I'm Still standing

There was a time I thought I had failed when daylight collapsed into midnight, and days once gilded with joy were rewritten as chapters of sorrow. Yet though the tempest raged and threatened to unmake me, the immutable truth remains: I am still standing. I fall, and in the bruising I learn the architecture of rising. Dreams perish in my hands, only to resurrect with sturdier wings, baptized by fire. Mistakes arrive uninvited, but I gather their wisdom like stones and build altars of progress; I learn, and I move on. Every struggle, I now discern, is not a sentence but a setup a scaffolding for the edifice of who I am becoming. The new day comes, morning unfurls its weary light; night descends, and still we wake, and sleep, and wake again a quiet testament that existence itself is resilience. People distance themselves, familiar voices fade to silence, abandonment and forsakenness knock at my door and still, I am standing. Tears fell, and then they dried, leaving salt trails as maps of where I’ve been. My mouth went arid from pleading, my knees swollen from the vigil of kneeling, prayers ascending like smoke that seemed to meet a sealed heaven. Hopelessness whispered that I was finished.