Where Love Heals

There was a girl
before twenty-three.

She laughed with her whole body.
Trusted easily.
Walked through the world
without calculating exits.

She believed love
meant safety.

Believed her body
belonged only to herself.

I grieve her sometimes.

Not because she was softer—
but because she did not yet know
how cruel the world could be
to women who love openly.

And then there was another girl.

Born in a single night
beneath fluorescent hospital lights
and unanswered prayers.

She looked like me,
but carried herself differently.

Quieter.

Like she had already learned
that survival
often requires disappearance.

She spent years
apologizing for existing.

Years mistaking fear
for love,
because fear at least
felt familiar.

She let people hold her
who only knew how
to make her smaller.

She called it patience.
Called it understanding.
Called it love
when she could not bear
to call it loneliness.

And still—

she survived.

That is the part
I keep forgetting.

Not gracefully.
Not cleanly.
Not in the inspiring ways
people like to write about.

But stubbornly.

With shaking hands.
With locked doors.
With long nights spent convincing herself
to remain
inside a body
that no longer felt like home.

And somewhere across the years,
the two girls began
finding each other again.

The one before twenty-three.
The one after.

Not merging completely.

But sitting together quietly
inside the same heart.

Learning,
slowly,
that what happened that night
may have changed the course of my life—

but it did not make me unworthy
of tenderness.

It did not ruin me.

It only taught me
how deeply human beings
can ache
for gentleness.

Jacque