The Path
This morning, I wandered into a labyrinth.
I thought I was following the winding paths of an old London cemetery, tracing stone softened by moss and gardens left to grow as they pleased. Instead, I found myself walking the corridors of my own heart, where nothing is ever truly abandoned, only waiting.
There are rooms within us we keep carefully closed.
Not because we have forgotten what lives there, but because we know the cost of opening the door.
Today, someone else unknowingly turned the key.
The air rushed in.
And everything I believed had settled quietly into the past rose again, all at once.
It burns.
That is the only honest word for it.
People speak of heartbreak as though it is something that cracks cleanly in two, but mine never did. Mine splintered. Tiny fragments lodged themselves beneath my skin, invisible most days, until something beautiful brushed against them.
Today, beauty found every one of them.
It is astonishing how grief can disguise itself.
Sometimes it wears the face of longing.
Sometimes it hides inside hope.
Sometimes it arrives as a photograph of a place you have never been and whispers, Do you remember what it felt like to believe?
And your body remembers before your mind has a chance to answer.
I can feel it in my chest.
In my throat.
In that hollow place just beneath my ribs where trust once lived so effortlessly.
I remember what it was like to hand someone my heart without asking for proof.
To believe that what was spoken in tenderness would also be protected in silence.
To think that love itself was enough.
I miss that woman.
Not because she was naïve.
Because she was brave.
She loved with both hands open.
She believed vulnerability was not weakness but a kind of faith.
I wonder where she went.
Or perhaps she is still here, buried beneath all these layers of caution, waiting for me to find her again.
This morning I cannot find her.
This morning I find only the echo of her footsteps.
There is coffee growing cold beside me.
There are photographs that refuse to leave my mind.
There is a cemetery in a city across the ocean where strangers sleep beneath ancient trees, and somehow they have become the keepers of my sorrow.
Perhaps this is what a labyrinth has always been.
Not a place to become lost.
But a place where everything we have tried to leave behind patiently waits for us to arrive.
So I will keep writing.
I will not edit.
I am not too much.
I am not too raw.
Right now, my only job is to tell the truth.
The shaping can come later.
Today, I let the page carry what has become too heavy for my heart to hold alone.
