Apollo
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Tell me, how exactly does one brace
for a knife
when all you offered was your throat
as a gesture of peace?
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Blue moon
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suddenly i don’t want anyone to know me as deeply anymore, which is weird because i have always yearned for someone to understand my soul.
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Natalie Diaz, from a poem titled “September 2001,” featured in The World Keeps Ending And The World Goes On
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Erica Jong, from a poem titled “Statue,” featured in Loveroot: Poems, originally published in 1975
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Brianna Wiest, from her book titled “The Pivot Year,” originally published in January 2026
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I am not afraid of getting older, I am afraid of staying unfinished.
Twenty-nine feels less like a number and more like a shoreline, that strange place where what I was keeps dissolving into what I am becoming.
I have loved people like the moon loves the tide. Never touching, but still pulling entire oceans toward them. I still think of them sometimes, the way you think of a song that once saved your life.
Not with ache.
With gratitude.
I have been shipwreck and altar.
Driftwood and offering.
I have broken and learned how to make something holy out of what was left.
There were years when I thought survival was enough, when staying alive felt like a full-time religion.
But twenty-nine arrives whispering:
you are allowed to want more than endurance.
I am beginning to understand that healing is not loud. It does not announce itself. It shows up quietly in the way I no longer beg for love that feels like winter.
The mountains taught me how to be rooted without being rigid. How to stand without needing to dominate the sky.
The sea taught me how even what is shattered, can still be shaped into something that holds light.
The trees taught me how to stay when it would be easier to fold, how to bend without calling it breaking, how to lose whole seasons of myself and still return.
The birds taught me that leaving is not always abandonment, that sometimes it is the bravest kind of love. The kind that refuses to rot in a small sky.
The earth taught me that nothing is wasted, not the ache, not the years, not even the versions of me that didn’t survive.
And love—love taught me, that you can carry someone in your heart without bleeding for them. That care does not require collapse.
Twenty-nine feels like learning how to swim without flailing. Like trusting my body not to drag me under anymore.
I am not who I was at nineteen—all ache and open wounds.
I am not who I was at twenty-five—still trying to prove I deserved to exist.
I am someone softer now.
Someone stronger.
Someone who knows that becoming takes time, and time is not my enemy.
I finally understand that becoming is not a straight line: It is root and wing, it is falling and finding, it is learning how to stay soft in a world that keeps asking me to harden.
And I have so much more to learn— from stillness, from wind, from water. From the quiet way things heal when no one is watching, from the weather inside my own chest, from the way even broken things keep growing toward the light.
Twenty-nine is not a closing door. It is a wide field. It is breath. It is a body finally learning that it is safe to be here.
And for the first time, I don’t feel like I am running toward who I might be.
I feel like I am arriving.
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