She Held it Anyway

She was the kind of person people left things with.

Their grief.

Their bad days.

Their unanswered questions.

Their shaking hands and heavy silences.

All of the things they did not know where else to put. She took them.

She tucked them into corners of herself as though there was always more room.

As though she had been built to carry what other people could not.

She held their sadness in her lap like something fragile. She let their storms pass through her.

She learned how to turn herself into somewhere soft to land.

There were marks on every part of her.

In the hours she gave without noticing.

In the way she swallowed her own exhaustion before it reached her own mouth.

In the way her voice softened without thinking.

She became a place people returned to without wondering what it cost her to stay.

She learned how to make her own needs smaller. How to fold them neatly into the background.

How to sit with a hollow feelings and call it patience.

How to mistake being needed for being seen. And still she gave.

She gave in the way she stayed longer than she should have. In the way she held on letting go would have been easier.

In the way she absorbed what was heavy, what was sharp, what was unfinished and carried it quietly so no one else had to.

There were pieces of her everywhere. She could see herself in them.

And there was a kind of beauty in that. A quiet aching beauty knowing that something of her had taken root in the lives she touched.

That even if she been worn thin in the process, she had made something soften out of the world around her.

That her tenderness did not disappear.