it was always you.

the magic, i mean, the wonder, the sun, it was always you.

The mind can be cruel with beautiful things.

Give it a flower and it will immediately begin calculating winter. Give it a kiss and it will begin constructing the blueprints of loss. Give it one beautiful night, one conversation that opened something, one moment where aliveness arrived so suddenly you felt it in the backs of your knees, and the mind will do what minds do.

It will try to own it.

And you can’t always see it happening. The mind is subtle about this. It’s not like, hey here I am, let’s try to cage this beauty… It simply begins asking questions. Reasonable questions. Responsible questions. What does this mean? Where is it going? Will it happen again? What if this is the last time? What if this is all I get?

And somewhere inside the asking, the beauty drains out of the room.

The moment was still there. The feeling was still real. But I had stopped living inside it and started managing it. Stopped experiencing it and started building a cage around it. Stopped letting it move through me and started pressing it between glass like a specimen, like something I could study and preserve and understand.

Like something I could keep.

I caught myself doing this a few nights ago.

Something beautiful had happened. The kind of beautiful that lands in your chest before your brain registers it. The kind that makes you feel, briefly, wildly, gratefully alive. And for a few minutes I was just inside it. Laughing. Open. Moved in a way I hadn’t been moved in a while. The part of me that sometimes forgets she is still capable of wonder... remembered.

And then my mind arrived.

I spent hours, actual hours, living inside futures that had never happened. Inside losses that hadn’t occurred. Inside the calculus of meaning and outcome and permanence and what it all signified. Inside the very reasonable, very human, very exhausting question: how do I hold onto this?

And somewhere around the third spiral, something snapped.

Like a twig under too much weight.

The way things snap when they’ve been holding for too long.

Enough.

holy fuck, woman, enough.

Enough processing. Enough dissecting. Enough turning every beautiful thing into evidence that something is missing, into a problem that requires solving, into a living creature that requires a cage to be preserved.

Because here is what I had forgotten, here is what I keep forgetting, here is apparently the thing I will spend my whole life learning:

The magic was never him (or her, or them, or whoever the other is to you)

The magic was never the kiss. Never the conversation. Never the dance. Never the specific arrangement of that specific night.

The magic was me.

The part of me that came alive in those moments. The part that laughed from somewhere below the throat. The part that opened without permission. The part that felt wonder arriving like weather and stood in it with her arms out. The part of me that remembered she was still capable of being moved.

That part was never in his keeping.

He illuminated it. The way a flashlight passing over a room doesn’t create the room, doesn’t own the room, exists in the room for only a moment before moving on. The room was there before. The room remains after.

But I had been treating people like the source of the light.

And then grieving, genuinely grieving, when they moved the flashlight somewhere else.

Here is what I think we do.

We hand our aliveness to people and then wonder why their absence feels like a small death. We make them responsible for our capacity to feel wonder, to feel desire, to feel the specific electricity of being awake inside a life that keeps offering us beautiful things. We build entire sworlds of meaning around a single person, a single night, a single moment, and then when the moment ends, as all moments end, because that is the nature and the law of moments, we experience it as devastation.

And the devastation is real. I’m not diminishing it.

But I am beginning to suspect we are grieving the wrong thing.

Because the truth is, most beautiful things cannot be kept. Their beauty exists specifically because they are passing. The sunset is beautiful because it is leaving. The bloom is beautiful because it is temporary. The conversation that cracked you open at 2am is extraordinary precisely because it arrived unrepeatable and will remain that way.

When I try to pin it down, to cage it, to extract a guarantee from it, to make it mean something permanent, something stabilizing, something I can rely on... I am doing the most human thing there is to do.

And I am killing exactly what I am trying to preserve.

Every beautiful thing I have ever tried to keep, I have accidentally loved with a closed fist.

And a closed fist is a strange way to hold a living thing.

The human wants permanence.

The soul wants experience.

The human wants certainty.

The soul wants wonder.

The human wants to know where this is going.

The soul is already dancing.

And these two things wrestle inside the same body. Constantly. The soul saying feel this, be here, let it move through you and the mind saying yes but what does it mean, yes but where is it going, yes but what if it ends and the body caught between them, exhausted, magnificent, trying to love something and simultaneously building a container for it, trying to stay open and simultaneously constructing the architecture of control.

This is what it mens to be human. This is the specific bind of being a creature capable of both aliveness and anticipatory grief, capable of experiencing beauty and immediately, reflexively, beginning to mourn it.

But the mourning before the ending... that is the thing that costs us everything.

Because we leave the moment before it leaves us. We build the cage before the bird tries to fly. We begin grieving the kiss while we are still inside it.

And then we wonder why the kiss felt like not quite enough.

Healing, I think, has very little to do with learning how to let people go.

That framing always felt slightly wrong to me, slightly too clean, slightly too much like a lesson someone arrived at from outside the actual fire. Letting go implies the thing was yours to release. Implies possession in the very act of releasing it.

What if the practice is different?

What if the practice is learning how to remain open to an experience while it is happening without immediately asking where it is going? How to let beauty arrive without building a house for it? How to want something, genuinely, with your whole body, with every cell, with that particular ache that makes you feel most alive... and allow the wanting itself to be the experience, rather than the evidence of something you are about to lose?

How to love with an open hand.

How to keep dancing after the song changes.

How to stay inside the wonder without making wonder responsible for your sense of safety.

The irony, and I have been turning this over for days, is that when we release people from the obligation of our aliveness, we become capable of loving them more honestly. Because they are no longer our oxygen. No longer our evidence. No longer required to perform a function they were never designed to perform.

They become what they actually are.

Another beautiful thing we get to experience while we are here.

And maybe, maybe, that is enough.

Maybe the kiss can be exactly what it was. A kiss. The night can be exactly what it was. A night that cracked something open and left both people slightly more alive than they were before.

Maybe the magic doesn’t require a future to be real.

Maybe the magic doesn’t require permanence to be worth feeling.

Maybe I can want it and release it in the same breath, with the same open hands, without calling that loss.

Maybe that is what it looks like to love something without a closed fist.

To feel it fully.

To let it move through.

To stay with the aliveness it stirred in you long after the moment ends.

To keep dancing.

Even after the song changes.

Even alone in your kitchen at midnight with the lights low and your chest cracked open and the full, unbearable, gorgeous weight of being alive pressing against your ribs like something trying to get out.

Keep dancing.

The magic was always yours.

It was only ever yours.

The poem/journal entry that helped this arrive…

[untitled]

I think people mistake me for someone unafraid of fire.

Which is kinda silly and most certainly not true.

Mmm. I like the fire sure

but I am terrified of it.

i always have been.

i read warning labels.

i touch the stove twice before bed.

i replay conversations from three years ago.

i prepare for catastrophes that have not happened and may never happen.

i have built entire civilizations out of contingency plans.

i am, at my core,

a very anxious and feral little creature.

just one with a remarkable willingness to walk directly into the thing that scares her.

which sounds brave.

until you realize the alternative was self-amputation.

and. fuck.

i know a thing or two about self-amputation.

i spent years doing it.

decades, maybe.

standing over myself with a knife.

careful. methodical.

certain i was healing.

“all right then.

let’s see.

what seems to be the problem?”

this longing?

look what it’s done to us.

off it comes.

this softness?

people keep putting their fingerprints all over it.

dangerous.

gone.

this need?

humiliating.

remove it.

this grief?

honestly.

have some dignity.

cut deeper.

this rage?

well. we might need a little of that.

keep it for emergencies. ;)

this joy?

mmm.

joy feels suspicious.

joy has a habit of arriving arm in arm with loss.

have you noticed that?

she shows up radiant.

sun-warmed skin.

wildflowers in her hair.

and somewhere behind her,

impermanence is dragging three suitcases up the driveway.

because every beautiful thing

arrives

carrying its own ending.

a child.

a sunset.

a lover.

a season.

a life.

to be reduntant

every beautiful thing

drags impermanence behind it

like a little red wagon.

which feels rude, if i’m being honest.

and for a long time i thought wisdom meant preparing for that.

you know…

getting ahead of it.

outsmarting it.

staying detached enough that when the leaving came…

i would remain intact.

i thought healing meant

needing less.

wanting less.

feeling less.

i thought growth meant becoming someone who could look at a beautiful thing

and remain untouched.

which sounds wise.

right up until you realize

the things that touch us

are the whole point.

but i didn’t know that then.

back then i was busy becoming smaller.

frighteningly good at it, actually.

i could take a whole human experience

and carve it into something manageable.

something presentable.

something that wouldn’t spill onto the carpet

and make everyone soooo fucking uncomfortable.

i called fear discernment.

control awareness.

avoidance wisdom.

i built cages so intricate they looked like philosophies.

and every single one of them had the same purpose:

protect the heart.

protect the heart.

protect the heart.

must protect the heart.

from what?

well.

there’s the question.

from what?

and a few nights ago i caught myself.

the way you catch a child sneaking cookies.

the way you catch a dog halfway onto the couch. T

he way you catch yourself repeating an old prayer

long after you’ve stopped believing in the god who taught it to you.

there i was.

doing the thing.

the thing i always do when something beautiful enters my life.

trying to understand it.

which sounds harmless.

except i know myself.

and sometimes understanding

is simply control wearing glasses.

sometimes understanding

is doubt with a clipboard.

sometimes understanding

is fear standing outside a living thing,

demanding guarantees.

where is this going?

what does it mean?

how long will it last?

am i allowed to want it?

what happens if i lose it?

ah.

oh. shit.

there it is.

the real question.

WHAT HAPPENS IF I LOSE IT????????

and suddenly

i could see

he whole machine.

all the gears.

all the cages.

All the years spent standing over myself with a knife.

because i was never actually trying

to keep the beautiful thing.

was i?

no, that wasn’t it at all.

i was trying to outrun the grief of eventually losing it.

the shattering that will inevitably arrive.

which, annoyingly, has almost the exact same effect.

and then something went very still.

because i saw it. really saw it.

you cannot excise the thing that makes you feel most alive

and call the bleeding growth.

remove grief and wonder leaves with her.

remove longing and love follows quietly out the door.

remove need and intimacy has nowhere to land.

remove joy and the whole nervous system dims.

wonder and devastation share a volume knob.

you cannot turn down heartbreak without turning down love.

you cannot mute grief without muting wonder.

you cannot amputate your aliveness without amputating life itself.

and holy mother of christ

there was the tragedy.

all those years i thought i was learning how to survive.

what i was actually learning was how to become smaller.

smaller than my love.

smaller than my grief.

smaller than my capacity to be changed

by the things

that arrive specifically to change me.

the friendships.

the heartbreaks.

the children.

the lovers.

the losses that carved new rooms inside my chest

and then moved in without asking.

all of it arriving with armfuls of life.

and there i was,

the very anxious and feral little creature,

trying to press it between glass.

trying to pin a living thing to a board.

trying to make a deal with impermanence.

trying to love without being changed.

which is like trying to stand in the ocean

and negotiate with the tide

about how wet you are willing to get.

it never works.

later that night i was standing barefoot in my kitchen.

music humming softly through the walls.

moonlight stretched across the counter.

and i caught myself reaching for the knife again.

(the metaphorical one, silly)

the old one. the familiar one. the one that says:

this feeling is too much.

this wanting is too much.

this beautiful thing should be smaller.

safer.

easier to lose.

and for the first time i didn’t pick it up.

i let the ache sit down beside the gratitude.

i let longing pull out a chair.

i let grief arrive without escorting wonder out the door.

actually,

they looked surprisingly comfortable together.

i think they even shared a cup of tea.

and there i was.

laughing a little.

crying a little.

dancing a little.

i wish i could tell you i stopped reaching for the knife.

i didn’t.

yesterday i caught myself sharpening it.

today i caught myself putting it down. tomorrow?

who knows.

old habits die hard.

but at least now i know what i’m holding.

at least now i know that every part of me

i kept trying to carve away

was carrying life.

the fire was never the problem.

maybe the fire is allowing yourself to be

this alive knowing exactly what it costs.

with your hands open.

and your chest full.

and the whole unbearable gorgeous weight of this life

pressing against my ribs

like something trying,

still trying,

to get out.

xx

Nikyla Maria