Fragile and Fierce

Spring arrives slowly, like a hesitant pulse beneath my skin, not in bursts of color but in the lingering light along the floorboards. The air tastes different: damp and bitter, a sweetness hiding in the undercurrent. I feel it in my bones, in the way the corners of the room seem less hostile, in the quiet lifting of something inside me I thought long dead. I am thawing, though carefully, like frost that refuses to give itself up completely.

I have come to regard my isolation as a hibernation or a necessary dark. The winter was not a season but a body pressing down, heavy and silent, leaving me hollowed, waiting. And beneath it, always, life stirred—unclaimed and stubborn. I did not see it at first. I mistook the stillness for emptiness. Only now do I feel the faint stirring of what was always there.

I have come to regard my isolation as a hibernation or a necessary dark.

I am learning the girl I once was. Her face, her hands, her voice appear in old photographs, in journals with ink bleeding like bruises. She startles me. Her mania hangs in the air like smoke; her suffering is sharp, unyielding. I read her pages and shiver at the clarity of her terror and courage.

Art was my hiding place and my confession. Alone, I gave myself to it, letting the brush or the stroke speak when I could not. I pressed my madness into color and shape, layering it until the canvas carried more of me than I could manage to carry myself. In those moments, I was not performing. I was not pretending. I was only myself, splintered and luminous. A girl without the world watching.

I remember the hours in the studio, the brush moving until my pulse slowed, until something inside me uncoiled. Until I could breathe. That is where I learned to let unraveling be beautiful. That is where I learned that the rawness of life need not be hidden.

I remember the hours in the studio, the brush moving until my pulse slowed, until something inside me uncoiled.

Now, spring arrives in increments. I watch it creep along the garden, along the streets, along the windows of this quiet house. I ask myself what it would mean to let the thaw last, to carry it through the winters too. To burrow when I must. To rest beneath frost and shadow. To trust the pulse of life that pushes from below. To remember that turbulence is constant, but not fatal.

And I wait. I wait with care, with attention, with the knowledge that light will return, that I will return with it—fragile and fierce, the girl I was still living inside me.