Between Bruises & Blooms

I used to think healing
would make me beautiful again—

soft around the edges,
easy to hold,
someone who no longer flinched
when the past knocked over something
inside her.

But healing made me stranger.

I grew roots through wreckage.
Learned which bones could become soil.
Let grief rot slowly beneath me
until something green
pushed through.

There are still ruins here.

Rooms I don’t enter.
Names that taste like blood.
Ghosts that know exactly
which floorboards creak.

But there are flowers, too.

Wild ones.

The kind nobody planted.
The kind that split concrete
just to see the sun.

And maybe that is what I am now—

not restored.

Not untouched.

Just alive enough
to keep blooming
where something once tried
to bury me.