past

They say to never look back especially not in the past, like memory is a cliff and regret is the fall, like the years behind us are all teeth and no tenderness, like nothing good ever lived there. But sometimes the past taps my shoulder softly, not to drag me under, just to ask if i remember how I once breathed without counting the cost of air.

I don’t turn around to worship it. I turn around because my heart knows the way even when my feet are tired of pretending they were never bruised.

There are days I look back and see a version of myself who didn’t know the words for survival yet but survived anyway. Who smiled with gaps in her armor. Who loved without a helmet. They say looking back will slow you down. Maybe. But so does grief. So does carrying everything unspoken like groceries with no handles.

The past is not a monster. It’s a house with some broken windows and a few rooms still warm. There are places in it I don’t enter anymore, but there are corners where my name was spoken kindly. I look back and I don’t see failure, I see context. I see why I flinch at loud joy. I see why I try so hard to make things right, why I apologize to furniture, why I keep going even when I want to lie down on the floor of time and sleep.

They tell me, move on, as if it’s a switch, as if the heart doesn’t walk with limp sometimes, as if healing isn’t just learning where it still hurts and choosing not to bleed on others.

I don’t live in the past. I just nod at it when it passes by. It taught me things the future hasn’t yet like how to endure quietly, like how love can be real and still leave, like how softness is not the opposite of strength.

If I look back, it’s not to disappear there. It’s to collect myself. To gather the scattered versions of me and say, you didn’t imagine it. You weren’t weak. You were becoming. So let them say don’t look back. I willbriefly, gently. The way you glance at the sea before turning inland, the way you touch an old scar not because it hurts but because it proves you lived through something and are still here, still walking, still learning how to face forward without erasing where you came from.