Crow and Flame

This season, I’ve been reflecting on how healing doesn’t always look like strength or certainty. Sometimes, it looks like softness — like finally allowing yourself to feel joy without fear, to sit in the light without waiting for the dark to return. This piece is about that shift, about learning to receive love and happiness as deeply as I once held pain.

I have cried happy tears more this year than ever in my life.

Not because everything finally made sense, but because I stopped demanding that it had to.

Because I let myself feel the warmth without flinching, the softness without suspicion.

Because for the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to believe that I deserve love, joy, and peace — not someday, but now.

For so many years, my tears were born from pain. They carved quiet rivers through nights that felt endless. I learned to brace for loss, to expect the world to take before it gave. But something shifted in me — slowly, gently, almost imperceptibly — like dawn creeping across a horizon that had forgotten the sun.

The crow in me remembers the dark — the weight of survival, the silence after endings, the ache of dreams buried before their time. She is watchful, wise, unafraid to face the shadows. But beside her burns the flame — wild and tender — reminding me that light has always lived inside me. That even in the ruins, beauty still rises.

This year, I let that light touch me.

I didn’t turn away. I didn’t say I was fine and swallow the joy before it could bloom. I let it fill me — awkwardly at first, like learning a new language of hope. I laughed until tears came, and I didn’t apologize for it. I stood in moments of love, and instead of waiting for the hurt, I stayed.

These happy tears are not fragile.

They are proof of healing, proof that my heart has found its rhythm again.

Proof that I can sit inside a moment of goodness and not shrink from it.

The crow gathers what was lost.

The flame illuminates what remains.

And I sit between them — open, grateful, alive — learning that joy, too, can be sacred.

Because I have cried happy tears more this year than ever in my life,

and each one feels like coming home

to the part of me that finally believes

I was always worthy of the light.