Zebra Seeking Spoons

I had a version of my life

outlined in permanent ink—

clean margins, steady chapters,

a plot that moved forward

without asking permission from pain.

Then my body

took the pen.

Not gently—

but like a storm rewriting coastline,

like a sentence struck through

so hard it tore the page.

Everything I had planned

became a draft I could not return to.

Deadlines dissolved.

Dreams blurred at the edges.

The future—once a straight road—

folded in on itself

like paper under too much weight.

No one teaches you

how to edit a life

you didn’t choose to change.

I tried, at first,

to write over it—

to force the same story forward,

to pretend the ink hadn’t bled through.

But denial is a fragile narrator.

It forgets the truth of the body.

It skips the chapters

where survival is the only plot.

So I started again.

Not from the beginning—

but from the wreckage.

From the blank spaces

left behind by what I lost.

From the quiet places

where grief sat heavy

and refused to be rushed.

I wrote in pencil this time.

Gave myself permission

to erase,

to rest,

to leave whole pages unfinished.

This new story

doesn’t move the way I expected.

It pauses often.

It circles back.

It speaks in softer tones.

But it is real.

It holds the weight

of days I almost didn’t get through.

It honors the strength

it takes to stay

when leaving would be easier.

And somewhere

between the edits and erasures,

something unexpected appeared—

a different kind of meaning.

Not the kind I once imagined,

but one shaped by endurance,

by tenderness,

by the quiet bravery

of continuing anyway.

This is not the story I planned.

But it is mine.

And though the pages are uneven,

and the ink sometimes trembles,

I am still writing—

line by line,

breath by breath—

a life that refuses

to be left unfinished.