By Grace

By Grace

What I mistook for forgiveness

was a door that opened into water,

and I walked through it

not drowning,

but breathing differently,

as if my lungs had learned

a language older than air.

By grace, they said,

but grace had teeth marks,

grace had worn its knees thin

from all that kneeling,

grace was a bird

that forgot how to sing

and learned instead

to hum with its bones.

The angels I expected

arrived as ordinary rain,

soft and insistent,

turning the pavement into a mirror

where I saw my face

becoming someone else's memory,

becoming fog,

becoming the space

between what I was

and what I'm turning into.

By grace,

the wound became a window.

By grace,

the window became a mouth

speaking in a dialect

I'd been hearing all my life

but never understood

until I stopped trying

to translate it

into anything

but itself.

There was a garden once,

or maybe it was a graveyard

the difference blurred

when I stopped pulling up

what wanted to grow there.

Flowers bloomed from my mistakes,

roots drinking from the water table

of everything I'd buried,

everything I thought

needed to stay

underground.

By grace,

the ghosts became guides.

By grace,

the guides became questions

with no interest

in being answered,

only in being asked

again and again

until the asking itself

became a kind of

arriving.

I found a staircase

that led both up and down

simultaneously,

and when I took the first step

I realized I'd been standing

on it all along,

that grace was not

the climb

but the standing,

not the arrival

but the being

mid-motion,

suspended between

falling and

flight.

The child I used to be

handed me a stone

and told me it was bread,

and by grace

I believed her,

and by grace

the stone softened

in my mouth,

became sustenance,

became the thing

that fed me

when I thought

I'd starve.

By grace,

the breaking wasn't ending

it was the beginning

of a different shape,

the shell cracking

not to destroy

but to release,

the chrysalis remembering

it was never meant

to be

permanent.

Time folded its hands

and stopped counting.

The past became present became future

became all three at once,

became the single moment

I'd been running from

and running toward

and finally

running through,

carried by something

I couldn't name

but could feel

like a current,

like a hand

on my back,

like a voice saying:

you don't have to understand it,

you just have to let it

carry you.

By grace,

I let go.

By grace,

the letting go

held me.

©️scry

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