thought possible. And yet, I would not be the version of myself writing this without any of them.}

^{This is for the things that leave behind more than they take and people that touch you in ways you almost never wish to be untouched.}

---

After years of winter,
I mistook the flame
for the hand that struck it.

I began to crave
the sudden hunger for tomorrow,
the way the world seemed to lean
ever so slightly toward music,
none of which you composed.

But you did remind my feet
of the rhythm.

You reminded me
the silence was only an interlude.

Now when I think of you,
I do not think of endings.

I think of finding fresh water
in a place I had not yet mapped.

And what a strange consolation that is—

to lose the traveller,
but keep the proof
that the spring exists.