Keep Swimming

I am still adrift.

In this river I did not choose, but that carries me anyway.

I don’t know where it’s taking me.

I no longer try to know.

There is a part of me that grew tired of asking.

I fought against the current too many times.

I spent my body.

I spent my soul.

And what I received was silence, water in my lungs, and an exhaustion i don’t know how to put into words.

Every time I tried to resist, I sank.

Now I let myself go.

Not out of weakness, but out of clarity.

Because there are moments when the only possible strength is to stop fighting.

I’ve learned to look at the logs drifting by…the faces that appear with promises, the easy shortcuts, the overly sweet gestures…and to understand that none of them will save me.

There is no salvation outside of me.

Healing begins here.

In the hardest place: inside. It begins with forgiving myself.

Forgiving myself for saying “enough.”

For ending what, on the outside, seemed whole.

For undoing a marriage that lived only on appearances.

For choosing myself, even without knowing who I was.

This is ground zero.

Still unstable ground, but mine.

How I will forgive myself, I don’t yet know.

But today… that no longer matters to me.

What matters is that one day, I get there.

Life reaches me now with more silence.

Maybe it has slowed down.

Or maybe it was I who stopped screaming.

I accept not knowing.

I accept not being in control.

I accept the emptiness.

I even accept solitude… as if it were a house where I can finally rest.

I need this withdrawal.

To be alone.

To face myself directly, without haste, without emotional makeup.

It is in this space that I begin to discover myself.

There are days when I cry for hours, without explanation.

Others when I smile with an almost strange lightness, as if everything were waiting to begin again.

I live like this: between collapse and rising.

Between darkness and the light that sometimes slips in through the cracks.

I don’t know what the future holds.

And honestly, I don’t want to know.

What I have is this: a now.

A tired body, but still mine.

A soul that still believes, even wounded.

I move on.

Without the strength to row, but with the courage to float.

Without certainties, but with a new instinct: the instinct not to resist.

And, from afar, way down there…

I think I’m beginning to see something.

Maybe a shore.

Maybe me.