The river does not ask how you fell in only takes you, cold and certain, pulling at your lungs like a quiet demand. Branches lean in, witnesses with trembling hands, while the current wraps your ribs in a tightening hush a language of weight, of breath stolen before it forms. You learn the sound of silence pressed beneath the surface, how panic blooms like thunder with nowhere to go. You kick, you claw, but the water is patient, and it knows how to hold. There, in the dim green blur, you meet the heaviness not just of water, but of everything you tried not to carry. And still something in you refuses to dissolve. A fracture of light, a memory of air, a stubborn, flickering yes you rise. You break through not into peace, but into ache lungs burning, body shaking, the world louder than you remember. Because survival is not gentle. It is the gasp, the trembling, the fight to stay when leaving would be easier. And yet you stay. You learn the rhythm again: in, out not just breath, but choice. You become river-shaped strong where it matters, soft where it heals, carving kindness from stone. And though the current still moves, though the depths still call, you stand in the shallows with something unbroken a quiet knowing that even forced under, even undone, even lost in the weight we rise above it all.
give me the large dose small doses of kindness are beautiful, yet sometimes are not enough;
surviving off of crumbs a soul can still starve—
i prefer large doses of kindness that last and linger on more than a single day,
i want do be drowned in flowers, trinkets, affection, compliments, and love;
i want to know i matter to someone else other than me—
i want to linger on the mind as a dream or a haunting crow, whose inky black feathers and eerie song bring no peace in accordance to how a soul treated me. -linda m. crate
i define myself watching from a distance, you can lose your whole life waiting to become;
and so i decided to believe in myself and my dreams—
for it didn't matter if others could see what i saw, only that i could get there;
because there's nothing this simulation can do to hold me back from becoming who i truly am—
i am magic, i am a melody, a poem, a song, i am the crow, the fox, the creek, the tree; i am immortal and i will never be forgotten no matter how many discard me—
i define myself although many others have tried, they don't know my heart or the mythology of these bones. -linda m. crate
where my magic is understood dragons in flight, freed from the tethers of anyone's need are so beautiful to watch;
but there's a part of me that also wants to escape on the back of one into another realm where i am warmly accepted and loved where my magic is understood—
some forgotten princess which is suddenly remembered,
pulled away from a reality where she doesn't feel known or appreciated;
ever since i was a little girl i thought perhaps if i were good enough my father would come find me and take me home—
sometimes he was a prince or a king, but usually he was a vampire. -linda m. crate
