Midway

I was not planning to stop here—

but my feet slowed

as if the ground itself

asked me to listen.

Halfway down the block,

where the streetlights don’t quite reach,

I felt the weight of leaving

and the ache of not yet arriving.

It’s strange, isn’t it,

how the middle stretches longer than the ends?

The goodbye is a single word,

the arrival, a single door—

but the walk between

carries a thousand thoughts

like loose change rattling in a pocket.

I keep telling myself

there is purpose in drifting,

that even unfinished sentences

can hold meaning.

The silence between two breaths

is still alive.

A notebook rests under my arm—

pages untouched,

waiting for a truth I haven’t named.

I could write “hope,”

I could write “fear,”

but both feel too small

for this trembling balance of now.

I am not where I began,

and not where I’ll end.

And maybe this—

this unsteady ground,

this pause mid-step,

this quiet asking of myself—

is the whole point.

Because life does not always happen

in the certainty of knowing,

but in the wandering,

the almost,

the halfway home.

*This poem is one of the drafts for my poem “The Middle Of Becoming”. I had to share, cause I really loved this version!