I like to think
that before any of us had bodies
we sat around a campfire
in heaven,
leaning into its warmth
letting the light touch our faces,
our knees tucked up to our chests.
The flames crackled
like tiny miracles,
sending up sparks
as if the stars were being born
in reverse.

We’d done this before
a few hundred times,
so we knew
before we had bodies,
the weight of them.
The way a spine can bow
under sorrow.
The way a heart can swell
with love.

We weren’t naïve,
we knew what it meant
for a soul to say yes
to a life that would
bruise it,
bless it,
break it open.

So together
in that glowing circle,
bright as hope –
ancient as love –
we chose
our lives,
our lessons…
each other.

One by one,
we made our promises.
We said:

I’ll be the one who wounds you.
(Aren’t we all, I thought to myself.)
And from that wound,
you’ll learn the strange alchemy
of being human:
that pain will keep trying
to teach you endings,
but every time it knocks you down
you’ll rise
with a new alphabet of scars
that spell: begin again.

I think this time
I’d like to be the mirror
that shows you
the parts of yourself
you’re afraid of
so you can see freedom
begins the moment you stop
treating your own power
like a threat.

Me?
Well, I plan to bring you such joy
– I know. I was a mess last time –
so you can learn how
delight can split you open
just as surely as sorrow.
I promise to remind you
that miracles often wear
ordinary faces.

Ok, I’ve thought about it
and I want to find a new way
to love you.
So, I will ask you to tell the truth
about yourself,
so you can learn how the wound
you swore would finish you
becomes the doorway
you walk through
to save yourself.

Girl, I’ll be the queen,
who shows you what it looks like
to walk in your own skin
without apology,
so you can remember
the life you were meant to claim.

And me, I’ll carry the heavy things
because I need the lesson
and you need the example –
that the weight we shoulder
is never as impossible
as the story you tell yourself about it.

We’ll be your children,
they shout,
sitting cross-legged in the dust,
as if the thought bloomed
in them at once.
We’ll show you
that love knows no human bounds,
that family isn’t a line you follow,
but a circle you step into
again and again.

I love you so much
that I’ll leave you
this time,
so that you can discover
your heart is not glass,
but a seed –
and once it splits, child,
once it opens,
there is no power on earth
that can keep it from growing.

I’ll be the one who shakes your foundations
so you can learn how to stand
in the ruins of what you thought
would last forever
and find the courage
to bloom.

I get to be the wild detour
this time:
the reason
your heart learns to speak
its native language —
soft syllables of love,
spoken like a prayer
from lips made brave
by the taste of my name.

As the fire burned low,
we huddled,
pressing our foreheads together
and – as I’ve done a thousand times –
I led a prayer:

Praise the sacred contracts
written in courage,
in wild wisdom,
in love so enormous
it looks like madness from the outside.

Praise the hard lives
that make the beautiful ones possible.
Praise the beautiful lives
that make the hard ones bearable.

Praise the remembering
that lives in the soul,
that we chose this life
for the work,
the wonder,
the wild, aching promise
of being human.

Amen.

And when the time came
to step into the world —
into skin,
into history,
into the long shadow of forgetting
the map —
the last words my soul heard were:
Remember what you promised.
Remember who you are.
And no matter what happens,
remember that the people you meet –
are the very souls you once loved enough
to choose.