Return to Myself

Peace over old intensity

I almost open the door again-
to the room where I once mistook pain for light.
It hums behind the wall like an old song:
familiar, poisonous, sweet.

My hands remember the shape of ruin.
They ache to trace it,
to prove I could still burn if I wanted.
But the air beyond that threshold
smells of old smoke and half-kept promises,
and I have already taught my lungs
how to breathe without coughing.

I used to think love was meant to hurt,
that devotion and disappearance
were twin halves of something holy.
How foolish-to keep worshipping
at the altar of almost.

There was a time I begged the fire to stay
even as it scorched my name.
Now I beg the quiet to forgive me
for calling it empty.

The world has softened around me:
the sound of small feet on tile,
the weight of laughter in another room,
the safety of someone who doesn’t need
to be chased to be real.

Love used to mean surrender.
Now it means staying.
It means hearing the storm
and not stepping outside.

It means holding the ache gently-
not as prophecy, but memory.
It means unlearning the language of loss,
and speaking in touch, in patience,
in the simple miracle of continuity.

I am learning that peace
is not silence-
it is a choice made trembling,
over and over again,
to live for what is still here.

And some nights, when the ghosts call soft,
I let them.
I listen.
Then I close the door again,
and turn toward the light that waits for me
in every ordinary morning.

-Koii