Between Ruin and Reflection

I walk through these ruins and feel as if I’m inside a story I already know—places where beauty and harm live side by side, where walls built from defence still carry the echo of what they held. And yet the trees lean in, the reflections shimmer, the colours keep returning. Nature keeps offering softness to what cannot soften itself.

I think of him—how his past built walls he couldn’t slip through, how I searched for a softness he didn’t feel safe to show. And I realise I’m really asking something larger: how close can we come to our own wounds without shutting down? Life gives us both at once, always—a coexistence, a paradox—and who we become depends on what we choose to lean toward.

As I move through these moments, I notice that something in me stays open, steady enough to feel the ache and still recognise the light. In the quiet space between ruin and reflection, I learn that softness isn’t the absence of pain—it’s the willingness to let beauty reach us, even when the hurt hasn’t gone.

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