When the Pieces Came Home
The night I stopped being scattered and started belonging to myself
They said, call them back.
Every version of me I left behind.
The boy who kept his voice quiet so no one would leave.
The man who smiled through exhaustion at a glowing screen.
The lover who performed steadiness instead of living it.
All the fragments that floated somewhere between timelines—working, waiting, pleasing—
they were mine, still humming in other rooms of reality.
And so I did what I was told.
Closed my eyes.
Let her speak the language of light that sounds like memory trying to remember itself.
Something inside me began to move.
Not dramatic. Just a pull.
A gravity.
Like being reeled back through years of pretending I was fine.
First came the boy.
He smelled like summer sweat and fear of getting it wrong.
Then the man in the office chair, the one who made a job look holy.
Then the lover, still half-kneeling in apology.
They stepped into me like rain through skin.
No resistance.
Only recognition.
In the background, Andrew Bird was whispering “Manifest.”
That looping violin.
That breath between confession and forgiveness.
We tried to stay inside the lines, he sang,
but we couldn’t help ourselves from moving.
And I felt it.
That restless mercy.
That quiet revolution of belonging to myself again.
It felt like warmth under my ribs.
A thousand yeses returning.
It hurt in the best way—
the ache of reunion.
She said, You are unbound now.
And for the first time I understood what that meant.
Not untethered. Not drifting.
Unbound.
As in, all my contracts with smallness burned.
Every vow of poverty, chastity, or silence deleted from the code.
I could want things again.
I could let them touch me.
When it was done, I didn’t float.
I didn’t glow.
I just sat there, heavy with self.
Full for the first time.
Later, I drank water like it was sacrament.
Slept like someone who trusted the world.
Woke up quieter inside.
Even my thoughts moved slower, more deliberate,
as if they finally had a body to live in.
And the violin kept playing somewhere in the back of my mind.
Silver. Steady. Manifesting me home.
// Scorpio Veil