Where Love Heals

There is a strange comfort in realizing that almost nothing about you began with you.

Your heartbeat learned its rhythm inside another heart.

Before you ever opened your eyes, someone else’s body was teaching yours how to become.

The atoms in your bones were forged inside ancient stars.

The language you speak was shaped by countless mouths you will never know.

Even your laughter may carry the echo of someone who came before you—a mother, a grandfather, an old friend whose kindness still lives in the way you love.

You are made of borrowed things.

Words passed from generation to generation.

Hope handed to you by people who refused to let it die.

Gentleness you learned because someone once showed it to you.

We spend so much of life trying to become someone original.

But forests grow from fallen trees.

Rivers begin in mountains.

Stars are born from the ashes of older stars.

Creation itself has always been an inheritance.

Perhaps that is what it means to be human.

Not to invent yourself from nothing.

But to receive what was beautiful, shape it with your own hands, and leave behind a little more light than you were given.

Because one day, someone will speak with courage because you did.

Someone will choose kindness because you showed them how.

And they, too, will pass it on.

Maybe that is how the world has always become more beautiful—

one borrowed life at a time.

Jacque Michele