✨A walk ✨
She was ten.
The oldest child.
Too young to carry a world,
but old enough to feel it cracking—
and to know, in some ancient place inside her,
that it was on fire.
The night he died,
they told her it was fast.
That the truck exploded.
That the flames swallowed everything whole
before pain even had the chance to find him.
But in her dreams,
the fire always came back.
It never started with the truck.
It started with her clothes.
Her roller skates.
The soft, glittery pieces of girlhood.
The joy-things. The childhood-things.
All of them rigged with invisible bombs—
ticking quietly,
as if joy had a timer on it too.
And in the dream,
he gathered them up.
Her father.
Not the broken man—
but the one she remembered from before.
He looked at her with eyes that already knew
what she hadn’t yet grown the words to understand.
He said, “Go. Hide. Now.”
And she did.
Naked.
Ashamed.
A ten-year-old Eve,
crawling across the street in silence
into a ditch lined with leaves and trembling light.
She didn’t cry.
She didn’t scream.
She just laid down and covered herself in dirt—
as if the earth were her mother now.
As if she might still hold her,
when no one else would.
Without warning…
the house exploded.
Not just hers.
Every house on the street.
Every home that ever held a version of her.
Gone. In flames.
But there was no Mom.
No siblings.
No neighbors rushing in with rescue or reason.
Just her.
A small girl in the dirt,
watching everything familiar
fold into fire and vanish.
And sometimes—
he would walk out of the flames.
Her daddy.
Singed and silent,
like a ghost trying to remember
what it felt like to be alive.
To be loved.
To be someone’s hero.
And sometimes—
he didn’t.
But always,
She woke up.
Not screaming.
Just still.
Heart thudding like a war drum
beneath ribs packed with leaves and fear.
Everything burned.
The house.
The laughter.
The soft, sweet normalcy of childhood.
But her?
She didn’t.
She laid quiet in the ditch,
until even the smoke forgot to rise.
Until silence returned like a ghost
kneeling beside her.
She let the dust hang in the air like incense,
offering it to something divine—
whatever might be listening among the ruins.
Because even among the ash,
there are truths—
sharp little ones—
that only come out in the burning.
And when she finally stood…
the girl who rose from that ditch
didn’t carry the fire with her.
She carried the memory.
She let her silence be a hymn.
Because this, too—this ache,
this pause,
this not-knowing—
it’s holy.
The wreckage proved the heart was real.
That she had loved.
That something sacred had lived there.
They say joy comes in the morning.
Or was it mourning?
Maybe it’s both.
Maybe they’re sisters,
braiding their hair with tears and light.
Either way…
She found it.
In the hands of a little boy
whose smile is pure joy
and his laugh sounds like freedom.
In the almond eyes of a little girl
who sees through time and
exudes a joy that touches the soul.
In God…
in Wisdom.
In love.
And in every breath
I’m still allowed to take.