Secret Garden

The sky bursts open,

not gently,

not softly,

but like a body breaking,

like something holding on for too long

finally letting go.

The first drop hits—

hot asphalt hisses,

dust rises like ghosts startled awake,

and the earth opens her mouth

like she’s starving.

There’s no beauty here.

No poetry.

Just the raw writhing of water finding cracks,

finding hunger,

finding every place that aches or crumbles or waits.

The rain doesn’t ask permission.

It doesn’t care where it falls—

forest, rooftop, desert, skin.

It pounds against leaves as if to punish them

for turning their faces away,

fills the throats of rivers

until they choke on their own rushing,

slides down windowpanes like tears

too heavy to hold back.

And it keeps going.

There is no tenderness in this.

This is not about grace.

This is about gravity and surrender,

the weight of billions of tiny impacts

stripping the world bare.

And something in you loosens—

against your will,

unraveling in the rhythm,

in the relentless pounding that reminds you of your own breaking,

of the times you couldn’t stop falling.

You stand there,

letting it hit you,

letting it drench everything you thought was safe.

Maybe this is what healing feels like:

not silent, not soft,

not clean.

But messy.

Wet hands in the dirt,

skin soaked,

blurry vision as everything spills.

The rain knows.

It always knows.

It comes to destroy,

and in the destruction

it leaves something you didn’t know you were—

raw, gasping,

I don’t ask for much...

just truth,

as bare and quiet as it comes.

Not the version wrapped in maybes

or buried beneath a smile,

but the kind that lets me exhale

without wondering what I missed

between your silences.

You offered a call today—

and I almost took it,

I'm just a girl who’s still learning

how to stop mistaking warmth for fire.

Would it have soothed the ache,

Or leave a deeper one in its place?

How do you still have this power?

To make me feel

like your precious girl

in one breath

and a stranger

in the next.

I wait,

quietly counting

your days away,

our days ahead,

and all the things

you still haven’t said.

I wonder,

not for the first time,

if you know

how heavy it is

to carry a love

that might not be real

anymore.

If you’d just say it...

one way or the other,

my heart might finally know

how to stop