From ice to water

Life keeps teaching me the same lesson

in different voices, different faces, different endings and I wish I could say I learn it the first time, tie it up neat, and carry it forward like wisdom.

But the truth is,

some lessons don’t settle gently.

They have to break you open more than once

before they finally make a home in your bones.

and I keep nodding like I understand,

only to find myself back at the same doorstep,

knuckles bruised from knocking on a truth

I didn’t want to accept the first time.

Because knowing something

is not the same as living it.

And if I’m honest?

I don’t always live it well.

I soften what cut me.

I call it grace when sometimes it’s just fear

of letting go.

I forgive,

but I forget why I had to.

And I reach

God, I reach for connection like it’s oxygen,

like I won’t survive without it.

Maybe that comes from a life

where nothing stayed long enough

to feel real.

Where consistency was a language

no one ever taught me how to speak.

So when something,anything,

lands in my hands,

I hold it like it’s sacred,

even when it’s not meant for me.

And every time,

it slips.

Like ice.

Perfect when it’s placed in your hands

solid, beautiful, whole.

But never meant to last there.

Even the smallest sliver of connection

starts to feel like something worth keeping,

even when it was never meant for you.

So I hold on.

And every time,

I end up with empty hands

scrambling, searching,

trying to gather up something

that once felt so real between my fingers.

I tighten my grip,

thinking if I just hold it carefully enough,

firmly enough,

I can keep it from changing.

But by the time I feel it slipping,

by the time it starts to drip through my fingers,

it’s already too late.

Because it was never the ice failing.

It was the nature of it all along.

 My hands are warm.

And ice does what ice does.

I used to sit there,

heart racing, chest tight,

trying to scoop up what had already melted

asking God why I couldn’t just keep it together?

Why I was never given what others seemed to have so effortlessly.

They had ice chests.

They inherited them.

Systems, stability, safety.

Ways to preserve what they were given.

And I didn’t.

So I adapted the only way I knew how.

I made myself smaller.

Colder. Careful.

I walked on eggshells around every connection,

terrified that my warmth, my very nature,

would ruin it.

I studied how to keep things intact.

Learned the mechanics of survival.

Tried to become someone worthy of holding onto something

that was never meant to stay.

And somewhere in all of that,

a childhood passed.

The beginning of adulthood too.

Until slowly, in small moments of time, I stopped long enough to begin to see it.

I wasn’t the problem.

My warmth was never the problem.

Because what I was trying so desperately to preserve

what I thought I was losing

was never meant to stay frozen in the first place.

What we needed?

what I needed?

was never ice.

It was water.

Living, moving, sustaining water.

The kind that nourishes.

The kind that brings life.

The kind that doesn’t need to be gripped tightly to exist

There was nothing wrong with me.

My warmth didn’t destroy things.

It transformed them into something essential.

Something necessary.

And now, as I keep growing,

I’m no stranger to the truth that not everyone stays.

But each time I relearn this lesson,

it settles a little deeper.

Some people were never meant to be kept, only experienced.

And when I stop trying to force permanence

into what was only ever passing through,

I see it for what it really is:

water.

And water doesn’t fail me.

It flows.

It nourishes.

It makes space for new life to grow.

So no, not everyone stays.

And that’s okay.

Because the next time someone finds themselves

parched,

searching,

desperate for something real

they won’t be looking for ice.

They’ll be grateful

that it melted.