A Brief Account of Wonder

November 25, 2025 12:39am

I didn’t notice when my heart slipped out of me.

It must have happened the way everything important does—
quietly,
in between breaths,
when the world is still deciding whether to wound you or wonder with you.

One minute I was moving through the forest,
thinking about absolutely nothing important—
just the way the air smelled like cold moss
and how pine needles always look like they’re mid-conversation.

Noticing how the sunlight got tangled in the branches,
how the air tasted faintly metallic before softening into green,
how acorns arrange themselves
like they’re midway through a whispered story.

Then there was this sudden lightness in my chest.
A small shift,
as if someone had opened a window in my ribs
to let something curious wander out.

It felt emergent.
But it didn’t feel like the kind of emergency people write songs about.
More like when you misplace a scarf
and assume it’ll turn up somewhere charming.

And it did.
I found my heart a little further up the path,
resting politely under a cedar,
absolutely covered in the coppery fall of spent needles
as if it had decided to try camouflage
for the first time in its life.

Before I could pick it up,
an osprey swept down with the confidence
of someone who never doubts her own timing.

She grabbed my heart like she’d been waiting all morning
for something interesting to happen.

As if it were the exact thing she wanted,
she carried it across the sky, her wings cutting the horizon clean in half,
and she dropped it into the sea—
not out of malice,
maybe because my heart is heavier than it looks,
just… fate’s strange choreography.

The fish did what fish do,
nibbling a jagged little window through the center
as if my heart needed more ways to let light in.

When the tide finally returned it to me,
there were chamomiles growing in the hollow—
small, yellow-faced things
that looked perfectly at home
in a place that used to hold something else,
somewhere once closed to the world.

I held it, and it didn’t hurt.
If anything, it felt softly amused.
It pulsed gently,
a little different,
softened in ways I didn’t know I needed.

So I put it back inside me.

And the world didn’t flip or shatter or announce anything profound—
it just shifted slightly, became more enchanted.
Like someone had adjusted the lens,
turned up the saturation on the parts I usually forget to notice,
making edges glimmer
and ordinary moments hum with a low, patient magic.

Even now, everything feels both familiar and newly wild.
I can feel the flowers rooting in the empty spaces,
making room where there used to be tightness.

The world keeps revealing itself
in ways that make me wonder
if losing pieces of myself
is the only way I ever learn how to see.

 It’s strange.

It’s beautiful.

And it feels, quietly,
like exactly the right kind of impossible.And somehow,
I feel a little more whole for it.