Wrightings

 

Skin remembers fire long after the flame is gone. What once was pliant, breathing, now cools into something altered clear, tight, fragile as art hung in a window no one dusts. The body learns a new language: pull, burn, white hush of silence. Nerves whisper alarms the mouth grows tired of translating. Pain becomes a season with no agreed-upon name. Doctors speak in diagrams, in careful gloves and brighter lights. I nod, polite, while my body leans away from itself, as if distance might soften what has already fused. There is grief here not loud, not cinematic but a thin mourning for ease, for touch without calculation, for the simple mercy of not thinking about skin. Yet fused glass still catches light. It bends sun into color, holds warmth longer than expected. Even changed, it is not ruined. Even scarred, it is still a surface the world moves through. I learn to tend myself like a careful artist: slow heat, patient cooling, respect for new limits. Not restoration but survival shaped ...

  My name is Joy—four days past Christmas born, Too late for hymns, too soon for grace of morn. I brought no warmth, no candle to the cold, No miracle of the season had been foretold. The heart I house is clouded, thick with night, A grief that dulls all color, sound, and light. Depression sits where healing should have grown, A rot unnamed, untreated, overthrown. Take care with names—those wishes etched in skin, Those crowns of promise pressed on infants’ sin. Had I been Lynn, or Sue, some neutral sound, No debt of cheer would track me all around. Who knows what truths my mouth might dare release, What darker thoughts might surface without peace? What I might be if not required to glow, To counterfeit a joy I’ll never know. I never loved my name, yet it is clean— Not half a prayer, not prophecy unseen. Not Hope, half-promised, dangling in the air, Nor Destiny, too bold to be unfair. Nor weighted like the names that openly Confess their grief—Mara, Lament, p...