There’s a theory that life gives you just enough to keep you moving forward—a breadcrumb here, a sliver of light through the darkest cracks, just enough to stop you from crumbling completely. And for a while, I believed it. I believed in the magic of just enough. I believed that if I kept my head down, took the pain square in the chest, and refused to let it knock me over, the universe would reward me with a little grace. A little mercy.
And one day, when I was crawling through the rubble of my life, with empty hands and a broken heart, the universe gave me what felt like a miracle.
It was him.
The one thing I never thought I’d get back, the one voice I’d replayed in my head like a song I could never forget. The one person who held so many pieces of my heart, I thought I could never find them all again. Out of nowhere, he reached out. As if he’d stepped out of my dreams and into my reality, holding everything I’d once begged for—everything I had spent years believing I’d never touch again.
For a moment, I let myself believe. I let that tiny ray of sunshine seep through the cracks of my grief and warm a part of me I thought had turned to stone.
Maybe I wasn’t too broken. Maybe I could have something that was just mine. Maybe my heart, hollowed out and heavy with loss, could be full again.
I wanted it. God, I wanted it.
I wanted him, and I wanted my son back—two things that seemed to live on either side of a cruel, impossible universe. And though one could never replace the other, they both had the power to fix what was shattered inside of me. One would give me back my soul. The other, my heart.
But you don’t get to want things this much. You don’t get to say, “Please, universe, I’ve had enough pain—let me keep this.” You don’t get to hold sunshine in your hands and expect it to stay.
Because the one person who could have let me keep that small, fragile hope decided that I wasn’t worthy of it.
It was as if he looked at my outstretched hands, my bleeding heart, and the flicker of light he’d placed there, and said, “This was a mistake.”
A mistake.
And so he took it back—my sunlight, my miracle, my sliver of hope.
You’d think by now I’d be used to losing what I love most. You’d think I’d have built armor thick enough to keep out this kind of heartbreak. But it still tore through me, swift and merciless, like a ghost clawing its way through my chest.
Because I want what I want. I want my son back, and I want him. I want my life to be full again. Complete. I want the two things I can’t have.
And yet, I keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Even when it feels pointless, when the ground beneath me feels like it could swallow me whole, I keep walking. I keep doing the work—the hard, tedious, emotionally draining work. The kind of work that never seems to end, where every step feels heavier than the last and the rewards haven’t been fruitful.
There are no grand payoffs here. No sudden bursts of light or moments of clarity. Just relentless work. Just me, sifting through grief, showing up for life, moving forward when every cell in my body wants to stop.
Because what else can you do?
You keep going, even when it hurts. You keep walking, even when it feels like you’re trudging through quicksand, because stopping would mean giving up. And giving up? That’s not an option.
So here I stand. Empty hands. Empty heart. And yet, somehow, still here.
Because even now, there’s a part of me that looks up at the sky and wonders if the universe will ever change its mind. If maybe, just maybe, that light will come back to me.
And if it doesn’t?
I’ll keep walking, because that’s what you do when you want something with every fiber of your being but the world tells you no. You walk through the rubble. You crawl through the dark. You do the work, no matter how endless it feels, because deep down you still believe in something—anything—that makes you keep moving.
And maybe that’s the cruelest, or maybe the bravest, part of it all: the hope that refuses to die, even when the universe tries to bury it.
