Stepping Outside of Myself

~Marie~

Stepping outside of myself

Imagining that I am watching me through a quiet lens

I see someone both fractured and whole.

She is a being made of layers of light and shadows that are not enemies but necessary halves of a whole.

~

I see a mind that builds and unbuilds worlds to survive.

There's a movement beneath the surface,

Like a tide shifting stones in the dark.

Each thought feels both owned and foreign,

Like echoes from another lifetime.

I can see how the world presses in on her

How her nervous system hums even when she's standing still.

The tension in her shoulders is a collection of memories.

She carries storms that the conscious self has forgotten.

~

From the outside,

I feel the electric pulse of survival running through her veins.

It's the same pulse that formed Marie

My protector, my shield, and my sword.

She isn't just a fragment.

She's a force born of unbearable need.

She is power reassembled from the rubble of pain.

When I watch her

Lightning emerges in her gray eyes.

There's resolve in her stance

I don't feel fear.

I feel reverence.

~

And yet, beneath the power, I feel the ache of return.

The moment after integration, when the breath slows,

When the warrior sets down her blade and the human heart begins to tremble again.

There's grief there.

Grief for lost innocence,

For all the lost years spent denying her own reflection.

~

What I see is madness

It's meaning

A system built to keep her life alive,

A woman learning not to exile her own protectors.

~

If I had to describe it in one line

It would be this:

She is the survivor and the storm learning to let the lightning live within her instead of striking her down.

~

Stepping outside of myself

I see her

The woman I have become and the fragments that build her.

There is stillness now, a kind of quiet hum beneath my skin

As if every cell remembers the moment I learned to stop running from the shadow of my own reflection.

~

From the outside, I look calm

But I know the weight beneath that calm

The ache behind the steadiness

It is the ache of carrying worlds no one else could see,

The burden of surviving when survival was never gentle.

~

I see the curve of my shoulders

One is heavy with shame, rising with each breath

There is strength there

Strength that was earned, not given

Marie stands beside me, no longer chained to the darkness.

Her power thrums quietly through me

It's a reminder that I was never fragile...merely fragmented.

~

When I watch myself now,

I see a woman learning to breath to a rhythm

With every version of myself that screamed out

Begging to be heard

The child who trembled

The protector who slayed the demons

The woman who finally stopped hiding from the masses

~

I feel compassion, not fear.

I feel pride, not guilt.

There's a tenderness that trembles in the same space.

Where the rage and sorrow used to live.

~

And when I whisper to my shadow self,

I no longer ask her to change.

I beg her to stay the same.

You are not broken!

You are a beautifully pieced together mosaic.

Every shard, every scare, every storm belongs to you.

You are whole, even when you are many.