by Sedona Torres
We spend our years learning the names of storms, mistaking movement for meaning.
Our hands grow full— of clocks, of keys,
of expectations, of promises
we were told
would make us whole.
We become collectors of almost everything
except ourselves.
Then one day, the wind keeps none of its bargains. A door closes.
A heart breaks.
A dream we built with careful hands falls quietly into dust.
We call it the end.
We fight it. We mourn the life we thought we were losing.
Yet beneath the noise, something ancient waits patiently.
Not to rescue us—only to remind us.
And there, where everything we built has finally fallen silent, we meet the stranger
wearing our own face.
They ask for nothing.
Not success.
Not certainty.
Not applause.
Only this—
to sit beneath
an ordinary sky.
To laugh until our ribs ache.
To hold another soul without needing
to become someone else.
It feels like losing everything.
Until we notice it was only everything
that was never ours.
And perhaps that was never the breaking.
Only the falling away of everything
that convinced us we had become someone else.
Beneath it all, the quiet one waited—
untouched,
unafraid,
already home.