There is a harbor

There are days I feel like the sea will swallow me whole. The waves crash against me, relentless, as though they remember the first time I nearly drowned. The salt still stings. The water is still just as cold. The memory still burns in my lungs.

And yet, here I stand—weathered, cracked, carved by the storms I did not choose.

I never asked to be a lighthouse.

No one ever does.

But somehow, through the battering winds and howling darkness, a light was placed in my hands.

A fire not my own.

A flame that refuses to be extinguished, no matter how fierce the storm.

The boats are out there—adrift, broken, wandering blind in the fog.

They cannot see the shore. They cannot hear anything but the roar of the tempest that tells them they will not survive.

And so, I lift the lantern high.

Not because I am strong. Not because I am whole. But because I know the taste of despair, and I cannot bear to let another choke on it.

I whisper into the night,

“I’ve been there too. I thought I would never make it. But here I stand.

You can make it.

Follow the light.”

The waves strike me too. The winds mock me too. Sometimes I still wonder if I will crumble, if this time I will be the one to go under.

But then I remember: lighthouses are not built for calm seas. They are forged in storms, planted on jagged cliffs where the fury is the fiercest. It is a holy thing—this weathered standing. This scarred shining. Lighthouses are not proof of a painless life. They are proof of survival. Proof that light can still pierce through the midnight sea. Proof that endurance, though costly, can rescue more than one soul.

So no, I didn’t ask for this.

I didn’t ask to relive the ache each time the tide rises. I didn’t ask to hold the lantern with trembling hands while the storm revisits me again and again.

But I know this: the light is needed.

And if I must stand in the gale once more, it will not be in vain. My Keeper promised that.

Because every flicker of the flame declares to the wandering and the weary—

the darkness is not the end.

The fog is not forever.

There is a harbor.

There is a shore.

And you will make it there.

Because the very thing that tried to drown me is now the thing that makes me shine