The Lastings of Forever

 Some days I feel like I was born in pieces. 

Like the world grabbed one part of me too early

and forgot to put the rest back.

I don’t even know when I stopped being a kid.

I just know one day,

I looked up and nobody was holding my hand anymore.

And I didn’t ask why—

I just figured it meant I had to grow up.

Fast.

But there’s still a small version of me

that cries when the room is too quiet.

That doesn’t trust the good days

because she remembers the bad ones too well.

She didn’t disappear.

She got quiet.

She made room for everyone else’s voices

until she couldn’t hear her own.

And somehow, that silence—that quiet ache just below the surface—became my normal.

But I’m learning something now.

Something no one ever taught me.

That forever isn’t a big dream out there,

or some finish line I haven’t reached.

Forever isn’t what happens

when you finally get it right.

Forever is that little girl inside me,

the one that never left.

She’s been here the whole time.

Watching.

Waiting.

Asking me to come back to her.

And the more I listen,

the more I realize—she’s not broken.

She’s the reason I survived.

She kept the light on

when everything else went dark.

She reminded me how to laugh

even when I didn’t feel like smiling.

She kept hope alive,

buried under all that tired.

So now, when I sit in the stillness—in the mess, in the questions, in the parts of me I used to hide—I hear her louder.

She tells me:

"You were never too much.

You were never too soft.

You were never wrong for needing love

and asking for more."

She reminds me that healing

doesn’t mean going back.

It means taking her with me.

Forward.

And that right there—That quiet, powerful reunion

between who I’ve been and who I’m becoming—That’s the lasting of forever.

Not some fantasy, not some perfect version of me.

But the child who stayed.

And the woman who finally chose

to let her speak again.