Juniper Burning
Through the grief, you grow, and sometimes, the stories you told yourself about someone dissolve when you finally are able to let them go
In the space between memory and truth
I created you—fashioned mythologies
from fragments of who I needed you to be
while hiding from my own completeness.
My grandmother would've recognized this
— the way we shape people into saviors,
mistaking our longing for love.
For over a year, I poured myself into the basin
of what you represented: shelter from storms
I believed would swallow me whole.
I noticed one morning how light filtered
differently through my understanding
— the sudden weight of seeing clearly
what I had constructed around your name.
The grief came then, not for you
but for the story I'd been telling about
when standing in your shadow.
The way Mystic has learned to read
the changes in shadows cast by light
through trees on mountain trails we ride,
I began tracking what was real beneath invention.
What falls away is not the love
but the illusion that contained it—
borders dissolving like hoofprints
after mountain rain washes the trail clean.
Some lessons arrive in whispers.
The mecates loosening in your palm
when you realize holding on
was always about fear.
I keep your memory now
like weathered tack hung carefully
— honored for what it taught,
but no longer needed for the journey.
The woman standing at the gate
is not who entered.
She breathes easier now,
having found what was whole within her all along.