I wrote Finally in the quiet after a series of goodbyes, when I realized how much of my life had been shaped by the need to be chosen. This poem came from learning to release the people and selves I was clinging to, and from the stubborn belief that love should feel like an opening, not a slow erasure.
Finally
Finally
I searched for meaning inside the mouths of others, called love by names that were never mine to keep. I mistook longing for devotion, and silence for depth. I held on to almosts as if they were promises, and made homes out of places that asked me to leave. I thought being chosen was the same as being loved. I thought staying was proof of something. So I stayed long after my heart had begun speaking in exits. But nothing wild was ever meant to remain still. The river does not apologize for finding another way. The sky does not grieve when the clouds let go. And the wind— it never asks permission to become somewhere else. Maybe that is what I was afraid of: not losing them, but losing the version of me that existed beside them. So I loosened my hands. Not because it stopped hurting, but because I finally understood that love should not require the death of the self to prove it was real. And now, after all this time, I no longer chase what turns away. I no longer confuse being missed with being loved, or being needed with being known. I let what leaves, leave. I let what stays, stay. And for the first time, I am not standing at the window waiting for something to come back. I am standing here with the door open, feeling the air move through me, and finally, finally, I understand the wind.
I wrote this to remember that I am not a harbor for other people’s storms, but a body learning the shape of its own tide. If it feels like a goodbye, know that for me it was also a quiet doorway into a life where my leaving could finally mean arrival.
Read Next → Fire
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Author’s Note
There is a quiet threshold between waiting and release, a breath where you realize the thing you were hoping would return has already become weather. In that stillness, the wind stops sounding like loss and starts speaking in the only language freedom has ever known: movement.
— Author’s Note: It took me years to unclench my hands from lives I had outgrown, to admit that calling something love while shrinking inside it was a kind of slow erasing. Finally was the moment I chose to step outside of that erasure and let the leaving be an act of care for the self I had been burying. Freedom did not arrive as fireworks, but as a thin, insistent breeze through a half-open door, asking nothing of me except that I not turn away.
