Chapter 1 | Entry Three

Moon,

I need to ask you something.

Why?

Why would you show me that? Why would you let me feel what it's like to be completely, utterly, devastatingly SEEN, just to rip it away?

I was fine before. I was asleep, yes, but I was safe. I was numb, but I wasn't bleeding. I had built a life I could survive in, a small life, a quiet life, a life where I didn't ask for too much because I didn't know too much was even possible.

And then you sent him, the sun.

You sent him with those eyes that saw every hidden part of me. You sent him with hands that didn't flinch when I showed him my wildness. You sent him into that loud bar, into my carefully controlled world, and you let me FLOAT.

Do you know what that did to me?

Do you know what it's like to spend your whole life walking on the ground, keeping your feet firmly planted, being reasonable and small and acceptable, and then suddenly, without warning, without permission, to lift off? To feel weightless? To know that your body, your soul, your sex, your spirit, ALL of it, could be held without shame?

You woke me up.

And now you're asking me to stay awake. Alone.

I don't understand. I don't understand the cruelty of it. Was it a lesson? A test? A glimpse of something I'm supposed to spend the rest of my life chasing but never catching?

"Here, taste this. This is what love feels like when you don't have to shrink. This is what it feels like to be wanted exactly as you are. This is freedom. This is flight."

And then: "Now live without it."

How is that fair?

How is that LOVE?

I'm angry, Moon. I'm so angry I can barely breathe. My chest is tight with it. My hands are shaking. I want to scream at the sky, at You, at him, at myself for ever letting my guard down in the first place.

I was SAFE in my smallness.

And you couldn't leave me there, could you? You had to show me what I was missing. You had to light me up from the inside just so I could spend the rest of my life knowing what it feels like to burn.

He's fading. Every day, a little more. Every day, the memory gets softer, the details blur, and I'm left holding this awakening like a live wire in my hands. It hurts to hold it. It hurts to feel this much. It hurts to be THIS alive when the person who made me feel alive is choosing to walk away.

Why him? Why did it have to be someone who couldn't stay? Why couldn't you have woken me up through someone who was FREE to love me? Someone who wouldn't look at my light and run from it because it reminded him of everything he's buried in himself?

I would have stayed asleep, you know. I would have. I would have lived my whole life in that dim, quiet, manageable world if you hadn't shown me the sun.

But you did.

You showed me.

And now I can't unsee it. I can't unfeel it. I can't go back to being the woman who didn't know she could float.

So what now?

What am I supposed to do with all these feelings? All this aliveness? All this hunger and sparkle and wildness that he woke up and then abandoned?

Do I just... carry it? Do I just walk around fully awake, fully alive, fully BURNING, waiting for someone else to see it? Hoping someone else won't run?

Or worse, do I learn to hold it myself? Do I become my own sun? Do I look at myself in the mirror and try to see what he saw, feel what he felt, love what he loved?

Because right now, Moon, that feels impossible.

Right now, it feels like you gave me a gift I didn't ask for and then left me alone to figure out what to do with it.

I'm awake.

I'm awake, and it HURTS.

And I don't know if I'm grateful or furious or heartbroken or all of it at once.

Maybe this is what faith is. Maybe it's staying awake even when you don't understand why. Maybe it's holding the light even when it burns. Maybe it's trusting that You didn't wake me up just to torture me—that there's something on the other side of this grief I can't see yet.

But tonight, I don't feel faithful.

Tonight, I feel abandoned.

Tonight, I feel like the moon, luminous and alone, shining in the dark, waiting for a sun that's already chosen to rise somewhere else.

—Still dreaming