Running till there’s no more staleness
left in the echo of our love.
Take this as a kind departure
and please, don’t linger.
I have shadows to battle,
the ones you left behind.
—Tara Simone
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Validation was never the destination.
Too often,
the eye is taught
to judge the skin before the spirit,
the posture before the pulse,
the surface before the soul.
Perception,
sharp as any weapon,
arrives before truth
and calls itself knowing.
Deception follows closely,
dressed in certainty,
speaking loudly
where wisdom has gone quiet.
Intelligence can be dangerous.
So can the choice
to remain untouched by knowing.
Some build whole lives
from projection,
casting shadows outward
rather than naming
what lives within.
Emotional intelligence
is no common gift.
It is often born
through ruin,
through reckoning,
through the long apprenticeship
of pain.
What does it mean
to become?
What does it mean
to belong to the self?
Identity is profound,
yet the path is often guarded
by fear,
by delay,
by the hand
that withholds its own becoming.
How easily depth
is mistaken for madness.
How often a singular mind
is taught to doubt
its own design.
One of the deepest wounds
is learning to hold others
to higher standards
than the self has ever known.
But there is only one measure
that matters now:
the height
of one's own becoming.
And there is a voice here,
capable of movement,
capable of reaching
beyond the body
that carries it.
If fully given room,
it may still arrive
as it was always meant to:
clear,
undeniable,
and heard.
-Tara Simone TM