She Keeps Making Things

She keeps makes things.

Not because the world
has been particularly gentle with her,
but because something in her
has always needed
to become.

A room becomes a refuge.
A battered piece of furniture
gets another life beneath her hands.
A canvas waits on a desk
and somehow becomes
a question.

A poem arrives
without knocking.

She reads it later
and thinks,

Where the hell
did that come from?

Ripping veils.
Angry waves.
A woman rising.

She doesn’t always recognize
the woman who writes these things.

But there she is.

Still.

She has lived through
doors closing,
people leaving,
people hurting,
versions of herself
she thought she might never escape.

And yet—

She keeps a cat nearby.
She stretches toward the floor.
She writes in the margins.
She paints over old surfaces
without completely erasing
what was there before.

This is important.

She has learned
that restoration
is not the same thing
as pretending something
was never broken.

Sometimes the brush
reveals the grain.

Sometimes the scar
is part of the furniture.

Sometimes you keep
the strange little mark
because it proves
the thing survived.

She is learning
to do the same with herself.

Not polished.
Not finished.
Not certain.

Just outside certainty,
where the map becomes useless
and wandering becomes
its own kind of wisdom.

She has spent years
being told what she was—

too much,
too sensitive,
too difficult,
too broken,
too something.

Now she is becoming
less interested
in the verdict.

She wants the morning.

The page.

The red brick house.

A room that belongs to her.

A life with enough quiet
to hear her own thoughts
without mistaking them
for someone else’s voice.

And perhaps
that is what freedom looks like
at first:

not a grand escape,

but a woman
standing in her own room
with paint on her hands,

looking at something
she made,

and realizing—

I am still here.

Then she smiles,

because somewhere inside her
is a strange looking Bird
who is already gathering
another piece of string,

another scrap of color,

another impossible feather,

another story

to make it part of the art,

her nest.