It hurts. There’s no denying it.

This isn’t a gentle sunset or a quiet letting go—it’s a city on fire. It’s a tower collapsing. It’s every dream you built with your own hands being undone brick by brick, until you are left standing in the smoke with nothing but your heartbeat.

This is where I am.

I am standing where Lot’s wife once stood, at the edge of the of a burning city. Everything in me wants to turn back, to salvage, to gather just one piece of the life that once was. My fingers ache with the memory of what I built. My eyes ache with he urge to look behind me. But the story whispers: don’t turn back. Not because of punishment, but because looking back will freeze me in place. Slat preserves. Salt holds. Salt cannot move forward.

I stand at the edge of fire, where the smoke curls like fingers pulling me back. Every happy memory, every hopeful request from my children going unapproved, every broken promise from a relationship labeled love, every face I loved now absent calls from behind me. Ghosts begging for just one more breath of life.

But I know—if I turn, I will not move again. I will become salt, preserved in grief, unable to walk into what waits ahead.

The struggle is not in the fire. The struggle is in the spine—to keep it straight when everything in me bands backward. To Keep my eyes forward when he past whisper my name. To let me heart break open and not run to gather the pieces.

It hurts. It hurts so much I can barely breathe. but the pain itself is proof of love. And if I can let it stay as love—not as chains, not as salt—then even this burning will not be wasted. The pain takes the breath out of my body, a drop so deep it punches me in the gut, leaving me shaking. It’s not pretty or poetic. It’s desperation laid bare.

Yet, this pain isn’t proof of my emptiness. It’s proof o fly love.

Pain is the evidence hat love still exists. If there was no pain, there would never be no love to mourn, no tenderness to be wounded. The ache is the remnant of what was sacred. It is not meant to be suppressed or shamed. It is meant to be remembered, felt, honored.

This is the paradox: as the city burns, as the tower collapses, as everything familiar dissolves, the pain becomes a compass. It says, I cared. I loved. I believed. That ache is the living thread of love.

This is what I’m learning to do:

To let the pain breathe.

To let it weep.

To let it teach me.

And then to transform it—to take the same ache that almost drowned me and pour it into love for another.

I’m not smiling because it’s easy.

I’m smiling because the difficulty reminds me how full of love I still am.

I’m smiling because even as I walk away from the flames, I am not walking empty.

I’m walking with he raw material of love—enough to boil something new.

This is my Exodus.

I look forward, eyes fixed on my Zoar—my small beginning after the fire.

This is the bridge I’m building: nt out of strength, but out of breaking; not out of suppression, but out of remembrance.

I am not looking back.

I am not salt.

I am a living flame.

And to every seeker standing at the edge of their own burning city: your pain is not your shame. your pain is your proof of love.

Let it ache.

Let it breathe.

Let it transform.