I’m sorry for abandoning you so many years ago. When you were innocent and full of light and just too young to know how valuable you were and not because of what you could achieve or the people you could please but just because you’re you and that’s enough for me.

Forty years later dry heaving on my knees in private captivity hidden in the rooms that no one else can see. But I was never really hiding it from anyone but me. And that is how I would proceed.

Until I took the vow to see.

Until I could bow to what I see.

It took almost half a century to finally see that I was the one deceiving me, believing I was bound while my worth laid gasping in the hands of someone else’s sleeves.

But I am here now and I’m free. I am here now and I’m free. My heart still pouring tears like rivers but this time of relief. Peeling off years of hidden grief. Revealing what’s beneath. Not an idea to be understood but an internal pilgrimage to seek.

So thank you for believing me when I say I’ll never leave.

Because I will never leave.

I’m awake inside this moment, still shaking in the after but no longer chasing after a love that is given by another because that which isn’t given can’t be taken and hearts can be breaking but never truly broken while they are learning to stay open.

Love is not a transaction exchanged but a ground that has arranged itself in the earth beneath my feet and in the oxygen I breathe and in the thoughts that are conceived when I truly come to see another and know that they are me. And it’s drenched into my bones all soaked up in my soul, the feeling of coming home to a home inside of me where I’m never separate from a love whose love could never leave.