Blooming Through the Pain

I am standing in a field of poppies where the wind drifts softly between the red blossoms, and each poppy glows like a small wound on the skin of the earth. In this quiet place full of color, I stand alone, somewhere between being and disappearing. The red petal resting over my eye is not pain it is memory. A memory of things I’ve seen, things I never wanted to see, and things no one but me could ever understand. The crimson lines running down my face. And in the hush of the field, I understand that I was never meant to vanish. The red is not only a mark of what hurt me, but of what shaped me. I stand there not as something broken, but as something quietly blooming.