Rootline / Branchline

I come from quiet soil.

Not the kind that boasts of richness,

but the patient kind—

the kind that keeps your secrets,

stores your failures like seeds,

waits for the right season to forgive you.

My roots learned early

that darkness is not the enemy;

it is the archive where strength is filed,

fiber by fiber,

until growth becomes inevitable.

I was taught to stand still

long before I was taught to walk.

To listen for the low hum

beneath the noise of living—

ancestor-breath, kitchen-table prayers,

the grain of doors that closed behind me

and the grain of others that opened.

From these, I inherited steadiness,

not as a command,

but as a pulse.

Yet there is always a direction

in which a person must lean.

Branches do not apologize

for wanting the sky.

They reach because reaching

is its own proof of life.

They stretch past the old boundaries,

test the hinge between safety and risk,

learn the language of wind

and practice answering it.

Some days I feel built

from two different instructions:

one telling me to stay,

one urging me forward.

But I have learned they are not rivals.

Roots hold the story.

Branches invent the next chapter.

The trunk—my stubborn heart—

keeps negotiating between them.

What grounds me

is not just where I began,

but the knowledge that I am still becoming.

What carries me forward

is not merely ambition,

but the quiet certainty

that anything reaching skyward

is still tethered to something deep,

something older than my doubts,

something willing to lift me

as long as I keep growing.