Between Bruises & Blooms

I waited for my book
to become real
with flour on my shirt
and sugar stuck to the counter.

I waited
while marshmallows melted
into something soft enough
to hold together,
which felt a little too familiar.

Twenty-one peanut butter cookies.
Twenty-four banana muffins.
Forty-eight chocolate chip cookies.
A whole pan of Rice Krispie squares
cooling beneath the kitchen light.

Ninety-three little distractions
and a pan full of sweetness
because apparently
I do not know how to wait
with empty hands.

So I baked.

I stirred butter into sugar
while the clock crawled forward.
Mashed bananas
while somewhere,
on some server,
my words were becoming
a thing strangers could hold.

I checked the oven.
I checked the time.
I tried not to check Amazon.

Again.

Again.

Again.

The house smelled
like vanilla and chocolate,
like midnight
trying very hard
to become morning.

And there was something
almost ridiculous about it—

me,
standing in my kitchen
at two in the fucking morning,
surrounded by enough baking
to feed a small village,

waiting for a book
about surviving
to finally arrive.

Maybe that is what healing
looks like sometimes.

Not graceful.
Not quiet.
Not candles and closure.

Sometimes
it is forty-eight cookies
because twenty-four
apparently wasn’t enough.

Sometimes
it is batter under your nails,
The Walking Dead playing nearby,
a timer screaming from the counter,
and your heart
beating louder than all of it.

Sometimes
you survive long enough
to make something
from everything
that tried to ruin you.

A poem.
A book.
A kitchen full of sweetness.

And then,
somewhere between
the last tray
and midnight becoming tomorrow,

your name
finally appears
on something
you once only dreamed
of finishing.