She did not wake like others do...
no sudden burst of light,
no voice calling her name from the shoreline of morning.
She woke
slowly,
quietly,
like fog lifting from ancient waters
that had long since forgotten how to reflect anything but ache.
Her awakening was not a choice,
it was a remembering.
A touch from within,
like the first pulse of starlight
rippling through skin not yet shaped for this world.
It did not ask,
it did not beg.
It was.
She had been asleep for so long
they thought her dead.
But she was only dreaming,
and in her dream,
she built herself anew.
Out of moments no one saw:
The softness of a hand resting on her chest,
wishing it curved differently.
The silence after being misnamed,
a silence not empty,
but roaring.
The mirror that refused to offer comfort,
but still stood witness.
The voice she tried to speak with...
and the voice beneath it,
aching to be born.
She never had the luxury of arrival.
She bloomed while bleeding.
And in time,
her dream thickened.
It grew limbs.
It grew light.
It grew wings not made of feathers,
but of memories too sacred to burn.
And she woke,
not into perfection,
but into presence.
Into breath.
Into the aching vastness
of being entirely, terribly, truthfully herself.
Not ready.
Not complete.
But real.
And in that first breath as herself,
she did not speak.
She listened.
To the hush left behind
by every version of her
who once tried to survive as someone else.
And in that silence,
she did not cry.
She whispered:
"I have returned."
"I was never gone."
"This dream is mine to live now."