Before I Ask the Stars for Another Name

I am not waiting for love.

I am learning how to stop mistaking
a lighthouse for a harbor.

For years, I chased constellations
with a compass that spun
whenever loneliness
pretended to be north.

I called every familiar ache destiny.
Every storm, a sign that I was sailing
toward someone.

But the sea does not reward
those who confuse survival
with arrival.

So I have anchored myself
in waters where no one else
is responsible for keeping me afloat.

I have become
my own cartographer,
redrawing coastlines that grief eroded,
naming islands after the versions of me
that refused to sink.

I’ve gone to heaven and hell and back
just to see my heart bleed.

Not because love was cruel.

But because I kept offering
unfinished galaxies to people
who deserved a complete night sky.

How unfair it was
to ask another soul
to translate the language
I never learned to speak to myself.

So I study.

I stitch torn sails
instead of borrowing
someone else’s wind.

I polish the brass of an old sextant
until it remembers how to find true north
without trembling.

I chart the currents of my anger,
the tides of my fear,
the quiet reefs where shame
waits beneath clear water.

Every star has survived
the collapse of something inside itself.

Perhaps that is why they shine
without apologizing.

And perhaps I can too.

I do not want the next person
to  inherit my unfinished storms.

I want them to meet an ocean
that still knows how to rage,
yet also knows when to rest.

I want them to find a captain
who no longer mistakes drifting
for freedom, or drowning for devotion.

But even if they never arrive,
even if my horizon only belongs to me,
this voyage will never be for nothing.

Because every mile I sail inward
is another constellation returning
to its rightful place.

Because the truest north
was never hidden
in another person’s eyes.

It was waiting, patient as starlight, inside mine.

And when love finally finds me,
it will not rescue me.

It will simply discover
that I have already
found my way home.