Comfort demanded I choose it through the ache of survival. What I believed to be an ending was never an ending at all, but a soft awakening beneath all I had endured. Perhaps that is what life asks of us—to keep breathing through the ache until the light we seek begins to bleed from within.

Regret lived beneath my skin, heavy and unrelenting. The world had stitched my fate long before I drew breath. It settled slowly until it became something I could no longer separate from. My mother moved through rooms like a shadow misplaced from its body, mourning the life taken from her the mo