I watch a bird throw itself into the sky
again, and again
as if faith alone could lift it.
It does not know its wings are clipped.
It only knows the shape of the sky
and the cruelty of gravity
and the way instinct keeps asking for more.
There is something unbearable about that—
wanting freedom without knowing why it keeps failing.
Wanting air.
Wanting height.
Wanting a world that does not punish you
for believing you were made to rise.
We live on the same earth,
but we do not live in the same world.
Some of us wake to birdsong and coffee steam
and the soft luxury of believing tomorrow is promised.
Others wake to rubble—
to borders drawn through blood,
to silence where names used to be spoken,
to the understanding that survival is not living
but a skill you learn young.
I try to hold both realities at once.
It feels like tearing my own ribs apart.
I look at the sky, and it looks back at me,
indifferent.
The sky has always been good at distance.
It watches children learn what loss means
and does not intervene.
It watches mothers scream names into dust.
It watches people grow old, waiting for peace
that never arrives.
And still—
the sun rises.
As if nothing happened.
As if everything didn’t.
There is a weeping willow I think about often.
Not a metaphorical one—
a real tree, bent low by its own weight,
its branches trailing the earth like apologies.
People think it is sad because it cries.
They don’t realize it cries because it has survived.
Because standing upright would have snapped it in half.
I think about that when my heart hurts in ways
language cannot carry.
When the grief feels ancient—
older than my body,
older than my name.
As if I am mourning things I never touched
but somehow lost anyway.
My heart breaks for strangers.
For faces I will never know.
For hands reaching out across oceans
that do not care how desperate the reaching is.
My heart breaks because I know what it is to ache
without permission to stop.
Everyone is a human.
That truth should be simple.
It should be enough.
And yet we have learned how to look away
with terrifying skill.
I feel guilty for the softness of my suffering
and ashamed that it still destroys me.
I feel too much and never enough
all at once.
I ache from the depths of my soul
in a way that feels tragically useless—
because my tears do not rebuild homes,
because my grief does not stop bombs,
because my broken heart cannot shield anyone
from the world’s hands.
And still, I weep.
Because not weeping would be worse.
Sometimes I imagine the bird finally understanding—
not that it cannot fly,
but that something was taken from it.
I wonder if knowledge would bring peace
or only sharper pain.
We are all birds in some way.
Some of us flying freely,
some of us leaping anyway,
some of us learning too late
what has been clipped.
The earth keeps spinning beneath us all.
The same ground.
The same sky.
Different worlds.
And I stand here—
rooted, bending, breaking,
a weeping willow with my branches in the dirt,
still alive,
still aching,
still loving a world
that does not know how to love us back.
If this hurt is the price of being human,
then let it hurt beautifully.
Let it break me open
until compassion has somewhere to live
