Zebra Seeking Spoons

There is a version of me

I still visit.

She wakes early

without bargaining with her body.

She says yes

without calculating cost.

She moves through days

like they belong to her.

I miss her.

I miss the ease.

The unexamined strength.

The plans that stretched years ahead

without an asterisk.

Chronic illness did not arrive

with a dramatic soundtrack.

It settled in quietly—

and then stayed.

It took things

piece by piece.

Stamina.

Spontaneity.

Certainty.

It left behind

appointment cards

and a vocabulary

I never wanted to learn.

Grief became a second pulse—

steady,

sometimes louder than hope.

I grieved the career

that bent under the weight.

The friendships

that didn’t know how to stay.

The simple arrogance

of assuming tomorrow

would cooperate.

Some days

the loss feels endless—

like standing at the edge

of a house that burned down

holding only the keys.

But grief,

if you sit with it long enough,

changes temperature.

It cools.

And in the ash

there are embers.

Not the life I planned.

Not the body I had.

But something still alive.

I began to notice

what remained.

A capacity for tenderness

I never needed before.

An attention to small joys

because they are not guaranteed.

A fierce empathy

for anyone walking uneven ground.

Purpose did not return

as ambition.

It returned

as meaning.

In conversations

that say, me too.

In art shaped by lived truth.

In boundaries that protect

what little energy I have

and teach me it is enough.

I am still grieving.

I may always be.

But alongside the sorrow

there is a quiet rebuilding—

a life measured not in achievements

but in authenticity.

Not in speed

but in depth.

The woman I was

is not coming back.

But the person I am becoming

is learning how to hold loss

in one hand

and possibility

in the other.

And somehow—

both can exist

at once.