There is a moment when fear stops looking like fear. It disguises itself as care, as waiting, as caution, until we can no longer tell whether we are choosing to stay or simply avoiding departure. Time helps with this deception. It does not need to hold us back. It only has to teach us, little by little, how large a world we should be afraid of.

And still, something insists on being born where there should have been only passage. Perhaps freedom is not what remains untouched, but what, even wounded, refuses the shape it has been given. There are forces that try to make us smaller without ever needing to touch us. And there is a part of us that keeps making room, even after it has learned to fear its own opening.

Perhaps living is discovering how much of us still knows how to fly after fear learns to take aim.

That's a selfportrait photography manipulated digitally with photoshop, lightroom and photoshop generative fill (for feathers and the flower)