What I've Learned So Far

Maybe I haven't lived long enough
or hard enough
to know what life is really about.
But I've stood in the quiet
where a sunrise starts to mean something,
and laughed and cried in parking lots
for no reason at all.

They say wisdom comes with age,
but sometimes it feels like
it's hiding in the pauses,
in the missed calls,
in the pain of letting go.

Maybe life is
just a string of almosts,
tied together by people
who sit with you in silence
while you cry;
or maybe it's about
becoming the kind of person
who can carry both hope and doubt
without needing to explain either.

I don't have answers,
just questions that grow with me.
But I think that's okay, for now.

Doubt Spiral

I can't be here,
alone with my thoughts.

I thought I was fine until I wasn't,
and I don't know when it started.

Maybe it was that look
or the silence
or maybe nothing at all
just a flicker in my brain
like a switch i didn't touch
and now it's all unraveling

what if i'm wrong what
if i've always been wrong what if
everyone knows i'm wrong and they're
just too kind to say it or too tired
of me falling apart or too far
away or too gone and i
shouldn't be here and i shouldn't
have said that and i shouldn't
have done that and my
chest is full of bees just making
noise too much noise in
my head all the voices are
shouting at all the other voices and
i can't make them stop
and if i'm so fucking smart why
can't i figure out how to control
my own brain

i'm unraveling
and i'm trying to breathe but i can't
the air slips away like everything else
i'm so sorry i'm so scared i'm so scared of everything

and i don’t know how
to stop
falling

 

Fire

I remember your hand.
How it moved
like it had a right
to anything it touched.

You smiled,
called it a game.
And I was so young,
I thought not screaming
was some kind of strength.

Everyone loved you.
You fooled them all.
You laughed too loud,
hugged too long,
said things
that didn't sound like warnings
until later.
So much later.

I didn't know I wasn't safe
in my own home.
My own skin.
My own bed.

Now, when I say your name —
and yes, I still say it —
I say it with fire in my throat.
I spit it back at you
like a curse.

I am not yours.

I never was.
You took nothing
I did not take back
with blood,
with grief,
with the years
you don't get to have.

You thought the little girl
would stay quiet and small.

But she grew up.
She walks ahead of you now,
broken, yes,
but unashamed.

And when she looks back at you,

her eyes
burn.

 

Page 43

The numbers won't stay still.
They shimmer, then scatter,
like ants when you lift a stone.

I read the same line
four times. Maybe five.

The pencil is too loud.
My heart is louder.

My mind replays it again.
It was years ago.
It was yesterday.

I keep pretending the lamp
is enough light.

Tell myself the shadow
is just the chair.
That I didn't hear the door.
The breath.
The footsteps.

He isn't here.
He never is.

He always is.

Common Thread

They came by different roads.

For one, an alley behind a dumpster,
footsteps that weren't hers;
the other on cotton sheets,
still warm from sleep.

Both slipped through a veil
that blurred everything behind it.
Now the night lives with them,
sometimes quiet, never gone.

They do not speak of it,
not often, not plainly.
But there's a flicker in their eyes
when stories stray too near,
the way the air thickens
around the word safe.

When the weight returns —
and it always does —
they show up.
A hand on a coffee cup,
a shoulder just close enough,
no words needed.

Soft, but strong,
a common thread
that holds,
the way friendship does
when built from the stuff
that broke them.

Because just being there
is not the same as
been there.

 

My Grandfather’s Hands

They weren't delicate,
knuckles knotted like old oak roots,
nails rimmed with blackened edges
of soil or engine grease.

In the morning they smelled of cedar,
split logs, and the faint ghost
of wood smoke carried in
after an early frost.

Strong when they needed to be,
but soft enough to wipe my tears like snowflakes,
or cradle an injured bird that crashed
against the kitchen window.

He never prayed out loud,
but his hands —
threading softly through my hair,
or brushing sawdust from a beam —
always moved with reverence,
like they were touching God.

 

Homesick

Seagulls cry
as the sun sinks into the Pacific,
fire reflected
in shattered glass.

I don't know how to be here.

I whisper your name,
pretend there's not
a continent between us.

For just a moment,
your absence feels 
like something I can hold.

It starts to rain.

 

The Nice Lady On The Plane

I'm trying to disappear
into the window.

Beside me, the nice lady
with hair like frost on lilacs
touches my arm,
like a mother might.

She doesn't ask why —
doesn't need to.
You don’t cry that way
unless you’ve left someone
who held your soul in his hands.

She just places her hand on my arm
with the calm of someone
who's seen love leave,
and still return.

We sit that way
watching clouds
and memories,
and breathing feels
just a little less
like breaking.

 

Westbound, Part 2

Goodbye
lingers at the gate,
like smoke after a fire.
Your arms surround me,
warm and safe

but slipping, slipping,
like the last light of dusk
fading into night.

Three thousand miles
is just a number,
until I try to cross it
with a kiss,
a hand outstretched
into air that no longer holds you.

Two years is a long shadow
I'll learn to live inside.
Wading through seasons,
marking days
with text messages,
with phone calls,
with stars we promise
to look at together.

This isn't forever,
just a slow unwinding of now —
a long pause
between heartbeats,

this last unfolding,
becoming
what I'm meant to be.

I won't stop loving you.

 

Westbound

Boxes packed,
stacked like monuments.
He takes my hand —
a ring, a promise,
not goodbye.

Tomorrow I chase the horizon,
heart torn between a dream
and a love I never dreamed
I'd find.

Westbound for now,
but not gone.

I'll find my way home.

 

Friendship, Glue, and Popsicle Sticks

In sixth grade we built
tiny houses out of popsicle sticks
and glue that dried
cloudy on our fingers.
Kat always made hers straight,
windows level, roofs that held.
Mine leaned,
walls like crooked teeth,
but she said they had
character.

We spent hours after school
with cardboard and scissors,
planning whole cities —
bridges, signs,
little paper gardens.
She let me name the streets.

Then That Thing happened —
the Terrible Thing.
And I stopped talking,
stopped building.
The glue dried up in the bottle.

Friends drifted away
like balloons let go.
Some didn't know,
and were too scared to ask;
others just stopped
coming around.

But Kat stayed.

She sat with me,
while I wrote poems
and crumpled them up
without reading them.
She never asked me
to be the same.
Didn't pretend
not to notice
how I flinched
at everything.

I forgot who I was
for a while.
But she never left.

Now, we drive past
neighborhoods with
perfect little porches,
and she reminds me
about those popsicle stick
houses we used to build.

And I come unglued.

She still holds me together,
like she's trying
to keep
a house
from falling.

 

Just As I Am

I'm not easy to love,
in case you didn't notice.

I cry without warning,
feel the hurt before the reason,
carry alarms that won't stop ringing.

My heart folds in strange ways,
marked with bootprints
that aren't yours.

I hold tight to old ghosts,
fear what I should embrace,
and I know that hurts you sometimes.

I'm sorry.

I'm stubborn,
wander through mazes
I've built myself to stay lost.

And still, you love me.
Even when I hide from your light,
even when my tears
can't explain themselves.

You just hold me
as I am.

And for that,
I am quietly,
wildly
grateful.

 

What's Wrong?

Nothing...just tired.

Because how can you explain
this unexplainable clanging
in your head.

to someone who holds you
like a lullaby?

 

Quantum Physics Is Weird

A blur of probabilities
wrapped around protons,
kaleidoscope of eigenstates
under Schrödinger's veil.

No orbit –
not like planets,
or moons tugged by gravity.

Emits no light,
sheds no energy,
can't spiral inward,
nowhere to fall.

Bound not by friction
but Pauli exclusion,
Heisenberg haze
in quantized spacetime.

Superpositioned system
in perfect obedience
to the weirdness of laws
we've yet to unravel.

 

Trafficked, Part 2

She came back
with silence in her throat.

No chains now,
only soft breezes
threading her hair.

She does not speak
of the place she left,
but plants things
that grow
deep roots.

Freedom
is not loud,
but it's hers.

--

Part 2 of a series
Part 1 is here: https://beckypoems.blogspot.com/2025/02/trafficked.html

 

I Saw My Grandfather Last Night

He sat at the kitchen table,
in the chair with the loose leg
he never got around to fixing.

He poured us coffee,
looked at my face, smiled,
but said nothing.

I reached for his hand,
the same strong curve
that taught mine to hold on,
and I felt his warmth.

I woke up crying.

 

Escape

Hide it.

Not your bruises, not your tears —
hide the eye that never sleeps.

Tuck it quiet in the closet's dark,
between the winter coat
and the shoes you never wear.
Press the button,
let it watch without blinking.

You’ve swallowed enough silence.
Now let the lens speak
with a tongue he can't strangle.

This isn't betrayal.
This is survival.
A key,
an exit,
made of silicon,
glass and light.

In the morning you'll press play
for someone who matters —
and that quiet little eye

will roar with truth.

 

Metamorphosis

She inches forward,
ripple of green on green,
tiny feet grasping the veins
of milkweed leaves,
her skin lit soft with sunlight.

The wind carries signals she doesn't trust.
Shadows loom, and leaves shiver beneath her weight.
Still, she clings to trembling stems,
nibbles what she can,
and keeps moving.

When the time is right,
she doesn’t know
what waits inside the dark.
Only that something within her
longs to unfold,
to turn inward,
to trust the silence between heartbeats.

Inside the chrysalis,
her body comes undone.
Cell by cell,
the past dissolves
to make room for something
she's never felt
but always knew was there.

When the stillness gives way,
she emerges from the dark
like a first breath after drowning,
fragile but whole.

She rises on colorful wings
shaped by all that she was,
and all that she's become

to taste this strange new freedom
of flying.

 

Closure (Part 2: Aftermath)

I hang my coat,
wash my hands twice,
stand at the sink
watching water spiral
down the drain.

I remember the sound
of my name on his lips —
how it sounded distant,
like someone else's story,
someone he didn't know.

Please forgive me.

His words ring hollow,
and I feel a cold clarity:
he wanted peace for himself,
not for me.
There's a difference
between remorse
and reckoning.

I sit in the dark by the window,
light from the streetlamp
drawing bars across the floor,
and I understand —
Sometimes closure
comes without healing.

Maybe it's just the sound
of a guilty plea
landing in a place inside me
that's no longer empty.

 

Closure (Part 1: Confrontation)

The room smells like Clorox and old sweat.
Shoes echo on the concrete floor,
and the wall clock ticks too loud.

The guard buzzes the door open.

He is smaller than I remember,
thinner, eyes dull, like the years
have scraped him hollow.

I'm not the child he knew,
but I see the shape of his mouth change
when he recognizes my face.
He looks away when he says my name.

I say what I came to say.
My voice shakes, holding back tears.
His eyes are fixed on the floor,
but I see a tremble in his shoulders
as the truth lands, finally,
where it belongs.

He tries to speak
without meeting my eyes.
Words don't come.
He shakes his head,
calls for the guard.

Please forgive me.

Barely a whisper,
swallowed by the closing door.

I return to the car.
He doesn't ask how it went,
just takes my hand, waits.

We sit like that
until I can breathe.

And we drive home
in silence.

 

Eight Thousand Sixty-Seven Sunrises

Eight thousand sixty-seven times,
the sun has risen for me.

Even when I didn't want it to.

There were mornings when light
felt like a lie,
when childhood was a cage
and love wore a cruel mask.

I grew up anyway.
Like a flower through a crack
in a concrete sidewalk,
I found my way toward light.

I learned to listen
to the quiet between storms,
the whisper of my own breath
telling me to keep going.

Morning always came.

Now, here I stand,
where the paved path
vanishes into wildflowers,
footprints behind me
making way for new life.

This is my next page.
The ink is still wet,
the air smells like hope.
And the sun —
the eight thousand sixty-eighth sun —
is rising.

 

Knowing

You never knew the shape of it,
only the shadow it cast.

My voice trembled
the night I told you,
drowning us both
in a flood of horror.

Shame curled in my gut,
fear thick as fog,
hoping you wouldn't turn away,
see me as cracked porcelain,
once beautiful,
now ruined.

But you didn't.

You held me,
not like something broken,
but something sacred.

Your eyes found mine
and didn't look away.

That's when I knew.

 

Inheritance

The body remembers hands like stories etched in a language of shame.


I hate my face.

I have shattered mirrors
just to gather pieces
of myself
he couldn't touch.

 

Echo Overlook

There's a trail that winds beyond the last fence post
past birches and maples,
where pine trees bend with the wind,
and every footstep breaks the silence.

Through green cathedral light,
trees open like a vaulted ceiling
and the world drops off into sky.

Echo Overlook.

A crown of stone above the river's ribbon,
where hawks glide silent in widening spirals
and the world stops.

I used to go there with clenched fists,
swallowed by something too big for words,
too sharp for tears.
I would shout until my voice
broke into pieces
and flung itself
back at me
again
and again —
not answers,
just proof I was still making sound.

No one could hear me.
No one needed to.

It was enough to let the mountain hold my rage,
to hurl it like a stone
into that vast and waiting blue
and know it would not shatter the world.

Years have passed since I went there.
The woods have likely changed,
grown thicker or forgotten the path by now.
But sometimes
in the brittle pause between dreams,
I feel it calling.

And I wonder
what I would shout
if I went there again.

 

 

Every Goddamn Night

I blink hard against the darkness.
The air is too quiet,
my heartbeat too loud in my ears.
The dream still clings,
sweat and memory a tight braid
at the back of my neck.

The room is still.
My hand slips between my legs,
ritual reassurance
that no one else is there.

I focus on my ribs,
my skin,
fingertips —
anything
to convince me
I’m not back there again.

Morning will come.
It always does.

But tonight,
I have to remember
how to breathe.