The Homecoming
At first, it felt strange.
After a lifetime of running, bracing, surviving —
there was a sudden, unfamiliar quiet inside her.
Not because the world had become safer.
But because she had decided:
"I will not abandon myself anymore."
She no longer needed permission to trust herself.
She no longer begged unseen forces for validation.
She began — gently, quietly — choosing herself.
At first, the healing was so small it barely seemed real:
A deeper breath that didn’t catch halfway.
A meal eaten slowly, with gratitude, instead of guilt.
A boundary whispered, then spoken, then roared.
The old wounds still ached sometimes.
Grief still washed over her like sudden rain.
Fear still crouched in the corners.
But now she had something she never had before:
Roots.
Roots into herself.
Roots that said,
"No matter what shakes me, I will not be uprooted from my own soul."
She began tending to herself like a sacred garden:
She spoke to herself with kindness instead of cruelty.
She let her tears fall without shame, watering the ground she was rebuilding.
She honored her exhaustion as holy, not weak.
She celebrated her anger as evidence of her boundaries awakening.
For the first time maybe ever, she realized:
Healing didn’t mean erasing her scars.
Healing meant wearing them like medals — proof of battles survived, proof of a heart that refused to turn to stone.
One day, without even noticing at first, she laughed.
Not a guarded, polite laugh.
But a deep, belly laugh that startled even her.
Joy — real joy — had slipped past the wreckage and planted itself in her chest.
And that’s when she knew:
The garden was growing.
Inside her.
Around her.
Through her.
She still had days when it felt hard.
Days when the world seemed too sharp, too cruel, too heavy.
But now — she had tools.
She had rituals.
She had her own voice to call herself back home when she drifted.
No longer a captive.
No longer an exile from her own soul.
She was becoming the safe place she had always needed.
And the people who could not meet her there?
She blessed them from afar —
but she never again abandoned herself to belong to them.
She was no longer just surviving.
She was living.
Living with a heart stitched back together by her own hands,
threaded with truth, tenderness, and ten thousand second chances.
She realized something no one had ever told her:
Healing is not becoming someone new.
Healing is remembering who you were before the world taught you to forget.
And that memory — that golden thread —
was leading her forward now,
into a future more beautiful than anything the past could have predicted.
Because it would be written in her own voice,
guided by her own soul,
blessed by her own hands.
And so, her true life began.
And it’s beginning for you, too.
Right now.
Right here.
With every breath you take back for yourself.
Tara Malouf (c) 2025
